To Rome

The paintings and statuary which win for their makers the famed Prix de Rome ($1,600 per year, plus a studio, and three years of study in the American Academy at Rome) are always scholarly, conservative. Those which were announced last week to have captured the awards for 1930 were religious as well. William Marks Simpson Jr., the winning sculptor, made a youthful, upright image of St. Francis of Assisi benignly inspecting a bird. Salvatore De Maio, Prix-winning painter, achieved an interesting composition called The Complete Sacrifice, the figures of Christ, Mary and Mary Magdalene forming oblique patterns with the bars of the tilted cross from which Christ has just been removed.

Sculptor Simpson, 27, of Norfolk, Va., was graduated from Virginia Military Institute. Last year he studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine Arts in Baltimore, where he was also an instructor in cast drawing. Twice before he has won traveling scholarships. When they learned that he was executing a St. Francis, the nuns of Norfolk's Franciscan Convent were led in pious procession by their Mother Superior to Sculptor Simpson's studio. Though he is not a Catholic, many of Sculptor Simpson's Catholic friends promised to say masses for his success.

Painter De Maio, 22, is the sixth successive student of the Yale School of Fine Arts to win the Prix de Rome in painting. Greatly pleasing is this to the School's rotund, genial Dean Everett Victor Meeks, to its prime teacher, famed mural painter Eugene Francis Savage, who so thoroughly imparts his theories, style and the principles of his luminous palette to his pupils that their work is frequently censured as being only an echo of Mr. Savage's. Painter De Maio is one of 13 children of a retired musician. To meet the expenses of his four-year course, he blew a cornet in jazz orchestras, in the Yale football band.

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