International studio (21.1903/1904(1904))

dened with much Imagination, especially in the use
which they make of the hgure. I suppose that
Zc&g by Henry Oiiver Walker, will be
reckoned, according to Studio parlance, as an ideal
work, because classical draperies are introduced,
and one of the Hgures is nude and has wings, and
both hgures are posed according to academical tra-
ditions. For in this meagre understanding of the
term, what is not real, but conventionally symbolic,
is considered to be ideal. But before a picture can
approach to this last dignity it must surely possess
something rnore, -—- a power to kindle our imagina-
tion, to make us lose sight of the means in the enjoy-
ment of the end, to travel beyond the facts toward
the infinity of speculation. That Walker's picture
will do this for any one, I doubt. As for niyself,
at any rate, it holds me rnerely to an examination
of the hgures, and suggests the suspicion that the
painter also, whatever may have hred his imagina-
tion at the Start, became, as he worked on, simply
preoccupied with his rnodels. The preoccupation,
moreover, is rather dry and precise, over-concerned
with the facts of the rnodel and too little with its
Suggestion for painter-like qualities of expression.
It is in this respect that the-hgure pictures, ^4 AYw
and <2^7 by John W. Alexander, are of
so much rnore account. In the gesture of the one
girl as she caresses the hower with her hnger-tips,
and in that of the other as she kneels reading a
book at the window-sill; in the abstract grace of
the lineal composition, and in the charrn of the
color scherne, with its delicate web of values under
the inHuence of the pale lighting; in the joy which
the painter has taken in these abstract appeals to
our own abstract sense of beauty, there is rnore
ideal Suggestion than in the picture abpve referred
to. It is true we are not invited to rise to an idea
of any elevation, but, at least, are made partakers
of those ideas clustering close to earth with which,
after all, the painter must Start, if he desire to lift
our imagination above thern. It is only through
the abstract beauty of the painter-like qualities of

his craft that he can make it interpret his higher
ideas.
But the craft of figure-painting in this country will
scarcely be encouraged in a serious direction by
awarding a prize to such apicture as H. M. Walcott's
Pleasant in color, skilfully composed,
and gracious in feeling though it is, this group of
children, all having the sarne type of face, is only a
fuller edition of the illustrations of child-life which
have been justly populär of late in the magazines;
but the real problems of figure-painting it scarcely
touches. Yet at least in its modest way it is a quite
sincere work, which we may not feel to be the case
with Edmund C. Tarbell's As the
latter's rnotive is limited to the artistic possibilities
presented by a girl's Hgure seated in a Studio, one
may not be too exacting in wishing that rnore sin-
cerity had been displayed in the actual techniques of
the problem. As it is, the picture will strike rnany
as unwarrantably futile.
Now this cannot be said of Charles C. Curran's
picture of a lady in white, Standing among lilies,
which he calls ^4
We may find a certain tinge of sentimentality in the
title, i'nfusing also the actual representation, but
must adrnit that the painter part of the matter, the
placing of the Hgure and Howers in a clear, cool
hght, and the study of its direct and reflected action
upon the tones of color, has been very thoroughly and
successfully accomplished. It is right good painter's
stuff, even if we find the sentiment a little too sweet
to our taste. Painter-like also, in the way it has
been seen and rendered, is Corwin Knapp Linson's
^4/%77;w/; ,* a lady in rose-colored gown, and a
child with a pink sunbonnet, seated at a table that
gleams with white cioth and blue and white china;
the group being kept in cool light against the
warrnth which permeates the greens of the garden.
We feel the scene as the painter himself feit it; a
patterning of bright spots of color, made rnore inter-
esting by the contrasts of lighting, and a further
contrast of relative degrees of roundness and Hatness

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