Lie & Monster

Last week Painter Harry Willson Watrous, 76, who specializes in small highly-finished figures, made news when he stepped out of the presidency of the National Academy of Design. Elected in his place was Norwegian-born Jonas Lie (pronounced Lee), 54, academic painter of land and seascapes. President Lie's election statement to newshawks convinced Academicians that they need fear no disturbing innovations from their new administration.

But outgoing President Watrous made bigger and better news for himself last week when for the first time he told how he had thrown New York's fashionable Lake George colony into confusion 30 summers ago by means of a large, gleaming sea serpent. He confessed that he had fabricated the serpent to give his story-loving friend, the late Col. William D'Alton Mann, longtime publisher of the defunct Town Topics, "something to talk about." Said Artist Watrous: "I got a cedar log and fashioned one end of it into my idea of a sea monster or hippogriff. I made a big mouth, a couple of ears, like the ears of an ass, four big teeth . . . and for eyes I inserted in the sockets of the monster two telegraph pole insulators of green glass. . . . I painted the head in yellow and black stripes . . . the mouth red . . . the ears blue.

"The log . . . was about ten feet long. To the bottom . . . I attached a light rope which I put through a pulley attached to a stone which served as an anchor. The pulley line was about 100 ft. long and was manipulated from the shore.

"I anchored the horrific hippogriff close to the path which Col. Mann's boat would have to take. . . . [When the boat passed near by] I released the monster. It came up nobly. . . . Mr. Davies [Acton Davies, onetime dramatic critic of the New York Sun] who had a rather high pitched voice, uttered a scream that must have been heard as far as Burlington, Vt. Mrs. Bates [mother of Actress Blanche Bates], a very intrepid lady of Milesian extraction, stood on the seat in the boat and beat the water with her parasol. . . . Colonel Mann shouted, 'Good God, what is it?' through his whiskers. . . .'"

Thereafter Mr. Watrous showed his hippogriff elsewhere in Lake George. "Within a few days, you couldn't see a Negro [servant] within a mile of the lake shore." He ceased exhibiting it when, one day, he "released the monster just as a pair of newlyweds came along in a canoe. With one glance at the vision and utterly ignoring his bride, the young man leaped into the lake, struck out for shore. . . . When he sought to make up . . . she refused to speak to him. . . ."

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