Midwife of the Arts

At his Chartwell country estate years ago, Winston Churchill was deploring a picture that Art Patron Eddie Marsh had persuaded Mrs. Churchill to buy. Said Painter Walter Sickert, who was visiting Churchill: "Our little friend Eddie is not without a certain idiot flair." Last week, four months after Edward Howard Marsh died at the age of 80, a London gallery displayed the pick of the pictures he had collected for himself over the years, and the critics came to a kinder conclusion: "A great midwife of the arts."

A bouncy, tireless man-about-town to the end, Eddie Marsh started collecting pictures at the turn of the century, kept at it with unmatched zeal until he died. He was not a wealthy man, but his mother had left him a modest annuity and he devoted all of it to art.

Still-Lifes & Laundry Bills. Eddie (no one ever called him anything else) liked realism. "I am . . . a consistent and brazen supporter of what is now slightingly called representational art," he once said. But much of what he collected was considered daringly modern and experimental at the time. In last week's show there was a boldly patterned Duncan Grant still-life called Parrot Tulips, an Ivon Kitchens and a moody Graham Sutherland that Eddie picked up before any of the painters was recognized. He bought Sculptor Henry Moore's early sketches of sad, nude women, a beautiful Augustus John drawing of a Seated Woman, the watercolors of the Nash brothers, Paul and John.

Eddie never paid the slightest attention to critics. He would talk to artists, find out whom they admired, then drop around for a look. One of his prizes was a haunted, bug-eyed self-portrait by Stanley Spencer that Eddie found in a smelly cow-stable studio. "The lust of possession surged up in me," Eddie recalled, "and I asked the price." It was -L-18, and Eddie marched out with it under his arm, the paint scarcely dry. Eddie helped young artists in other ways, too. "Usually," says a friend, "he would go out of the studio with a painting in one hand, and the laundry bill in the other."

Poets & Pronunciation. Entering the Civil Service after Cambridge, Eddie Marsh soon became known as "the perfect private secretary," first to Joseph Chamberlain, later, in 1905, to Winston Churchill, then Under Secretary in the Colonial Office. Eddie knew all Britain's greats and near-greats, dashed from dinner to dinner drumming the names of his favorite artists into their ears. He followed Churchill to the Board of Trade, finally to the Admiralty, eventually won a knighthood in 1937 for his services.

By World War I, Eddie was one of London's luminaries. He was theatergoer No. 1, a patron of such young poets as Robert Graves, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Bridges, and Walter de la Mare. He took it upon himself to correct George Bernard Shaw's pronunciation and got called "a bumptious novice" for his pains, tidied up Ezra Pound's Greek, played charades with Playwright James M. Barrie. Between 1912 and 1925 he edited and published six volumes of poetry to help his young poet friends get started.

During his lifetime, Eddie Marsh gave 100 works to London's Contemporary Art Society for distribution to needy museums; his will left 250 more to be split up among 80 museums in Britain and the Commonwealth. He never bought a foreign painting, always tried to encourage native artists, and seemed to like them all.

Long before he died last January, his best epitaph had been inadvertently pronounced by Novelist Arnold Bennett, who was engaged in criticizing a play Eddie had thoroughly enjoyed. "Hang Eddie Marsh," grumped Bennett. "He's a miserable fellow--he enjoys everything."

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