Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1904 (Heft 7))

THE SOLITARY HORSEMAN.

WE ALL have seen a solitary horseman, like the one
in the Hofmeister picture, riding slowly along the
highway through a landscape classic in composition,
the gaunt form of trees weirdly outlined against a sky
of flying clouds that animate the silence and mystery
of the scene. Whither is he riding? We do not
know. The great highway stretches far and very far
into the infinite distance, and he passes along wrapt
in deep thought. He follows his natural impulses, is
happy in his own way and fashions his paradise of the passing hours. Mys-
terious blue horizons beckon him and flee. He watches the sun rise over
lonely forests and is intimate with the moon that smiles over sleeping cities.
He is the man who seeks and might well stand for a symbol of the
whole photographic movement, and in particular of the Secessionists, that
class of eager workers who restlessly search for new pictorial possibilities.
They are also solitary horsemen, treated with indifference as they are for
the present by the profession and denounced by the majority of artists.
Yet they cheerfully ride along, trilling their strange little song of a new art.
They are no adherents of any special esthetic creed; they do not say to the
profession, “You are old-fashioned — become modern like us.” They simply
say, “You are manufacturers; we wish to be artists.” That is the whole
contention, commercialism or art; around this revolves the movement
inaugurated by the Secessionists. They wander toward some ideal and
gladly forego the ordinary pleasures of life to journey toward some new
and wider horizon of art.
The artist, whose gaze is at all times turned inward, seems to be the
true personification of the solitary horseman. He is always ready to saddle
his horse and leave behind him the great, curious city with its many
superstitions, its grotesque rivalries of castes and classes and set out on
another journey along highways swept by wintry rains or burned by the
summer sun. Some halt at a cozy wayside inn, sit comfortably down to
sup and loudly brag about themselves. Others lie down near the ditch in
the noonday sun and their fancies build a ladder up into the blue sky where
they meet spirits with whom they spend hours in sweet converse. While
others, with empty stomach, unmindful of time or weather, persistently ride
on, searching at every turn of the road for the highway that leads to some
Castilian fountain if not to the Parnassian heights. They are satisfied if
they tread the open road and if the winds of heaven blow upon them.
To Hofmeisters' hero there clings the dust of this great highway. He
has traveled far and will go still farther. He is roaming the earth, he
can abide nowhere. The wind passes, the birds fly, the great horizons call
him and he must go, continue his journey on and ever on, between the
mountains and along the plains, past thorp and grange and town, through
forests and mysterious places, on and ever on, he knows not whither, save


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