DOI issue:
No. 82 (December, 1903)
DOI article:American studio-talk
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.26230#0216
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CHALK STUDY BY ROBERT BLUM
with an intimate feeling for their peculiar possi-
bilities of expression, and with an extraordinary
capacity for making thern pliable to bis own
requirements.
He was one of those men who, by the nature of
their temperament, must be practically seif-taught.
Such direct training as he received was gained hrst
of aH in a iithographic estabiishment, then in the
McMicken Art Schoo] of Design in Cincinnati, and
later, during a stay of nine months, in the Pennsyl-
vania Academy of Fine Arts. Those experiences
disciplined him in the precise study of the human
hgure; they fortunately did not continue long
enough to interfere with the freshly personal way in
which he was bent on seeing the world around him.
The latter is a capacity which no school can give,
but which, except in cases of very strong individu-
ality, it may easily distort or smother. And yet this
capacity of seeing for himself is the ßrst essential of
the artist, at once the rarest and most vital. Pri-
marily the fact that he shall see for himself is of
even more iniportance than how he sees. For this
latter will necessarily undergo modifications and
changes, conforming itself surely and gradually to
his ripening faculties, and always in the direction of
a fuller expression of the truth as he sees it. But
the element in him, which rnakes him find the truth,
and which rnakes the truth, so found, worth hnding,
is that radical capacity he has to see for himself,
which is rooted deep in individuality and sincerity.
clxxxiii
CHALK STUDY BY ROBERT BLUM
with an intimate feeling for their peculiar possi-
bilities of expression, and with an extraordinary
capacity for making thern pliable to bis own
requirements.
He was one of those men who, by the nature of
their temperament, must be practically seif-taught.
Such direct training as he received was gained hrst
of aH in a iithographic estabiishment, then in the
McMicken Art Schoo] of Design in Cincinnati, and
later, during a stay of nine months, in the Pennsyl-
vania Academy of Fine Arts. Those experiences
disciplined him in the precise study of the human
hgure; they fortunately did not continue long
enough to interfere with the freshly personal way in
which he was bent on seeing the world around him.
The latter is a capacity which no school can give,
but which, except in cases of very strong individu-
ality, it may easily distort or smother. And yet this
capacity of seeing for himself is the ßrst essential of
the artist, at once the rarest and most vital. Pri-
marily the fact that he shall see for himself is of
even more iniportance than how he sees. For this
latter will necessarily undergo modifications and
changes, conforming itself surely and gradually to
his ripening faculties, and always in the direction of
a fuller expression of the truth as he sees it. But
the element in him, which rnakes him find the truth,
and which rnakes the truth, so found, worth hnding,
is that radical capacity he has to see for himself,
which is rooted deep in individuality and sincerity.
clxxxiii