Open Letters From New York

V.

To cover one of the prominent superficial aspects of the collision of our two art associations the dispatch might be framed, “ They have met the enemy and are mutually each other’s.” The new society exhibited at the Kurtz Gallery during the month of March. The Academy of Design followed within a few days of its close, and is still in session. A line of demarkation between two antagonistic forces was not as sharply drawn as may have been anticipated. Academicians in regular standing, Colman, Inness, LaFarge, Wyant, Hunt of Boston, and others, formed a considerable and very attractive part of the Kurtz Gallery display. The peculiar constituency of the latter, on the other hand, made up, as has been explained, of the younger men, who have lately completed or are actually engaged in their studies abroad, musters in sufficient force at the Academy to give there also a very fair taste of its quality, and to make the regular exhibition as representative as usual of the various branches. The disclaimer, therefore, on the part of the new movement of any hostility, or of a desire to do more than furnish additional exhibition facilities, seems quite sustained. I think there can be no doubt that the reasonableness of its existence has been sustained too. It has been a useful opportunity to have our attention very distinctly called to the most powerful influences at work upon our art, and to the precise manner in which they take hold of the native element sent directly into their midst. There must have been a good deal of latent curiosity on this point. Perhaps we thought it stoutly defied them. Perhaps we thought at any rate that it opposed to them something of an inherent vital Americanism that might be more or less deflected, of course, but would appear as a resultant in a triangle of forces.

If one had thought so he would have been disappointed at the Kurtz Gallery, He would have found an unconditional surrender to Paris and Munich, He would have seen Bonnat, Breton, Duran, Feyer-Perrin, Gerome, Diez, Piloty, taking as complete possession of young Americans from Connecticut as if they were of LeMans or Coblentz. Perhaps more, since the Americans are credited with a quickness at seizing the idea and a facility in adjusting themselves to circumstances which their neighbors do not always so fully possess. The room, hung with works for the most part of considerable size, had an effect of importance in its subjects, and a well-understood magnificence of color unmistakably foreign. There were but about one hundred and thirty works, including a few unimportant bits of sculpture, against seven hundred and forty-seven at the Academy, but nearly all of them good. A number had passed the fastidious test of admission to the Paris Salon. Nothing could be more French than Pearce, Sargent, Thayer, Comans, Low ; nothing more German than Shirlaw, Duveneck, Gross, Dannat, Macy. Yet it is not so easy in every case, though Pearce is readily enough connected with Bonnat, and Bridgman, in his Egyptian archæology, with Gerome, to establish the relation between the pupil and his accredited master. It is a relief to find that the result is a susceptibility to a union of impressions, and not a slavish submission to a single one. The pupil sometimes appears to have been repelled from his master, as in the case of Shirlaw, whose strong manner does not resemble that of Piloty or Lindenschmitt, but is more like Diez, with whom he did not study.

