International studio (22.1904)

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THE WEAVER, CANADA
knew the names was a challenge. It was certain
to exclude all that wide range of mediocre work
which at a water-color exhibition, more than at any
other, swarms, because for so many years water-
coior was looked upon as the refuge of those
unequal to the task and the training of oii. But
this is a small matter compared with the more im-
portant fact that the exhibition falis at a moment
of development and advance. It represents, as no
other recent exhibition has, the final triumph of the
growing school which deals with water-color exactly
as it deals with oil, treating the medium employed
not as one different from oil, but as possessing, ex-
actly like oil, simply the value of service through a
vehicle by which color is rendered permanent, con.-
tinuous, and capable of manipulation.
As long as oil paints were handled with a view to
solid color, and water-color with a view to washes,
it was inevitable that a wide range of effects should
be closed to the latter, which was open to the
former. The Continental school of water-colorists
never accepted this view. Neither did Turner.
Speaking broadly, however, twenty years ago, when

BY EMMA LAMBERT COOPER

Mr. Blackburn came over to this country with Eng-
lish water-colors, — of which a distinguished critic,
Mr. W. C. Brownell, wittily said that, instead of bring-
ing the water-colors over to show Americans how
to paint water-colors, he ought to have brought the
artists who painted them, in order to learn how to
use water-color,—Mr. Blackburn discovered, as
so many who come with the English insular tradi-
tion to this country, that in our art we are learning
from France rather than from England. The use
of gouache was already thoroughly established,
though the conventional type in water-color was
still the one talked about in American notices and
by American critics ten years ago as " legitimate."
From ten to fifteen years ago there was a new and
sudden impulse in this direction given by Mauve
and other artists of the low countries, where the
tradition in water-color rather as pigment, and not
as wash, has been preserved. Nowhere and by any
one is it exclusively either.
The practical result has been that year by year,
lustrum by lustrum, and now through one decade
after another, the whole school of American water-
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