DOI article:
On the Elongation of Form [unsigned text]
DOI Page / Citation link: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.30573#0038
A manually made transcription or edition is also available for this page. Please change to the tab "transrciption" or "edition."
ancient queens. ” Already the American-born children of emigrants of the
very lowest class show certain traits of refinement that one would seek in vain
in their parents. It is our severe, disagreeable, ever-changing climate which
seems to call forth the elongation of limbs and gradually remodels the buxom
German maid of one generation into a tall, slender, American girl of the next.
The beauty of our American women has not been worshipped half
enough by our artists. They think only of clever brush-work, and would
laugh at making such anthropometrical studies as Giotto,Ghiberti, Ghirlandajo,
and Pietro della Francesca made in their time.
The southern and western women, the heroines of Bret Harte and
Cable, have not yet made their debuts in our art-exhibits, much less the
Mona Lisas of Murray Hill or the Back Bay. Thomas Dewing is the
only American painter who has succeeded — Whistler, Sargent, Alexander
have done it accidentally at times—in giving us pictures of women that
might stand for the ideal American type. With him elongation of form
becomes enervation, almost attenuation of form. He understands the
Hellenic spirit and Florentine temper in finishing human figures, but it is
too much infused with the melancholia of modern times to depict them in
clear outlines with marble-like profiles and bronze-like limbs. Their attitudes
are simplicity itself, but offer that " succession of mute cadences ” in which
abides the secret of supreme art. It seems that his emblematical figures of
womanhood are both present and yet far away. He does not give us
merely the physical charms of these languid descendants of the Puritans, but
succeeds in making them express psychological suggestions of their inner
life, a vague estheticism with a vague mixture of the Parisian demi-monde,
an element that, strange to say, can often be found in the remotest New
England villages. Their faces are exquisite in the revery, the dreamy delicacy
they express, they are veritable Decamerons of twentieth-century love, and
perhaps too much so.
Dewing’swomen all seem to live in a pre-Raphaelite atmosphere, in
mysterious gardens on wide lonesome lawns, or in spacious empty interiors
with something old Italian about them. And there they sit and stand, and
dream or play the lute, sometimes two together, sometimes three, but mostly
alone, and they look as if they were as far removed from our world as was
Boccaccio’s party from the pestilence. And the average public, no doubt,
wonder why he presents women in this peculiar fashion, doing nothing but
assuming picturesque attitudes in the rosy dawn or when the mists of evening
rise upon some desolate lawn.
He has merely solved once more the problem of beauty, which is, at
all times, approximately the same, and for which there exists — at least for the
depiction of women — only one supreme standard. We may prefer at times
the gladiator-like proportions of the Milesian Venus, the robust beauties of
Rubens and the stately dames of a Titian or Tintoretto, but the more we
come to understand what form really is — that it is not merely for the senses,
but that it may become expressive to the spirit—the better we will like this
peculiar elongation of form. We will find that the peevish-looking angels
34
very lowest class show certain traits of refinement that one would seek in vain
in their parents. It is our severe, disagreeable, ever-changing climate which
seems to call forth the elongation of limbs and gradually remodels the buxom
German maid of one generation into a tall, slender, American girl of the next.
The beauty of our American women has not been worshipped half
enough by our artists. They think only of clever brush-work, and would
laugh at making such anthropometrical studies as Giotto,Ghiberti, Ghirlandajo,
and Pietro della Francesca made in their time.
The southern and western women, the heroines of Bret Harte and
Cable, have not yet made their debuts in our art-exhibits, much less the
Mona Lisas of Murray Hill or the Back Bay. Thomas Dewing is the
only American painter who has succeeded — Whistler, Sargent, Alexander
have done it accidentally at times—in giving us pictures of women that
might stand for the ideal American type. With him elongation of form
becomes enervation, almost attenuation of form. He understands the
Hellenic spirit and Florentine temper in finishing human figures, but it is
too much infused with the melancholia of modern times to depict them in
clear outlines with marble-like profiles and bronze-like limbs. Their attitudes
are simplicity itself, but offer that " succession of mute cadences ” in which
abides the secret of supreme art. It seems that his emblematical figures of
womanhood are both present and yet far away. He does not give us
merely the physical charms of these languid descendants of the Puritans, but
succeeds in making them express psychological suggestions of their inner
life, a vague estheticism with a vague mixture of the Parisian demi-monde,
an element that, strange to say, can often be found in the remotest New
England villages. Their faces are exquisite in the revery, the dreamy delicacy
they express, they are veritable Decamerons of twentieth-century love, and
perhaps too much so.
Dewing’swomen all seem to live in a pre-Raphaelite atmosphere, in
mysterious gardens on wide lonesome lawns, or in spacious empty interiors
with something old Italian about them. And there they sit and stand, and
dream or play the lute, sometimes two together, sometimes three, but mostly
alone, and they look as if they were as far removed from our world as was
Boccaccio’s party from the pestilence. And the average public, no doubt,
wonder why he presents women in this peculiar fashion, doing nothing but
assuming picturesque attitudes in the rosy dawn or when the mists of evening
rise upon some desolate lawn.
He has merely solved once more the problem of beauty, which is, at
all times, approximately the same, and for which there exists — at least for the
depiction of women — only one supreme standard. We may prefer at times
the gladiator-like proportions of the Milesian Venus, the robust beauties of
Rubens and the stately dames of a Titian or Tintoretto, but the more we
come to understand what form really is — that it is not merely for the senses,
but that it may become expressive to the spirit—the better we will like this
peculiar elongation of form. We will find that the peevish-looking angels
34