Chase, the most mature and finished of the exhibitors, is of the Germans, sending his pictures from Munich, but he is even more of the Flemings and the old masters. Permeated with the essence of the great galleries in which he has lingered, he seems frankly to have abandoned any attempt at an originality which could detract from the incomparable grand manner of the past. So perfectly does he give a sense of Rembrandt, Hals, Velasquez, Raphael Mengs, that it is difficult to see in what respect he falls short of renewing their dark, rich, full, and vivid portraiture. His work needs no provincial audience for its appreciation, but can take its chances in the markets of the world. The peculiarity is the intense concentration of interest on the points of principal importance. In Preparing for the Ride, a fulllength life-sized lady in a black ridinghabit and a steeple-crowned hat, drawing on her gloves, the head and hands alone beam out of a rich, olive-tinted gloom. The figure is defined by a pale diffusion of light, which forms but a slight connection between these isolated points. From a distance you see in the large canvas only two white spots. The head, cut off by a spreading lace ruff, seems to float, cherub-like, in space, or, rather, to rest upon a salver. The pale face, of a milk-like complexion, with thin blonde hair fringed above it, to which the large accessories give a sort of preciousness, has once been beautiful, but there is now in it the melancholy of an unmistakable fading. The quaint separation of the parts seems less appropriate for such a subject than for the Wounded Poacher above, and I for one should like to have seen a stronger illumination following down the line of the shoulder and arm and connecting these detached high lights. The Poacher is a grim bandaged head with a ragged mustache, patched nose, and dangerous eye. Nothing is seen of him, either, but this ominous head and a hand grasping a gun-barrel — into the mouth of which you look —emerging from a thick darkness. Rembrandt, whose allowance of light was one eighth, while more cheerful colleagues take one quarter, never used less of it. Another powerful head, of a soldier in a battered steel helmet, is, by an opposite process, flat and dark against a ground almost white. The Apprentice is a graphic study of an unterrified young scion of the working classes, with the dirt grimed into the wrinkled skin of his wrists, who has been seut after a pot of beer. It has the reality of an actual person standing in the frame. In color it is an epitome of Munich. An affinity to the chord struck in its intelligent use of white, of soft grays and browns, the blue of the working apron, the flesh tints, warm and agreeable without floridness, is found in Shirlaw’s flock of screaming geese, fed by a young peasant whose drapery twists about her with the spirit of a Virgin of the Assumption, in Velten’s (himself a Munich master) peasant interiors at the Academy, and in his landscapes, as well as in the exquisite grave ones of the American Macy. In the key of red he is equally successful. He has at the Academy a court-jester in scarlet, as rich-hued as Meissonier and on a scale that gives it dignity.

The difference between Paris and Munich, in the abstract conception, consists in a nearer relation to Italy and ideal art in the former, and to Holland and actual life in the latter. Paris is more theatrical, Munich more domestic and sympathetic. French color is more smiling, sunshiny, decorative, inclining to the whole gamut; German lower-toned, and perhaps exhibiting in its sedateness the greater depth of the national character. But in practice they are closely related, so that I can hardly see what it is that should determine a student now to go to one rather than the other. It was in fact Piloty, a pupil of Delacroix, who first brought to Munich the inspiration of the admirable new movement. On the other hand Dutch influences and the revived German seem to react strongly upon the French school. The two were not so far apart in spirit in Millet, Jules Breton, Frère, and the resemblance extends to substance as well, in such landscapes as those of Jacques, such work as that of Munkacsy, Ribot, and John Louis Brown, all of which — the last two rarer, but seen at Cottier’s recent singular sale — are not uncommon among our dealers. In the remarkably fine work of Hovenden, one of the younger men and the new school, exhibiting at the Academy, the two fully coincide. His Brittany interior, with the beautifully managed confined light from a window, rounding over the massive, sympathetically felt, harmoniously colored figures, would be credited at once to Munich. Yet he is, one learns, a pupil of Cabanel, who is quite of the preconceived French order, as there was opportunity to see in his tragic Francesca di Rimini at the Centennial.

Of other Munich work the character heads by Dannat and Gross are typical, and interesting for their method. They obtain a great brilliancy by being forced out of an almost black ground. Shadows fall under the nose and upon one side of the face almost as strong as on a plaster cast from an upper light in the evening. The flesh is roughly and solidly painted, the colors as far as possible being laid in patches side by side and left untroubled, or, at most, one slightly merged in the other by a dexterous sweep of the brush, for in oil scarcely less than in water-color do uncertainty and experiments destroy freshness and the highest attainable results. The practice is carried to the extreme of caricature by Currier, whose Bohemian Beggar’s complexion, painted in crude stripes, appears to have been flayed.

Duveneck adds nothing to the great reputation it was his fortune to obtain perhaps in part by his early appearance in the field as an exponent of the novel German inventions. There is no doubt about his strength, but he displays a repulsive want of feeling, His principal piece, a life-size, goggling German baby in a green wooden contrivance, and beating the devil’s tattoo with a hammer, is as disagreeable as a young hobgoblin.

