JOHN DAVIS - The Dog of Capri, from The Ordered Web, 1986 One does not too easily write about the living. The dead are fixed, iconic, unchanging in whatever image we give them, while the quick have a. way of altering our attempts to deny their mutability. In ironic prediction of how all history becomes fiction, they grimace, pout, thumb their noses, and eventually step out of the portrait frame we have so cunningly made for them. The deceptions of the human mind, applied to itself and to others, are so mutant that one has to treat all human story as science- or philosophy-fiction. That is the challenge of its charm. Dean Stambaugh arrived at St. Albans in 1942, the same year I did. My diary states only that I thought I would like him. Reserved, nervous, with the formality that unfamiliarity with a new environment produces in some people, he moved tentatively as a fawn in the miniature forest of the St. Albans of that time. More than later on perhaps, he had then a keen eye for details, motives, the hidden machinery of a person's action, and an intuition born of his love for the countryside of north-central Pennsylvania, of the rural folk who know it. Throughout our association of over forty years I always trusted his analysis of a person's character even when I knew he often made errors in judging an immediate situation. It was a fortunate day for St. Albans when Mr. Lucas travelled to Philadelphia in the heat of July, 1942, to interview this candidate for a position teaching art. The appointment was a departure in itself-especially when one recalls what national educational priorities were in 1942-for Mr. Lucas to think of offering a program of painting and sculpture to boys eight to eighteen. Mr. Lucas was prescient. He was in any event determined to place a new emphasis in the curriculum St. Albans offered to the sons of the prominent families that made up the school community of that time. He could not have chosen a field more congenial to the tastes of most of the parents, and the teaching talent of Dean Stambaugh rapidly made art a desirable and even essential part of a boy's experience at St. Albans. Very early Dean established the ground rules for his courses. Students were not to talk to each other in class. They were not to wander around looking at one another's work. Visitors were met at the door with a polite stare, and retreated after muttered excuses. Headmasters and faculty on important missions waited at the door for Dean to come to them. The room was a spectacle of adolescent males poring over watercolours, of football players stepping back from their easels to view an effect. Throughout this ant-hill of industry the instructor moved deftly, talked only sparingly, suggested, pointed to a reproduction to illustrate, and set his tone of order and work. An innovation was music. A phonograph, later an elaborate stereo set, played records, usually of Dean's own taste for ballet and opera. Students could request selections, but only in later years did Dean allow the popular taste of the time to intrude into the enchanted forest of Swan Lake, and then only on Fridays. Without intending to do so, he taught music as valuably as he did painting. Later Dean added plants and, finally, caged birds. The result was extraordinary, for visitors inspecting the School would be shown, (though only from the door) an Art Room totally different in atmosphere from anything else at St. Albans. Finches hopped and flew around a large wire cage set in the midst of flowering hibiscus. Canaries sang. Once there was a parrot, beautiful but mute as a model, and therefore not a success, so it was traded to the zoo for six Gouldian finches. There were even chickens. The Great Chicken War occurred in 1954 or 1955. Dean had given in to his own childhood love of chickens-he had had a pet pullet named Queenie-and added several to the bird population of the Art Room. Among them was a rooster who was diligently painted by a number of the students. Roosters are not quiet creatures and this one was no exception. It woke up the neighbourhood at five a.m., including the resident faculty who lived then in the Lower School Building and had been deep in beer at midnight. That the rooster lived in an areaway of the Gregory Court on which their quarters faced caused solemn delegations of protest to file into the office of anyone who could stop the racket, especially that of the Headmaster, Canon Martin. Canon Martin referred the matter to Alfred True, then Assistant Headmaster, and tactfully left town on School business. How it was all settled I no longer recall. The rooster departed, though not immediately, and the issue was allowed to lapse also into quiet. The chickens were gradually given away or perhaps eaten, and Dean restricted himself to canaries and finches. There are still several paintings of chickens on the walls of graduates of that time like Larson, Eager, and Ruestow, and the artistic production, the corpus of those years, displays fowl in all their glory. I recall using the Art Room to give an exam in church history, during which teen-age knowledge of the Seven Oecumenical Councils was interrupted and tensions released by clucklings and chirping. About the same time Dean himself began to collect porcelain and pottery hens silently sitting on nests, some of them valuable and of such varied provenance as Madrid, Naples, and rural Pennsylvania. The Chicken Mania died slowly and there was a brief resurgence in the 196o's, when Dean went to the York Fair, where one could see