EPSTEIN’S MADONNA

Waikato Times, Volume 122, Issue 20510, 28 May 1938, Page 27 (Supplement)

EPSTEIN’S MADONNA

BOUGHT BY AMERICAN GIRL Four years ago a slim, 17-years-old American girl with tousled blonde hair crept up to the front door of Mr Jacob Epstein, sculptor, and shyly whispered, "Please may I see HIM." Yesterday—shy no longer, for they call her “The girl with the Epstein touch”— she saw a four-years-old dream come true when she wrote a cheque for about £1,500 and received in return Epstein's famous work “The Madonna and the Child.” The girl is Miss Sally Ryan, beautiful daughter of a wealthy New York business man, and as she sat talking to me in her luxuriously furnished flat In Lowndes Street, S.W., writes a Daily Mail reporter, porters were moving "The Madonna” from Epstein’s studio to the Tate Gallery, whioh has accepted the loan of It. “That’s Fine” Miss Ttyan was a boyish study—her grey flannel suit and blue open-necked shirt—against a background of cream and orange-cream divans and silken orange curtains. “Does my father know?” She watched the smoke ourl from her oigarette with whimsical blue-grey eyes. “Sure he knows. And so do all the family. 1 cabled them. “■Nither cabled back ‘that’s fine.’ They think I’m a. little crackers—mad, eccentric, or whatever you like to call It. “Families are funny that way, don’t you think—particularly when It comes to art. They thought I was a silly kid when I started to do a bit of sculpture at school. “For Everyone” “I guess they still think I’m a little crazy, although I’ve had my own show here in London. Not that we aren’t friends. It's just that they don’t know about art.” I asked how she came to buy “The Madonna and the Child’’; why she had bought it, and what she was going to do with it. “Why?—l felt I'd asked a stupid question. “Because everyone should see it; because the whole world should see it. “It used to hurt me to see it lying in the studio and no one doing anything about it- Now it’s mine, but I don’t look at it quite like that. A work of art doesn’t belong to anyone really, does it? “No, I shan't bring it here, and I certainly shan’t take it home. Haven’t 1 told you my father does not know much about art? 1 haven’t any definite plans as to what I shall do with it. but you can guess tiiat all people will have the chance of looking at it. They simply must see it.” We talked of her first show, opened at ttie Cooling Galleries last ‘year, and she showed me photographs of studies

she had made (iielgud, Capt. others. • Epstein was said. "He has of Paul Robeson, Val Victor Cazalet, and the first to come," she been so kind. I would

not like to think I copied him, for there is no sincerity in anything that Is copied, but I suppose he must have bad a lot of influence on my work.