International studio (15.1901/1902(1902))

American Studio Talk

nately they are both well represented in this exhibi-
tion, and it is not to such pictures as the former’s
A Group of Oaks and The Cornfield that I allude,
but to his Spring Woods, which is pleasant rather
than convincing and for the reason, I believe, that
it is poor in structure. In the same way with Bruce
Crane : his Signs of Spring, which won the Webb
Prize in 1897, owes a great deal of its spiritual
beauty to the exceeding truthfulness of the drawing,
and it was a pleasure to see him returning to this
sterling manner of study in the recently painted
The Years Wane. For between these two had
appeared several pictures with little trace of exact-
ing study, formless and structureless, among which
I cannot feel it an injustice to reckon The Fisher-
man''s Hut, shown here. Neither in the sky,
ground, nor in the hut itself is the drawing satis-
factory, and the whole picture protests the surface
of the canvas. Charles Melville Dewey, also, in his
recent work seems to lay himself open to a similar
charge. For example, The Evening Star, Dulver-
ton, England, does not suggest that the painter has
made any particular effort to comprehend his sub-
ject ; that, while his feeling in front of the scene
may have been sincere enough, he has been satis-
fied to try and express what he felt, without any
serious effort to express the facts by which presum-
ably the sentiment was aroused, and I find this
tendency appearing more or less in all these pic-
tures by Mr. Dewey; and if the criticism is well
founded, it amounts to this : that, instead of giving
us his impression of the scene, he is really giving
us an impression of the impression itself— a very
different thing ; a twice diluted draught, in which
but a faint suggestion survives of the fragrance and
sparkle of the original.

It is worth while to raise this point, for there is
more than a little tendency in the teaching of our
schools to ignore the necessity of drawing. The
students are taught to see the landscape as a pattern
of form, of values, or of colors ; to correlate the
values and tones ; to do everything, in fact, except
to study the structure and to learn to draw the
forms. It is a perilously superficial kind of teach-
ing that flatters the student with the notion that it
is all very easy and pleasant, substituting for honest
study a slight, superficial plausibility, and coaxing
him into the fool’s dream, that he can begin where
such artists as George Inness and Alexander Wyant
left off!

On the other hand, what evidence of exhaustive
study there is in Alexander Harrison’s Le Cre
pusciile, owned by the St. Louis Museum of Fine

Arts, and offering a perpetual object lesson of the
noble results of true nature-study to succeeding
generations of students ! How exhaustively the
movement and form of the water have been com-
prehended, and the subtle tones of the hollows of
the waves, resulting from direct and reflected light!
We talk of the foam upon the wave as “creamy,”
“curdling,” and so forth, as if it were so much
opaque, clogged liquid, whereas it is blue water-
aerated, lifted, and loosened by the inflow of the
air; and this phenomenon, so often overlooked,
Mr. Harrison’s penetration has recorded. It is
what one may call a most scholarly picture, which
is at once its title to respect and the source, per-
haps, of its lack of emotional expression, the perfec-
tion of style having been for its author justification
enough. In Lunar Mists and Misty Morning, on
the other hand, the ripe knowledge and skill are
entirely at the service of the artist’s impression of
the moment, and the result is more completely per-
sonal and expressive. Something of the same
difference between less and more of spontaneity is
noticeable in the two marines of Charles H. Wood-
bury. There is more conscious effort in the North-
west Wind, where the tide is hurrying up between
rocks in broken masses of sunlit water, than in the
Maine Coast, in which a great slide of green-blue
water, met by a rock, throws up a burst of spray,
and recoils in a curving flood. The former must
have been studied from the rocks, the latter proba-
bly from a boat. Mr. Woodbury’s passion for the
sea includes the feel of it under him even more
than the sight of it before him, and there is just
this difference between the two pictures. Another
marine which excites more than a passing approval
is A Northwester in Gloucester Harbor, by F. K.
M. Rehn. I must confess to a feeling that some
of this painter’s sea pieces suggest rather that he
has found a convenient way of doing it than that
he feels very strongly what he is trying to do. But
with this picture it is otherwise. In the brisk and
colorful movement of the water a breezy enjoyment
of the scene has been realized which is quite con-
tagious. A similar genuine enthusiasm appears in
a Marine by Charles Hopkinson, expressed also in
a charmingly individual way. George H. Bogert’s
Sea and Rain is a picture that needs a good deal
of light. It was excellently hung at Buffalo ; and
though I have seen it many times, I never realized
before what beautiful colors —blues and grays and
sooty blacks — are veiled in its web of murkiness.
There is fine color also in his Autumn Sunset, with
its amber, creamy sky and rich brown trees and

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