The French method in heads is smoother, but bold enough. It avails itself too of the forcing out from black grounds. In the examples here accessible, such as the excellent study of a head and the full-length portrait of a lady by Anderson, pupil of Bonnat, and the threequarter length by Bonnat himself, all at the Academy, it is not always done with the same artistic discretion. The figures are very real, yet have a hard, too sharply detached outline. But there is hardly anything else in portraits so satisfactory to my mind, so capable of doing good, if its easy naturalness, combined with dignity of attitude, and its skillful opposition of tones, be attended to, as the No. 453, also at the Academy, of J. Alden Weir, a pupil of Gerome. A grayish tinge is diffused over the usually intractable black of the every-day costume. The use of frigid greenish tones in the obscure background gives it even a certain warmth. He had, it is true, in a well-preserved old gentleman with fine gray hair, an unusually good subject; so had Huntington in his No. 480 in the same room. The latter makes of it only the usual bank-president with his boots in full, on the usual red carpet, and his arm on the usual red table-cover.

The striking novelty at the Kurtz Gallery, the feature which most marked its difference from the ordinary American exhibition, was the lightly draped or wholly nude figures. Two of these subjects may be classed as “high art.” The eye was at once drawn to Pearce’s Lamentation over the First - Born of Egypt. Bonnat, his master, is a brilliant illuminator and a realizer of his subject to the last degree. His famous Crucifixion, of ’74, was absolutely startling. I have heard, from some who saw, that he painted it from a dead body actually nailed to a cross and set up in his studio. It might have been expected that an impressible pupil would display some of these qualities, and these are in fact just what we find. Two slightly draped figures sit upon the floor, bending over a mummy case. They do not impress you as overcome with grief. Oriental lamentation, as I understand it, is wilder, with ululations and contorted countenances. They are studio models posed for a purpose. The well-formed man has a greenish blanket thrown over one shoulder. He might do in some other attitude for a young Saint John, or anything else. The woman is more Egyptian and very ugly in figure. The ugliness, one feature of which is the condition of a thin arm painfully pinched by metal armlets, is dwelt upon with as much interest as if it were beauty. The piece is a close, life-school study, with especial attention to the texture of flesh. It is extremely well done and the best kind of practice, but it cannot be called practice yet turned to account. Miss Dodson, on the contrary, in her group of dancing maidens, led on by a Cupid pretending to fiddle by drawing his arrow across the string of his bow, — one is inclined to ask the pert young genius whence he learned the parody — aims to be an exponent of grace and the decorative qualities of soft pink and white flesh, without over-sensuousness. The difficult action of the dainty figures, springing forward through a grayishgreen Arcadia, is not quite successful. You cannot always say of a poise, as you ought to be able to do, just what it is going to be next. If you look too long at it, the middle one has more the appearance of a person who has sprained her ankle and is being supported to a seat. But it is a delicate and elegant work, a paler modern inspiration from Correggio.

The only things corresponding to these at the Academy from home sources, passing Hall’s clumsy allegory of winter, are two canvases by Loop, illustrating Shakespeare. Marina walks by the seashore in a yellow chlamys, and Hermia and Helena recline in an American woodland in different hues of the same. The ambition and a certain dreamy feeling in them are to be commended, but the figures (it is always the same model in three different attitudes) are not more Greek than Shakespeare, and, smoothed down to a vapid tameness in the attempt to idealize, are not modern either.

