Chalk & Talk

Briand and Borah; Clemenceau, Chesterton and Clemens; Stresemann and Stimson; Poincare and Pershing; Masaryk, Mussolini, MacDonald and Mellon --they were all of them to be seen last week in the library of Manhattan's fastidious Pynson Printers, most of them in chalk, Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln in lithograph. Had it not been withdrawn for reproduction on the cover of this issue of TIME, the crayon likeness of Charles Evans Hughes would also have appeared.

The occasion was an exhibition of work by Samuel Johnson Woolf, frequent TIME cover-artist, whose specialty is drawing and interviewing celebrated people. Artist Woolf has a psychological as well as artistic knack for his work. He gets not only good likenesses, but good talk. Many of the famed are either brusque or secretive with newsmen, strangers. But while Artist Woolf sketches renowned features he says just the things to stimulate the response of renowned personalities. Onetime Crown Prince Frederick William of Germany willingly confessed his identity to Artist Woolf while stopping incognito in Rome, sat for him in a hotel garden, told risque stories, and, noticing the prevalence of uniforms in the streets, remarked: "The late war was supposed to have been fought to make the world safe for democracy, but does this look like it?" Of his exile at Doom with his father he said: "The climate was terrible. . . . The Dutch people are not easy to harmonize with. I once wrote to a friend . . . that many of the women I saw were heavy, with piano legs. ... I got a flood of letters from indignant Dutch women and girls."

To Artist Woolf, Gilbert Keith Chesterton declared that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "was trying to emulate, in the spirit world, his famous character, Sherlock Holmes, but wasn't succeeding very well."

Artist Woolf looks a little older but just as alert as his self-portrait (see above). Born 50 years ago in Manhattan, he was named, by parents who loved literature, after the great Dr. Johnson. He went to the College of the City of New York (1899) and, like most Manhattanites who relish pencil and brush, studied at the National Academy of Design, The Art Students' League. In 1904 he married; he has two daughters. For a long time he did oil portraits, exhibiting widely, winning academic honors. But, says he, "I had to commercialize my art by pleasing aunts and uncles, grandmothers and old-maid relatives of sitters. Now I draw ... in any medium I wish ... as I wish . . . and that is to be artistic."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.