John Burroughs at Seventy-Nine Shows Portrait

Author Holds Reception at House of Princess Lwoff-Parlaghy, Who Has Just Completed His Picture.

Mr. John Burroughs, who on Monday, at West Park, N. Y., celebrated his seventy-ninth birthday anniversary, came to New York yesterday and held a reception for his friends at the house of the Princess Lwoff-Parlaghy, No. 109 East Thirty-ninth street, where they were invited to see a portrait which the Princess has just completed of him. Scores of persons congratulated the aged author and naturalist on the excellent state of his health and his evident vigor.

Mr. Burroughs explained that he had devoted so much of his time to studying the habits and welfare of birds and animals that he had neglected his own, with the consequence that in the last winter he had become ill. After passing a month in a sanitarium he says now that he is feeling better than he has for many years.

After Mr. Burroughs left the sanitarium Princess Lwoff-Parlaghy pursuaded him to go to her residence and stay there while she painted him. He was under her roof two weeks and she painted daily on the portrait, with which the author is greatly pleased.

“More than a dozen portraits have been painted of me, but this is the best of all,” he said yesterday. “It tells more than the others.”

From an artistic viewpoint the portrait is an achievement. It conveys the intense vitality and brain power of Mr. Burroughs and at the same time carries out a beautiful and rich color scheme, and the modelling of the face suggests the methods of the old masters. It is to be the frontispiece of Mr. Burroughs’ twentieth book.

Among those who attended the reception, which was held both in the afternoon and evening, were Mrs. E. Henry Harriman, Mrs. C. B. Alexander, General Horace Porter, Mr. Edwin Markham, Mr. and Mrs. Allen Pratt, Dr. and Mrs. Henry Fairfield Osborn, Judge and Mrs. Alton B. Parker, Mrs. Cleveland Dodge, Mr. Nikola Tesla, Mrs. W. A. Anderson, Colonel Connant Church, Baroness de Ropp, Mrs. William Gould, Mrs. Robert P. Huntington, Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Day, Mr. and Mrs. Charles R. Flint, Mr. John Quincy Adams, Mr. and Mrs. E. Reeve Merritt, Mrs. William W. McAlpin, Professor Michael Pupin, Mrs. J. Fred Pierson and Mrs. Cortlandt S. Van Rensselaer.