In the department of more regular genre no word less than “ exquisite ” describes Sargent’s Oyster Fishers at Cancale. We envy a mind, that can look thus at common life, the bliss of its daily existence. Where another would see but a group of rude fish-wives plodding heavily in the sand, he shows us a charming procession coming on with a movement almost rhythmical. The light is behind and throws their shadows forward in a dusty violet bloom. Small pools in front give back reflections. The close skirts show the action of the figures. The line of a descending hill in the background is cut by the straight sea horizon. All is as fresh and crisp as the gray and blue of the shifting sky. The light touches only in scattering points upon the forms, which are for the most part in shade. It is managed with a delicious skill. The difficult matter of the relief of white upon white is disposed of as if with an airy nonchalance. The white peasant caps are brought off the light sky with just a sufficient suggestion of detachment, here by a slight darkening of gray, there by a flicker of yellow in the light on an edge. Maynard, with as good opportunities, in his group of Venetian water-carriers, threw them away. In Thayer’s cattle piece there is a feeling and a management of light of the same nice sort. A procession of a dozen boldly fore-shortened cows is coming down hill towards you in a dewy landscape, not quite enough finished. The light again is behind and follows along their sides and vertebræ, throwing shadows forward and deep shades in the hollows of the hips. In another line, his sleeping infant with a puppy held in its naïve embrace, at the Academy, Mr. Thayer has one of the most charming things in either show.

The group of members of the Academy, who were invited to take part in this exhibition, has to be foregone, since an Open Letter from New York will positively not hold everything. They show for the most part, it is important to remark, a close connection of their own, from study and travel, with the foreign influences of which it is here a question.

It will be a useful second division of the subject to inquire what the Americanism is from which the new fashion may be thought to have reprehensibly departed. Have we developed something of value which defines our national direction? which Cannot be varied from without treason? If so, it should be found among the older practitioners, at the Academy, the body which peculiarly represents American art and preserves its traditions. Let the exhibition be first examined with reference to its subjects. From a catalogue in which you may have marked the most striking works, perhaps you have derived the impression that the members are not taking part very much. But there are, in fact, forty-four out of eighty-seven Academicians, and twenty-six out of eightyfour associates represented, omitting those engaged in the rival movement. Their contributions are a considerable number of portraits, and a very much larger number of landscapes. In the latter, foreign scenery—the Thames, Brittany, the Isle of Wight — has a fair share of representation. Then, to make a general class composed of everything else, there are large, spirited cattle by James Hart, and small, tame ones by William, dogs by Tait and James Beard, comic owls and rabbits by William H. Beard, a Seer in Israel, in crayon, by Oertel, a dismal attempt at a fairy pool by Hope, a nicely done old lady knitting by Ryder, a capital small school-girl in a pinafore, decidedly German, by Constant Mayer, two honest-looking grownup girls by Lay, a very mediocre workingman’s child preparing his lunch, by Story, and some interiors with figures, good, but of an antiquated sort, by R. W. Weir, brought forth perhaps to hang beside his son, who is a new-comer, of the later school, and of a very different force. There are a few sentimental heads, — one by Julian Scott, with a smooth, warm complexion, small blue eyes, and a coral necklace, quite quaint and pleasing, —one inferior bric-à-brac, and one good flower piece, Lambdin’s.

The best genre things are Magrath’s Irish peasant looking over a flowerfringed wall at a golden harvest, Ehninger’s monk with a loaded donkey, and another showing peasants, in an evening light, with a curious rainbow sky and reflections, washing in a stream of the Pyrenees. Then there is a sufficient representation, in Chapman, Hall, and Cephas G. Thompson, of the feeble, old-fashioned picturesque, surviving from the days of diligences, when a contadino and a pifferaro and a lazzarone were thought to be the summit of all that was desirable to paint.

There are but five —I am keeping for the present to the actually exhibiting members — who can be called American in their subjects. The animals, interiors, domestic traits, Shakespearean heroines, even the Oneida County game probably, of all the rest could have been selected and painted in any other country as well as ours. Even Mr. Perry, who has penetrated so far into the interior as San Francisco, finds nothing more racy of the soil than an old lady telling a child a story in a luxurious parlor. I do not make this lack of “ raciness ” a reproach to anybody, — I am a little tired of it myself, — but I only state the fact. The number will not even include Wordsworth Thompson and Julian Scott in their Revolutionary military pieces. There is nothing to show that they express our national character of that date. The small, uniformed figures are a good opportunity for color, but they could he French, say, of the same date, just as well. In another line of criticism, they are very much without spirit. A pilgrimage to the original battles of Trumbull, at New Haven, would be a stimulating exercise for their authors.

