Shutdown Creates a Royal Pain for Officials at Reagan Library

Oh, bother.

Just as the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum is preparing to open a show today of watercolor paintings by His Royal Highness Charles, Prince of Wales, this infernal American budget crisis closes the place.

Pity, really.

Marilyn Morrison, the museum’s assistant curator, seemed quite taken by the prince’s brush strokes, his firm command of light.

And museum spokeswoman Lynda Schuler was ever so anxious that interested guests would be turned away at the gate until this funding nonsense is resolved.

Still, hope was aloft that the President might sign the Treasury funding bill over the weekend. That would reopen--among other things--the National Archives, which encompass the Reagan Library.

So--stiff upper lips and all that--Morrison and Christian Bailey, the curator to the Prince of Wales, kept fiddling Friday with gallery spotlights until they caught his Highness’ gilt-framed work just so.

Here, vermilion sunset washed over a snowy field as seen near Bircham, Norfolk. There, in finicky detail, the prince had sketched early morning sun falling on the towers and turrets of the royal residence at Sandringham.

“Being an art historian, I’m very impressed with his landscape, and his architecture is wonderful,” said Morrison, doffing the white work gloves she was using to adjust hot lights. “He has a great mastery of it. . . . “

Prince Charles has been painting for about 20 years in the rare lulls between world tours and royal vacations, said Bailey, whose job is to oversee display and storage of the prince’s own work and private art collection.

He finishes perhaps 20 watercolors a year.

But only recently did the prince begin showing them after friends pressed him into it, Bailey said. They “managed to get him to get the picture that people would not just come because the artist was the Prince of Wales, but because the Prince of Wales was an artist.”

The prince usually roughs out his subject in pencil, then lays on watercolor fairly quickly, Bailey said. Once the paint is down, it must be perfect or the prince has to start a new one--there is no erasing or correcting watercolors, she said.

But all of His Highness’ hurry will be for naught until the President and Congress settle their disputes. The Reagan Library must remain closed until the bill is signed.

“We’re just a little disappointed,” said Schuler. Then she added hopefully: “But the exhibit will open some time in the next three or four days, and it’ll be up through Jan. 7.”