thousands of chickens in cages, and he was ecstatic in the midst of brilliant birds, all clucking and pecking and eating grain. He even bought a bantam that laid an egg on the back seat of the car as we were returning to Washington. I don't remember what happened to the bantam, but I know I ate the egg. Now and then a breath of country wisdom would come from Dean, a brief penetrating summary of a boy's character, a monitory quiet cluck from the chicken coop. The patterns of farm nature he saw reiterated in students and their families. To him, boys seemed at times young bulls, and the girls they dated were on occasion com­ pared to willing yet unwilling heifers. The protective rages of mothers and the rampaging of fathers reminded him of the devices many beasts used to protect their young. Only man, however, seemed to Dean to have the selfish perversity to cling possessively to the child when it was full grown. During an art show in the 40's, a Canadian Brigadier surveyed the work of his fourteen-year--old and then in a tone of deep confidentiality, voiced his concern over his son's physical "immaturity." It was an age of worry over such things as delayed pubescence and undescended testicles, and only after minutes of protocol and circumlocution did the Brigadier finally ask Dean what he ought to do about it, or them. Dean thought solemnly a moment, and in his best upcountry-blunt manner said, "You know, if I were you, I'd just wait." His own professional record was distinguished if unattended by publicity or self-puffery. A student of Hobson Pittman, whose subtlety of colour Dean always admired, he taught with his mentor for many years at Penn State and exhibited solid landscapes, meticulously worked over, in the Corcoran Biennial, the Detroit Art Institute and National Academy Annuals, and the Pittsburgh Directions of American Painting shows. He painted slowly, so the corpus of his work even today is about twenty completed paintings. This small number was chiefly the result of his attention to detail and to fitting that detail accurately into the landscape it inhabited. The sky was wrong here, or the road into the forest was wrong there. Sometimes he was generally displeased with the result, and put the work away to study it later on. One time he forgot a painting entirely, and when time came to work on it he found that some paint was flaking off. "I am probably the only painter who has ever had to have his work restored so he could finish it," he said. Students swarmed around him. He attended their games; they took his art course. One year the football team voted him a varsity letter because all but two of its forty-five members were painting with him. The two that were not were thought a bit strange, if not downright queer. Dean's artist's eye looked at athletics as poetry in motion, even as Eakins sought to harness photographs of athletes to the purposes of his art. The boys were unaware of this dispassionate alliance of the athlete's grace with the eye of the artist, but they often experienced the effects such knowledge had given to Dean, for he used what he saw to analyze their character and-in troubled situations-could bring his knowledge to bear on other faculty opinion. I always listened carefully when he spoke in faculty meetings, for I knew that his judgement was not a facile one. “Watch him run," he would say. "He is scared of the world around ·him. And when you meet his parents, you can see why." Or, "he is naturally uncoordinated. He's just big, and will never really be any good. He ought to paint more and play less. Look at the way he moves. Someone ought to tell him." Usually that some­one was Dean. On another level, Dean detected colour blindness very early in a boy, who was usually then restricted to earth colours and whose parents were informed of the condition. One such lad, now an innovative, very successful Washington architect, went home with the discovery before Dean had a chance to tell the boy's mother, and she was indignant. Subsequent examination showed Dean was right, and a poetic painting of Confederate memory-a flag, a sword, a book and candlestick-belonged for thirty years in the School collection, done entirely in earth colours. Dean’s teaching method was subtle, wise, and distinguished by his ability to raise the level of a student's taste upon his initiation into art, which was at his first aesthetic experience of painting, and a touch of the missionary fanatic was not absent. The examples Dean used were not his own work, as can be true in the case of lesser teachers who view their students as their audience, tools, or potential clients. If a boy had a problem, perhaps with getting water to lie flat or to show the almost-imperceptible alterations of colour that graduations of distance demand under certain light, Dean referred them to nature, to their own ability to observe, and in last resort, to examples of great art. Basically, he wanted the boy to find out for himself, not to be told, and he viewed his function of teacher as guide or intermediary. He turned a cold eye on theory. When students began to talk at home about their painting, and came back to Dean with the rich and strange vocabulary of the art critic, historian, or dealer, he knew at once that the devil of theory had been at work among his faithful, and he set about at once to oppose it with the arsenal of sarcasm and blunt attack that he occasionally employed in other matters. Very early on he made fun of the vocabulary of the world of the art dealers whose