The five are Winslow Homer, J. G. Brown, Eastman Johnson, Guy, and T. A. Wood, who exhibits his ingenious small figure of an old negro, with an aguish expression, and a bed-quilt around his shoulders, pouring out medicine in a teaspoon. They belong to the enumeration in unequal degrees of validity, of course, — Guy and Eastman Johnson the least. I suppose the reading girl and the lazy boy of the former, though he looks like an American boy enough, yawning over his unsawed wood, —and the row of mites of children, of the other, ranged like swallows on a beam over a hay-mow in a barn, helped up, probably, by some good-natured “hired man,” might be found in England at least, also. These children, with their diminutive legs in striped stockings, and all sorts of well-used shoes dangling, are having just the best kind of a time. Even the baby is supported there, not thoroughly understanding the situation, and looks down with a monumental gravity. The question evidently is, supremely contented as they all are, what shall be done next? The leader, the roguish one of nine, with blue sleeves, and a ribbon in her hair, and her round cheek visible only in profile, will decide it in a moment, I know, by plunging down with a wild shriek, and the rest will follow after as best they can. As a picture, the parts are too much cut up; it was necessary, to convey the idea, to give too much to the comparatively vacant space where the hay is; but the figures contain all the qualities, and, in a frame by themselves, would have made a broad and charming piece.

Homer is intensely American in his subjects. He has selected types which belong essentially to us and to no others. He represents us intimately, and is original. He goes first into his field. He does not follow; nor is he himself much followed — the more is the pity. He unites two qualities not often combined: an appreciation of rugged natural character, with poetic refinement. It is not easy to be blinded to his defects. There are plenty of them. He does not know enough about either light or color. I imagine to myself, knowing nothing whatever about it, that he suffers for lack of a thorough technical bringing up. I wish he had studied Plagues of Egypt with Bonnat. He is possessed by his idea and puts upon the canvas, in spite of his materials, the feeling he would convey; but they resist him, they yield sullenly, they do not aid him with their felicities, which, if he had them, would make his work, charming already in its essence, exquisite. He has here five pictures. In the principal a tall, sinewy young mower has paused, looking up, to listen and to follow the flight of a lark. His scythe is held under one arm, his coarse straw hat swings loosely by his side. He is a common young farmer enough, but a good one and a real one, and a type. We have not seen him, but we know him. We know his unpolished laugh and his loud voice calling “ across lots.” He is a fellow who would keep a particularly nice colt for his own driving, and get, by a trade, with a moderate cash balance, a harness and buggy to match, not so very different from city style. He would cherish an opinion that he could hold his own very well with city people. He would not care to go there and enter a store, but he decidedly means to experiment with new ideas on the farm. If it were war time he is a fellow who would make a splendid soldierly corporal, and like nothing better than the adventure. Shown in the restrained light to which this artist is so partial, detached against a bosk of trees in the middle distance, the figure has a serious and noble air. A touch or two of light catches on the rings of the scythe snath. Overhead is a cool, silvery sky with cirrus clouds. It is not of the usual dreamy sort, but accurately studied, and with a kind of definite poetry in it, which I should count as one of Mr. Homer’s general traits.

Another picture shows a couple of mountain guides, each with a distinct flavor of the American, and no other, scenery about him. One is short, old, and grizzled; the other young, tall, majestic, almost statuesque. The talent is in finding this native dignity, in discerning in a 'Bijah of the Adirondacks something allied to the Apollo and the Germanious, to the core of Greek art and great art of all times. They are painted against broad planes of mountains, sloping with the grateful unbroken lines for which Mr. Homer has so distinct a liking in the other mountain piece, and in the background of the one in which two small negroes and a white boy, the worst of the lot, are enjoying a water-melon, and shouting back defiance at the farmer from whom it was stolen. There is a great out-of-doors feeling in the shapes, but not in the light of them all. The color, too, which is for the most part gray and harmonious, is always apt to have random harshnesses in it, as the crude red tree on the edge of the hill with the guides, and a scarlet skirt in the centre of the other. The first is simply disagreeable, but has plenty in the foreground to keep it company. The latter is isolated, and has hardly more connection with anything else in the picture than if it were a large wafer pasted on.

