the elegance of `a town that has survived change' By Patrician Calnan The work of one of America's greatest watercolourists has just gone on show in the Ondaatje Wing of the Bermuda National Gallery.

Ogden Pleissner, a frequent visitor to Bermuda in the 1950's who stayed at `The Jungle' in Tucker's Town, has left a legacy of at least 13 Island images, most of them depicting the old town of St. George's.

Fortunately for Bermuda, Masterworks has acquired some of these works and, through the kindness of a loan of three more paintings and a sketch from the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, has now staged an exhibition of his work entitled `Ogden Pleissner's Bermuda Inside Out'.

Pleissner, who was born in Brooklyn in 1905, studied at the Art Students' League in New York City and went on to teach at the Pratt Insitute and the National Academy of Design where he was elected a full Academician in 1940.

The creator of over 2,500 oils and watercolours over half a century, mainly of landscape and `the sporting life', he claimed that he never had any formal training in the watercolour medium: Nowadays he is spoken of in the same revered breath as his fellow Americans, Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent.

As Peter Bergh, author of `The Art of Ogden M. Pleissner' explains in the exhibition's catalogue, oil painting necessarily gave way to watercolours when he worked as a combat artist in the Second World War. "The Masterworks Foundation,'' he writes, "is indeed fortunate to have several examples of Pleissner's outstanding Bermuda watercolours, executed in the early 1950s, in its collection and now on public display''.

The exhibition runs through September of this year.

STREET SCENE -- Watercolourist Ogden Pleissner's St. George's streetscapes show how little the old town has changed since he painted there in the 1950's.