publicity dealt in "tactile values," "effulgent textures," or "gestural expansiveness" that "achieved an uncorporeal (sic) realm." In the end, he would tell students not to substitute gallery chatter for the experience of creating, no small feat when one considers that the St. Albans parents were often on boards of museums, were themselves ready prey to the seductions of New York art dealers, or fancied themselves, after a course or two at the Vassar, Princeton, or Smith of the 3o's, as able to offer an equal opinion on the work of their sons. Dean was not amused by them, commented sarcastically on such opinions quite openly, and refused their invitations to meet charming visitors from foreign museums. He was no art historian and did not view art historians as artists of any sort. He admired Duncan Phillips and Bernard Berenson as cultivated collectors whose taste coincided with the goals of the creative artist. As for all the rest, they were money-grubbing predators in the pasture, or even the beloved chickenyard, of his young charges. Ultimately, Dean's goal was for the individual student to develop his own style and perception with little influence from anything but the best. The result was, for forty years, that Dean's annual art shows of student work were alive with paintings of a striking individuality. Abstractions were natural, not forced by fashion, and he could detect in a boy's mind the natural tendency to see things abstractly. He would say not a word, but let the boy develop his own style as he would. Some of the most knowledgeable men and women in the world of American art came to the St. Albans annual exhibits of student painting, and did not go away disappointed, Duncan Phillips, William Burden, and Paul Mellon among them, for there was in Dean an integrity that produced varied styles and honest perception. The walls of Washington are full of his students' work, and if only a few of his boys went on into careers as artists, there are many lawyers and businessmen whose youthful paintings hanging on the walls of their offices or homes indicate a side of their personality that was, unhappily, to be sacrificed to the traditional American gods of success. Dean's taste in decoration, and the tone it set, were of a superior order. For one whose own painting was a series of subtle variations on green, brown, and blue, the range of colour in his apartment was surprising. Pastel shades of red, yellow, orange, mauve were every­ where, and when one came into his living room, it was like walking into a Bonnard, and gave the same feeling of ordered confusion as a great Riviera garden all in bloom, all somewhat untended. Yet if order seemed at first sight sacrificed to detail, it was not the case. The slightest alteration of the many objects would quickly bring to light the basic pattern, even as in a Bonnard painting, and the wise viewer saw the principles behind the seeming disorder of the detail. As with his decorative taste, so with Dean himself. A potent if neglected Calvinism, starved for the flowering of art, underlay the almost-willed disarray that was less disorder than a passionate interest and attention to the rococo details of ornament and to the artistic fitness of such ornament. There were self-inflicted deprivations to his taste, even in art and music. He did not care for big statements, whose appropriate noise intruded upon his details and their subtlety. Beethoven and Wagner were too loud, too weighted down with meaning. For him, the Italians with their emotion and their ornaments, Verdi, Bellini, Puccini, Rossini, best brought out what Dean looked for in art: subtlety of shading, direct statement of emotion, the immediate romanticism of a dying Mimi or Aida. Head tones were all. Similarly, Dean disliked—or chose to disparage as merely great—both Michelangelo and Rubens. The great hunky male nudes of the former, with their ideological or sheer physical weight, left him cold. They were too massive, too unsubtle, too overpowering. His females, allegorical and symbolic, were like Soviet athletes after a full meal. As with Michelangelo, so with the great statements of Rubens. And to Dean, the heroes and heroines of Wagner were not the bearers of mystery, or ominous prophets of cultural doom and death, but simply big voices howling on key and set in improbably primitive or mediaeval settings. To him, the poetry of Wagnerian romanticism, the mood of horns in the far forest, was lost in noise. After a brief encounter with Wagner, Dean fled back to Aida's tomb and Mimi's bedroom. The tone that Dean set was superior. The product of his good taste, it was one of dignity, refinement, and discipline. He disliked the vulgarity of pretension, whether it was that of an untalented artist or a bombastic politician or art critic. Self-advertisement he fled from, and his most devastating criticism was reserved for those teachers who used their positions to advertise their own usually inferior work. One had only to see his student exhibitions to realize the taste that lay behind the tone that they set, and even the dignity and quality of the invitations and catalogues reflected it. As for the latter, in the trendy commonplaceness of subsequent productions, with their commercial design and typeface, there is present a monument to the influence of poor taste on its sensitive product, tone. But Dean's work as a teacher and as a personal influence on students should be judged in its own right and not by a too-facile com­ parison which would be unfair to the