From Lodz to Canterbury

Ywympled wel, and on hir heed an hat

As brood as is a bokeler or a terge;

A foot-mantel aboute hir hipes large,

And on hir feet a paire of spores sharpe.

In felaweshipe wel koude she laughe

and carpe.

Chaucer's Wife of Bath seems as rosy and real--and surprising--a person to most readers as a vaudeville queen in a broken-down daisy chain. Last week the lusty Wife and all her fellow travelers went on exhibition in a Manhattan gallery.

The Pilgrims, painted by Polish miniaturist Arthur Szyk for a forthcoming edition of the Canterbury Tales (Heritage Press; $5), seemed a little tired and dusty in illustration, and strangely short in the legs (see cut). But Szyk's faintly medieval touch had caught some of the richness, if not much of the reality, of Chaucer's characters.

Arthur Szyk (pronounced Shik), 52, has been tackling big projects, usually in a small way, since he was six. In his home town of Lodz, Poland, his first subject was a series of drawings of the Boxer Rebellion. His father, a wealthy textile manufacturer, packed Szyk off to Paris at 15 to study art, and -- when Szyk paintings began getting smaller & smaller --sent him on to Asia Minor to find out how the Mohammedans did their miniatures. Since World War I (in which he served with the Russians), Szyk's studious talent for the tiny has made him tops in his field.

Szyk, a round, bouncy little man with thin brown hair and thick glasses, thinks his most interesting project was the 38 miniatures of George Washington and His Times, which he finished in 1935. The set was presented to President Roosevelt by the Polish Government, and today hangs in Hyde Park. But the assignment Szyk enjoyed most was in 1924, when he was hired to paint El Glaoui, the Pasha of Marrakesh, Morocco. Sighs Szyk: "There were gazelles in the garden and dances of the bosom every night."

Best known in the U.S. for his lavishly detailed anti-Nazi cartoons, which for a time were frequent Collier's cover subjects, and for his 1940 illustrations of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Szyk is now laboring lovingly over illustrations for the Book of Ruth and the Arabian Nights.

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