J. G. Brown’s American piece, though the subject is in a British possession, is a crew of Grand Menan fishermen pulling for the shore in a broad sunshine that renders their faces coppery, and the buoyant sea, in which the deep-laden boat rides heavily, green and crystalline. Each man has a distinct character. By character I do not mean simply that this man has a face different from his neighbor, but that this is George Thompson and this Rufus Warner. You could call them by name. The picture is hard, by reason of this studious finish, which is besides not so much called for in the kind of subject, since such a tossing boatload on a friendly sea is a pleasant thing in itself, without too much individualizing. But it is an original work worthy of respect. His other, a simple figure of a girl in white muslin walking by the sea, presents a type, blonde, slender, restrained, thoughtful rather than coquettish, which one would set down pretty unhesitatingly as American of New England. The atmosphere closes in over the vanishing beach behind her. The horizon is at the height of her waist, and the pleasing head is painted against a bright spot in the cool gray sky. There is nothing dashing in the work of this artist. You do not forget the model, but the taste in its selection and the conscientiousness and absence of ostentation with which it is wrought out are very agreeable.

If the inquiry after Americanism be widened to include the whole exhibition, the number of interesting works will be much increased, so that, with the exceptions already made, you are inclined to believe that ability is almost in the inverse ratio of connection with the ruling powers. The range of subjects we are in search of, however, is extended by but a single addition, Gilbert Gaul’s Rainy Day in the Garret. George Inness, Jr., has large cattle, bolder in treatment and mellower in color than Hart’s, set into landscapes in his father’s attractive manner; Bispham, some conventional, geography tigers; Sword, some better dogs than Tait’s; Miss Jacobs and Miss Brownscombe, well imagined figures — the children of the latter the best — of some size; Brundegee, Bickford, Reinhart, Kappes, figures of smaller size, each with its special merits; Mrs. Dillon, in 219 and 228, good flowers with little reflections of the windows from which they were lighted mirrored on the convexity of the vases, as in some of the still-life etchings of Jacquernart; and Harnett, some representations of vulgar still-life objects, counterfeit hills, and so on, of surprising fidelity.

It belongs to the foreign school, but I will note, in passing, an interior by Piquet, with portrait figures on a scale which makes it genre. I said a word in favor of the style in my water-color letter, and yet I hope not to be accused of triviality. What is more legitimate ? Is not the home one of the foremost objects of modern life? and look at the time and money given to its adornment! It is worthy, if not of its epics, at least of its sonnets. And its inhabitants, — why should they not be painted at length in the surroundings which make a part of them, in which they are natural, instead of always in the strange studio lights?

It would not be a calamity if there were no studios for a time, and artists had to go about from house to house like journeymen tinkers, with their easels under their arms, until some of the charming apartments, with their rugs and blue crockery, and the interesting people who live in them are properly celebrated. Walter Palmer has a very nice room, with a mysterious quality in the permeation of the light from the farther end over a complication of rich objects, and a single figure in front.

