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The act was fourteen minutes long.
Gean Smith is a serious oil painter who times himself. He paints a horse head in four minutes and turns that head into a lion’s head in another three minutes. He also paints a tiger’s head and the finish of the “Salvator-Tenney” race. A small phonograph with a megaphone attachment plays Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s poem “How Salvator Won” as he paints it. His assistant then uses a telephone book to locate someone in the audience to bring one of the paintings home.
Smith needed at least a Victrola to play the poem because no one could actually hear it on the phonograph. It is refreshing to see a serious painter who does not need to resort to using coloured crayons and cheap gags to get the audience to laugh. His painting is instructive and entertaining, and he does not need the bit with the phonograph and the telephone book to make it interesting.
Source:
Variety 28:5 (04/10/1912)