A First Annual Competition and Exhibition

As these words are written, late in February, there is in progress in the Boston Public Library an exhibition of more than three hundred cover designs submitted in a competition announced some months ago by the House Beautiful. The pictures chosen for exhibition represent but a fraction of the total number of cover designs received. Of these there were more than 1400, and they came from all the corners of the globe — China, the Hawaiian and Philippine Islands, South America, Canada, England, France, and

other countries of Europe. An Art School for Disabled Soldiers was the source of one group of designs and a Society of Deaf Mutes of another. Art schools and organizations of many kinds, to say nothing of individual artists, interested themselves in the competition. The result was an assemblage of pictures with an extraordinarily high average of merit, both in the technique and in the quality of imagination which it revealed. The first prize of $500 was awarded to Mr. C. E. Millard of New York City, the second prize of $250 to Mr. William Fuller Curtis of Williamstown, Massachusetts. A number of other designs have been purchased by the House Beautiful for use during the coming year.

The success of this first annual exhibition has justified the immediate formation of plans for a second. Even at this early date it may be said that the entries for the second annual competition will close February 1, 1924. Meanwhile the interest in the Boston show led at once to requests for exhibitions elsewhere, with resulting arrangements for the display of 100 chosen designs in New York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago.