BIG COMICS

THE two pictures opposite represent a vanished era in a primitively bold way. Part of a set of 13 oils recently discovered in Auburn, N.Y., they went on show this week in a tent on the grounds of the New York State Historical Association in Cooperstown. Nobody knows who painted them. The artists worked on the scale of the present-day "New York School" abstractionists, for the pictures measure 7 ft. by 10 ft. and up. All 13 pictures (painted on mattress ticking) were commissioned over a century ago by one George Mastin. a Genoa. N.Y. tailor, farmer, phrenologist violin player and horse trader, who exhibited them, together with his own wares and talents, in barns all over his county

The spiels which Hawker Mastin spouted when he showed his pictures were found with them in an old barn. His notes for a running commentary to General Putnam's leap:

General putman Performed his famous feat

of Riding down the stone stairs at horse neck

and plunged down the Precipice near the church.

this was so steep as to have artificial stairs, composed of

Nearly 100 stone steps for the accommodation of foot Passengers, the Brittish dragoons, durst not follow the in tripid horseman down the precipice . . .

And the Murder of Jane McCrae, which was witnessed by a fellow prisoner of the Indians :

. . . high words violent gestures, till at Lenghth they Engaged in a furious

Quarrel, and Beat one another with there muskets in the midst

of which fray, one of the chiefs appearently in a Rage shot

Miss Me

Crea in the Breast, she instantly fell and Expired, her hair Was long and flowing, the same chief grasped it in his hand. Seized his knife and took off the scalp in such a manner as to include nearly the whole of the hair--then springing from the ground, he tosed it in the face of a young wariorur. who stood near him watching the operation .

Apparently such picture-stories filled the need of a century ago which "true-life" comics and pseudohistorical movies now supply with considerably more effort and expense. Seen in flickering candlelight and buttressed by proper rhetoric, they presented a lurid, larger-than-life view of the nation's early history.

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