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

is beautifully felt and melts away into the dark most enjoyably, but I fail to
account for the cloud'slighting as of the same hour. This artist’sportraits
are, as was to be expected, finer than ever, though one is a little chary of
saying that when one remembers the Lenbach of an earlier year. Personally
I much prefer the Rodin version we had a year or two back. The present
one, No. 132, does not so fully convey the sense of the essential genius of
the great sculptor; it is not so restful; the pose generally and the turned-
back gaze make it seem a striving after a feeling of force and strength that
is not fully reached. One thinks more of the attitude than of the man, but
the Le Penseur statue is so finely treated that this criticism is perhaps not
hypercriticism. The William A. Chase portrait, No. 129, is simply magnifi-
cent; nothing but the most unstinted praise is its due. Pose, color, sense of
personality, all are quite great, and it is enough in itself to make any ex-
hibition showing it a marked one. The painter, in No. 130, Theobald
Chartran, stands excellently well, but the spot of light given by the boot sur-
face is discomposing to me and worries my eye away from the fine lines and
feeling of the picture. The Richard Strauss, No. 125, is evidently a care-
fully worked out symbolic version. I would have preferred another treat-
ment, for like though it certainly is, it is too little important in that aspect
to have any great value as a portrait. My own seeing of the great composer
when conducting or accompanying at the piano gave him to me as a much
more cheerful person; and when in the throes of composing, say such a
tremen-thing as his Ein Heldenleben, I should not believe him to be fond
of so " forcing the note ” as this study gives him out to be doing. I sup-
pose the fiame-like high lights around the head are to symbolize the musical
emanations from his tireless brain. How clever, almost too clever, it all is,
and how infinitely I for one would prefer the treatment of the Chase or the
Lenbach, or the first Rodin, three superb and unquestionable masterpieces !
This may seem to have left out of the question the other masterpiece shown
at this Salon, the portrait of our adored painter, George Frederick Watts,
No. 121; but this seems so exceptionally able and personal a presentation
of him as to impress me as belonging to a permanent public gallery, and I
would greatly like to see it so acquired here. The expression, too, is so
much more cheerful, human, almost humorous, than any other portrait I
have ever seen of the great man as to very greatly enhance its value. The
solidity of the thing is so amazing; at first it strikes one as a trifle hard, maybe,
but this feeling soon merges into a sense of the actuality, the vitality of
the kindly old genius. The Understudy, No. 113, is the most searchingly
fine thing of the kind he has given us, the finest in line, in modeling, and
in suggestion of flesh; the contours, the weight of the poise of the body, are
admirable in the extreme. It is, moreover, an eminently comfortable nude
study, full of dignified reticence, and that is very much more than can be
said of most studies in the nude, whether painted or made by photography.
The young leader — and he fully merits the title — Mr. Coburn, has
shown the most astonishing advance in work I can remember, and this not
only relatively to his youth and consequent paucity of experience, but,per se,

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