hardworking ones who succeeded him. He was an unusual and outstanding teacher with great personal and professional gifts, and his successes were not the usual ones of a high-school art teacher. His successors should not be criticized for not doing what they could never have achieved. La plus belle femme du monde ne peut donner que ce qu' elle a. Dean was like Chinese Chippendale furniture: strip away the ornament and detail and the simple lines emerge. A delicate yet sturdy framework was strong enough to survive through the decoration and acquired ornament. His basic simplicity included loyalty to friends, truth to nature, absence and horror of pretension and sham, and an immediate penetration to honesty of position. The rest did not matter, and if the world did not care for Chinese Chippendale, that was its right, but not Dean's concern. I suppose we like others essentially because there is something in them that reminds us of ourselves, a supposition that arises from not-a-very-optimistic view of either love or friendship. Yet similarity of reactions to life, whether small or large in scope, does draw people together. Dean and I had the same sense of the ridiculous. Once on Capri, where Dean and I spent several weeks mostly bathing at the Faraglioni or sitting in one of the eternal cafes on the tiny sun-drenched square, we noticed an ancient dog who came out into the narrow crowded street at precisely the same time each day that we descended from the bus that had taken us up the hill from the Piccola Marina. He would walk stifflegged, without a purpose, and looked so unkempt in a small mixed-breed way that he seemed comic to both of us. We began to look for the dog every day and were never disappointed. He would move into the ceaseless flow of people, an island in the midst of confusion, and after a moment, return to his doorway. To us, the dog not only summarized Capri, with its delectable contrasts of absurdity, love, tragedy, and beauty, but also reminded us-though neither one said anything of it-of the transitory nature of enjoyable experience. Past the house from which the dog tottered had walked the small and the great of the last century: Alexandra of England, Lenin, Wilde, Rilke, Gustave of Sweden, Proust, and the last German Emperor. So, for their moment of time, did my own friends Zabby and Jim Green. Now they were all gone, and it was our turn to enjoy the fleeting moment that Capri gives to all of us so indiscriminately. Years later, alone on Capri, I still looked for the dog, but he was not there, nor was Dean. The street was the same, the sights and smells the same, the bus still emptied its chattering crowd into the stream of people flowing up and down, and only in individual memory was there something lacking. The dog was past time, a moment of grace given, the detail of a canvas that was not essential to the grand design. Such moments of grace make one realize both our own impermanence and the eternal quality of the pattern, and Dean may indeed be right in stressing the significant and subtle detail rather than the broader design. After all, perhaps man has no higher goal than to make his own life a work of art. John Davis Art Department at St. Albans Makes Unique Contribution to School Life, Cathedral Age, 1952 IN JUNE OF 1952, Dean Stambaugh, the art department of St. Albans School, will complete the tenth year of his contribution to the students of the National Cathedral School for Boys. The result, an almost culinary success, is due to the ingredients of student interest and administrative support, and the efforts of a first-rate cook, Dean Stambaugh. For the number of students taking art at St. Albans each year, five times a week, has increased from eight to fifty; the Eighth Annual Student Exhibition in 1951 attracted more than five hundred visitors during the week it was open; the John Covert Boyd Arc Gift, presented annually by Dr. and Mrs. Walter Willard Boyd of Washington, has already expended around $1900 for student prizes and for the purchase of paintings (Soyer, Pittman, Romano) for the growing St. Albans Art Collection; students have made as much as $450 from the sale of their work while in school; several others have continued serious work in painting after their graduation from college; and most important of all, in Dean Stambaugh's eyes, perhaps eight hundred boys have been given an insight into what they can do in a medium of expression that may be a source of pleasure and an important or relaxing avocation when they are older. These results are the creation of one man, Dean Stambaugh, who joined the St. Albans faculty in September, 1952, after having been engaged the previous July by the Reverend Albert Hawley Lucas, Headmaster of St. Albans from 1929 to 1949. When Mr. Lucas made up his mind to make the art course a part of the curriculum open to any boy attending St. Albans, it was the summer of 1942, a time when teachers in general, and especially teachers of art, were as scarce as hens' teeth. It was not unusual, in the early days of the war, for a headmaster to have several teachers whom he had engaged in the summer shot out from under him by the local draft board before the opening of the September term. So it was with relief though probably with no feeling of certainty, that Mr. Lucas journeyed back from Philadelphia in July, 1942 having engaged a tall bald art teacher from Galeton, Pennsylvania, with experience in the Pennsylvania and Elmira public schools, to head, or be, the Department of Freehand Drawing, as St. Albans called it at the time. Before 1940, art education in America was considered suspect by a great many colleges and conservative preparatory schools, as something for students who could not progress beyond fractions or simple spelling, or at best as a subject for which students in poor schools were usually given credit. Indeed, as late as 1950, a Dean of Admissions of a major college remarked rather testily that "he deplored the tendency of many preparatory schools to abandon the solid old-fashioned curriculum in favor of courses which, at best, could not be called basic." St. Albans, with the exception of the Headmaster, agreed pretty much with this point of view, and a very honest elderly lady of the staff, when told by Dean Stambaugh that he taught art, replied with motherly sympathy in her voice, "Oh dear! I thought you taught a subject." Inadequate Quarters In 1942 the Activities Building of the School, which was then bur four years old, was magnificently equipped for everything but art. The Department of Freehand Drawing was closeted in the cellar. In the basement next to the locker room, running almost the full length of the building, was a splendid Manual Training Room, completely furnished with lathes, saws, benches, storage closets, metal-working machinery, and so forth. Immediately adjoining such luxury was the room reserved for drawing, both freehand and mechanical. It was about four times the size of the dark room built for the Camera Club. In this room for drawing, under fluorescent lights aided by a few area-way windows, the Art Department began and has continued to live. But whereas the art room in 1942 could contain quite comfortably the eight "freehand drawing" students and the ten or so mechanical drawing pupils, it is now crowded with the fifty or sixty boys and the mechanical drawing has long since been banished from the room forever. Dean Stambaugh was thus initially presented with the problems of adequate space and student interest, and the numbers working with him today are sufficient proof of his success in solving the latter. In the spring of 1944, he produced the first Annual Exhibition of Student Painting, complete with prizes, catalogue, and Jury of awards with the boxing and wrestling room as his gallery. By 1946, interest in art had grown co such considerable proportions that he was beginning the long series of plaintive reminders to the St. Albans administration that "twenty-four boys painting in a room built to hold twelve must give a very poor impression of the interest, etc. etc…" As his friends occasionally reminded him, however, there was little point in pursuing the school for "adequate space" if his definition of what "adequate space" was expanded each year as a result of the propagandistic attractiveness of the art course, the popularity of its instructor, and the interest the entire school took in the work produced in the cellar. And so the recent years have gone by in much the same pattern, with the number of students whom Dean Stambaugh has encouraged to venture into art increasing each year, and the need for larger quarters becoming more and more pressing. The present hope for a solution is the proposed Lucas Wing of the Lower School Building, which, if built soon enough, will have an art room large enough to contain, for a few years, the contagious artistic enthusiasm of the department. A visit to the Art Department is the best way to receive, to any degree, a true impression of its confusion, its unorthodoxy, and the unwritten rules of its operation, for it does have rules. As you enter, you have the sensation of looking into a small, noisy, and disorganized anthill. Twenty-four boys are seated, or standing at easels, in a room which measures exactly, in working space, 19½ x 21 feet, excluding closet and cabinet space, and not including a long table which bars activity on the side nearest the windows. On the rear wall is a bulletin board some eighteen feet in length with colored reproductions of Poussin's Rape of the Sabine Women, some Pompeian frescoes, and a Picasso drawing. Another bulletin board to the right of the entrance presents a more unplanned appearance, with cartoons from the New Yorker, a student watercolor (a failure, hung upside down), an announcement (out-of-date) of concerts at the Phillips Memorial Gallery, and a paint spattered reproduction of a Miro abstraction. Around other walls are hung framed prints and by present and former students. An old rccord111g of Tetrazzini singing the Swiss echo Song is being played on a phonograph on front of a blackboard on which is written "Light, Medium, and Dark" and "Sec Jose Greco" and, in the lower corner, inscrutably, "Teehee! Demerits for Johnnie and Edward!" In the center of the room, standing in the midst of quietly working students (conversation is prohibited), is the art department, dressed in a tweed suit covered by a paint-splashed apron. Teacher and Artist Dean Stambaugh is tall and slim, fortyish, with a long neck, prominent features, and keen green eyes that move quickly around the room. By temperament, alert and dignified, he belies completely the popular conception of the impractical artist, except for an inability (which he would more honestly call a disinclination) to balance his cheque book. Very fond of music, he is especially devoted to sopranos, preferably dramatic, large, and Italian. His other interests are reading and antique-collecting, the former Shakespeare and the Bible (which he reads in a large Masonic edition given to