Of all the University academic divisions, the Fine Arts Department probably managed better than any other to hold on to some of the personnel and traditions of Harvard's Golden Age, which lasted into the first two decades of this century.

The remnants of this tradition, in the persons of Arthur Pope, professor of Fine Arts, emeritus, and Chandler R. Post, William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts, stopped serving actively on the faculty within the last year and a half.

This fall, however, the tradition is making a brief comeback through a one-man show by Pope at the Robert C. Vose Galleries, 559 Boylston Street.

Pope's broad tolerance and apprecia- tion in the study of art carried over to his painting. The Vose exhibit shows he was a painter who possessed unusual versatility of taste and skill. The showing includes samples of Pope's charcoal portraits, portraiture in oils, and several of his landscapes.

Pope apparently was no more single-minded about choice of a subject in painting than he was about the style in which he painted. At the Vose show, he is exhibiting a still life. "Still Life With Cauliflower"; the charcoal portraits of his contemporaries; a study of a bouquet of "Meadow Flowers from Chamouni"; and scenes from France and Italy done in the manner of the English water colorists.

The Pope pictures also show us that their painter was a disciplined as well as a versatile scholar. They generally give the impression of being carefully put together rather than being works born from imagination only.

Pope may have been the more artistically creative of the two Fine Arts men who retired during the last year and a half, but his colleague Post, was unquestionably the more colorful.

A vigorous, compactly built man, Post liked to express his individuality by indulging in cold, water bathing in South Boston during the winter months. His intellectual sphere seemed to know no limits. He was expert in the art and history of the Romance Languages countries, and competent in a score of languages and in other fields of learning