Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1905 (Heft 9))

conflict which ended in the downfall of the Philadelphia Salon, and the
resignation from the society of some of its oldest and most valued members,
she never shrank from the conflict, vulgarly offensive and abusive as were
the attacks, and much as she disliked anything that savored in the slightest
of notoriety or vulgar contention. And when Stirling, Redfleld, Bullock,
and others felt that no longer, with self-respect, could they remain members
of the society for which they had sacrificed much and labored long, her studio
became the recognized rendezvous in Philadelphia of the pictorial movement.
In the summer of 1901 Miss Watson married Martin Schütze, Ph.D.,
a man of distinguished literary ability and charming personality. Since she
has resided in Chicago, where Dr. Schütze holds an important position in the
University, and where she has opened a studio. She is now one of the lead-
ing spirits among the pictorial workers of the middle west.
Mrs. Schütze was elected to the “ Linked Ring ” in 1902. She is a
Fellow of the Photo-Secession, of which she is one of the founders. She is
one of the staunchest and sincerest upholders of the pictorial movement in
America—ever ready to do battle in its cause. In appearance Mrs. Schütze
is a little above the average height, slight of figure, rather pale, with earnest,
searching, expressive eyes that I recall as of violet hue. She is quick and
nervous of motion, reserved and self-reliant in bearing, and in speech quiet,
thoughtful, and to the point. Her intellectual life is broad and includes her
Art, not art her life. It is the mystery of life; its purpose; its significance;
its noblest possibilities; its aspirations toward the infinite, through which
she measures literature and art. Her mind, which is of distinctly analytic
cast, is tirelessly active. In matters of taste she leans toward the reserved,
the subtle, the spirituelle. Her broad, human sympathy makes her see in
the work of others not only the results, on which alone its artistic worth
must be judged, but the thought and labor expended in its production.
Counterbalancing this is a fine, keen sense of humor that lends snap and
sparkle to conversation and correspondence. She once wrote me, when an
exhibition of mine in Philadelphia was being made the subject of considerable
and picturesque criticism, that she had instructed the custodian of the
exhibition-rooms that he must stand up for the show and that his " con-
servative and safe reply was: ' Oh, yes; I’ll help him out, Ma’am.'" And
he did — he packed and expressed the prints later.
Mrs. Schütze’swork shows poetic appreciation of a high order, and a
great sympathy with the more delicate beauty of nature. She deeply loves
nature, but seems to endeavor less to express what it seems than what it means.
In common with all who endeavor to draw the spirit of beauty from behind the
veil of the seeming, she at times is oppressed with the sense of the inadequacy
of human effort. Through nearly all of her work I feel that same restless
groping after something still beyond; that tireless spirit of analysis that
never is satisfied: that "troubled search”
"Behind the ceaseless, traceless shift of things.”
This is characteristic of that school of which Mrs. Schütze is one of the
leading exponents, and to which belong the refined, intellectual Edmund

25