But as I was going on to say, Gilbert Gaul’s Rainy Day in a Garret is the only thing that can be added to the list. Children elsewhere, no doubt, masquerade in the garments of their elders, but surely not in such a garret, with such a hair-leather trunk, such a bandbox covered with blue and mauve paper in a large pattern, such a map and old hat and string of onions on the wall, and such a barrel and half - empty bag of seed-corn in the corner. The boy has a long-tailed coat and blue cotton umbrella, and a hat on the back of his head that would envelop him to the shoulders if it were allowed to. The girl — they are aged ten or eleven — wears a great bonnet of a remote period, with the large bows tied under her chin, and a mature shawl trailing over her short dress to the floor. In its make-up, in its light and shade, the picture is neither good nor bad, — simply neutral. Its author is young, not long out of his pupilage, which has been entirely on this side of the water. He seems to me to show much promise in a straightforward, unmorbid field, which there is room for a great deal of without crowding the purveyors of eccentricities. He has the story-telling talent, a genuine humor, and no mean facility of execution. But there is more. The flicker of a gentle poetic sentiment is detected in the whole. The girl’s face, surrounded by its preposterous trumpery, is charming. The boy laughs, but she is pensive, catching for the moment, perhaps, one knows not what premonition of a coming destiny. To gratify, too, an evident bias towards harmonious color, slight sacrifices of probability may be noted, as in the introduction of a warm crimson and goldbordered shawl, the Curaçoa bottle, and the blue and white ginger jar, which would not occur in such a garret.

It is evident from this narrowing down that the Americanism does not consist largely in the selection of peculiarly national subjects. In what, then, is the secret, for it is certain that one recognizes at sight numerous things as American? It is, it seems to me, in efforts at imitation by the most obvious means, which are largely inadequate ; a lack of appreciation of the decorative capacities of colors, even while they depict the objects; and in a thinness and smoothness of finish, in deference to patrons who are too apt to admire the imitations alone, and have only a small conception of the purely artistic qualities. Americanism of the old school in art, in short, it is submitted, is rather a form of weakness than an indigenous style of expression.

The smooth finish at its very best is seen in Guy’s reading girl, and in such pieces as Sandford Gifford’s mellow sunsets. There is no suggestion of paint. Only the threads of the canvas, when you approach, seem to spread like a film between you and the actual scene. Far more common is a conventionalism like that of Cropsey and Caislear,—foliage rendered by a drawing-book trick and yet not generalized. There is usually a lake in the centre of the picture, surrounded by home-made crags, and with a blasted pine-tree thrown out against it from the foreground. The style of McEntee, the poet of the late sad autumn, seems to me the happy ideal. It is simple and right; he neither obtrudes his materials nor discredits them. The direct accosting of nature in landscape is seen again in the careful, admirable forest interiors of Fitch and Hetzel, and in T. A. Richards. The last has a landscape of the unrelieved green of nature, —the hue it takes, if you have ever seen it, through the camera. Done by a tyro it would have set your teeth on edge,-the plain fields of grass and the cold gray sky without a spot of blue in it, — but it is saved here, although I would not buy it, by a certain nice feeling in its accuracy of rendition. Contrast with it and with the clear coldness of David Johnson the landscapes of Magrath, Earnest Parton, and Bolton Jones of Baltimore. Such a one as the No, 361 of the last affects you somehow as if the air were full of lilies and chiming bells on a summer morning.

If my letter were not a search for tendencies rather than an attempted account of things in their order of merit, I should not have to pass here again, with so bare a mention, Nicoll’s closing in of navigation on the Hudson, in which there is a forlorn melancholy, Quartley’s charming marine, and Hartley’s statue of Whirlwind,— who comes bearing down upon you with knitted brows, the lithe body twisted upon the hips, the drapery blown back in sharp curves, with immense spirit, — and much beside with none at all.

As a conclusion of the review of the two displays one cannot fail to recognize, without allowing much originality yet to the new contributions, the arrival of a period of much more thorough preparation and knowledge than has ever hitherto prevailed. It must result in no long time in the abolition of a double standard of criticism, which has had to have its tender side for a weak and struggling art, and in a production of pictures on our own side of the water able to compete with the foreign importations on equal terms. As to subjects, what ought to be demanded of the artist is to obtain the greatest possible power of execution, and to keep his sensibility open to all impressions of beauty, blow from what quarter they will. He is our delegate to expound the universe in this particular branch. If he can find beautiful impressions here, so much the better, and it is a patriotic thing to do. If what he can learn at Munich — not forgetting Paris — enables him to render them freely and joyously instead of lamely and with misgivings, then by all means

Raymond Westbrook.