International studio (14.1901)

American Studio Talk

The picture exhibition

AT THE PAN-AMERICAN EX-
POSITION. BY CHARLES H.
CAFFIN.

In the picture exhibition at the Pan-American
there is very slight representation of the “ Pan.”
One small room is filled with Canadian examples
and there are a few canvases by the Peru-Parisian,
Albert Lynch; otherwise the exhibition is entirely
of American Art.

It has been arranged with the particular intention
of illustrating the development of our native art
since 1875 ; the date which approximately marks
the first evidences of European influence. Twenty
years earlier, William Morris Hunt had returned
from abroad and established himself in Boston,
where he continued to urge the dignity of the
Fontainebleau-Barbizon pictures, and to teach a
wider and more enlightened view of art and that
the subject is of less concern than the manner of
its presentment. In the years that followed, students
went to Europe in greater numbers, and by 1875
many had come back and began in turn to make
their influence felt. The Art Students’ League was
organized, and three years later the Society of Ameri-
can Artists, while the schools all over the country
quickened into dissatisfaction with their own results
as compared with the foreign art exhibited at the
Centennial Exposition of 1876, began to be leavened
by the new impulse. In the quarter of a century
which has elapsed since then, the schools and a
large majority of our painters have put themselves
abreast of the motives and methods of European
art. It is a brief growth of very extraordinary
development.

A censorious critic, especially if he be a foreigner,
may object to the use of the word “ native ” in the
previous paragraph, as applied to American art.
Certainly, until the recent Exposition in Paris he
would have said that he was unaware of the exist-
ence of any American art; that, no doubt, there
were American painters in Paris, London, and else-
where, but that, for the most part, they seemed to
identify themselves with the influences around them
and represented nothing American, unless it were a
quickness and voracity of assimilation. The ex-
position of last year, however, demonstrated to the
foreigner that there is a considerable body of painters
on this side of the water also ; and in that sense, at
least, the term “native ” is justifiable, — art has its
roots in this country and provision for development.
Whether this native plant have characteristics dis-

tinctively American is another matter. The influ-
ences affecting it have been eclectic, mostly French,
as was natural, since Paris is the modern conserva-
tory of artistic methods. The direction, too, of its
growth, the painter-way of regarding a subject, is
largely French. But the fruit of this technique and
motive— is it, also, French in flavor? To a certain
extent, yes; but, unquestionably, not in the gross.

Let the exhibition speak. Its galleries on the
right as you enter the building are devoted to the
pictures by painters living abroad, and among these
you will find evidences of French feeling in choice
and treatment of subject. But even here the im-
pression is not an overpowering one. On the other
hand, in the galleries containing the work of resi-
dent Americans it obtains only in a few spots. In
fact, a general summary is this, that the best of our
painters abroad preserve their individuality, and
that a much larger number at home, partly due to
their separation from direct contact with European
thought, or the lack of it, are in no sense plagiarists.

Turn, for example, to the work of George de
Forest Brush. He was a pupil of GAome. One
may, perhaps, detect some savor of the master’s
influence in the early work, The Sculptor and the
King, but will seek it fruitlessly in the rich and elo-
quent color and in the deep humanness of the
Mother and Child, owned by the Boston Museum
of Fine Arts. It has, however, a quality far higher
than any derived from hand or heart, — a serene
elevation, the impress of a man, raised head and
shoulders above the average, who comprehends art
in its biggest significance, as the product and ex-
pression of noble ideals. Another example is Silence
Broken, — an Indian in a canoe, and a wild goose
overhead that has just burst from the dense back-
ground of foliage. A little picture, but what an
immensity of stillness and solitude ! The Indian is
kneeling as he plies the paddle, and looks up, in
nowise startled, but with a grand composure that
seems a part of the elemental suggestion of the
scene. It is the work of an intense imagination,
and of a mind able to fathom the full significance
of its conception ; as far removed as possible from
the ordinary studies of the Indian, being indeed a
re-creation of the life that looms out of the solemn'
spaciousness and trackless mystery of the past.

A vision as penetrating, but fastened on the pres-
ent, belongs to Dwight W. Tryon, whose pictures
received such scant courtesy from the jury at the
Paris Exposition, probably because they were not
figure-subjects. And yet these landscapes exhibit
technical qualities quite extraordinary. The struc-

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