him by the Consistory of Coudersport, Pennsylvania), and the latter maple furniture and Victorian glass. He is by temperament and background a true product of rural Pennsylvania. His home has always been in the small town of Galeton (pop. 1500) in the north-central section of the state, in the middle of the antique-and-deer-hunting region. After his graduation in 1932 from the Pennsylvania Scare Teachers' College at Edinboro, he began teaching in a consolidated school in Gaines, Pennsylvania. At this he had his first chance to do any extensive painting of the countryside, and this choice of subject-matter has been unchanged for the rest of his career as an artist. In 1937 began his fruitful association with the Philadelphia painter, Hobson Pittman, and with the work Pittman was doing with his students at the Summer Session of Pennsylvania State College. Perhaps the work of no two painters could be superficially more unlike than that of these two men, for Pittman's dreamy evocations of the decaying slipper-chair-and-faded-silkscreen gentility are, on the surface, remote from Dean Stambaugh's brisk, solid, undramatic, and restful Pennsylvania landscapes. Behind the surface impression, however, is one impressive resemblance, a feeling of artistic integrity in the work of both men which shows itself in a concern for good color, line design, and an implied contempt for the fashions of theorists and schools of modern painting. This simple artistic honesty necessary to any good painter is one of the elements of artistic tradition, and in this case the tradition can be traced directly from Hobson Pittman to Dean Stambaugh's students at St. Albans School. Many of his methods with students also stem from Hobson Pittman: his insistence that the student put on canvas as or paper what the student sees; his refusal to paint on a student's work, even 1f there are obvious errors in it; his refusal to allow a student to copy styles of other painters, all of which produce in his annual exhibitions as many individual styles as there are exhibitors. To a new student, he will usually give the following basic instructions: (1) Plan what you want to paint, (2) always use nature as your reference book, (3) devote enough time to your work, (4) don't expect immediate success. For himself, Dean Stambaugh has only a few teaching principles; to lead the student rather than to drive him; never to paint on a student's work; to let the student learn to paint by painting, and not to let him copy other paintings or other styles. In his ten years at St. Albans, he has been left speechless by only one student, one with a mathematical mind who after the first day of class asked him very seriously for "the formula for a successful painting." Had he answered, he probably would have said: honesty, plus talent, plus hard work. For the past four summers, Dean Stambaugh has served as instructor-assistant to Hobson Pittman at the Pennsylvania State College Summer Session, and has continued with adults there the same success he has had with the boys of St. Albans. It is during the summers that he does most of his own painting which, save a few still-lifes, is drawn from the Pennsylvania landscape, a winding dirt road running into a green valley or through yellow, brown, or green fields, a brook moving in and out behind willows, a series of gently rising slopes crowned by a copse of trees, a line of blue hills in the distance, a large clump of pines in the left foreground, and over everything a deep and unperturbed blue sky running far back into the deep horizon. Since he first exhibited in the Carnegie Museum’s Directions In American Painting show in 1941in Pittsburgh, Dean Stambaugh has appeared in more local and national shows of any importance—three times at the Philadelphia Academy show (reputedly the most difficult and selective exhibition in the country); four times in the Corcoran Biennial; the Cleveland Museum Show, the Audubon Artists, and the Pepsi-Cola Exhibit. And in many of these exhibitions, one can see there is something striking and honest about his traditional style, something that attracts the eye. He is so “un-modern” that his painting has achieved the distinction of being different from all the others in the exhibition, as though in the Academy of the Abstractionists, he were in the Revolutionary advanced guard. And if his honesty is apparent in his subject-matter, it is even more so in his choices for titles for his work. To exhibitions which contain paintings exotically titled Into this World There Came a Soul Called Ida, or That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do, Dean Stambaugh chooses to send The Knoll and Midsummer Landscape. To a recent exhibition in Florida, he submitted an oil called Evening at the Pig Farm. The lack of cunning in a world of potential buyers and profit motive, is similar in artlessness to the remark of a Potter County farmer who, when told that Dean Stambaugh wanted to paint his sorrel horse, replied that he rather likes his horse the color she was. In all probability, the next twenty years will repeat the general history of the past ten: a continuing growth in interest and the expansion of the present facilities if and when the money for the new building has been raised. As for predicting the future, Dean Stambaugh would probably repeat what he once said to a father who impatiently wondered what he could do about his son’s delayed maturity. Dean, with Potter County helpful directness, answered, “You know, if I were you, I’d just wait.”