International studio (27.1905/1906(1906))

The Society of Western Artists

ings. If ever there is to be a schcol of American
painting will not the works from each portion of
this great America breathe out the type and colour
of their local environment ? Has not each suc-
cessive school of art the world has known produced
an art that we have come to reckon as typical of the
place and clime and spirit of the people producing
it ? The continent of Europe, with its twenty-two
odd thousand square miles in excess of the United
States, has the well-defmed Dutch, French, Span-
ish, Belgian, Swedish, German, Italian and
Russian schools of art. It may be too early to pre-
dict for the artists of the several sections of America,
but might we not suppose that they will in time
establish individual schools of native art? May
not this then be the reason that we linger with such
admiration in the presence of J. Ottis Adams’s
canvases; that we receive a touch of the Red Man’s
thrill in looking at Mr. Frederick Oaks Sylvester’s
clreamy renderings of the Father of Waters, or that
we are impressed by the sincerity of endeavour by
men like Meakin, Browne, Steele and Dudley?
The first of these sends four superb painting* which
teil the faithful story of unpretentious Indiana
landscape. In his Refleclions from an Old Mill, he
has presented to us a Fritz Thaulow view-point
translated into American scenery and American
expression. The red in the mill is of a tone that is
brilliant and still retains its place in distance. It
mirrors itself in broken images in the agitated water
and the entire spot of colour in relation to composi-
tion is most satisfactorily placed.
Despite the unfortunate loss sustained in the
burning of his works at the Missouri Building on
the last night at the Portland Exposition, Mr.

Sylvester has been able to place upon exhibition
eight admirable things, six of which are painting*
in oil, the other two being tinted charcoal drawings.
Here we have an artist whom we should designate
as a realistic painter, a painter indeed of fact, but
fact as exemplified in Nature’* moods and not in
her physical appearance. The tenderness of dawn,
the soft mysteryof twilight, enchant his brush and
rnake it respond to wondrous notes such, for in-
stante, as may be viewed in The Illinois Hills, a
picture which, for its particular kind of thing, is
peerless. It is a simple description of river bluffs
rising in an irregulär wall along the distant side of
the stream. Behind these a band of pearly gray is
stretched as if to curtain the sun’s red glare in his
descending glory, a feat that is quite accomplished
but for the Suggestion of a lurid rim which tellingly
appears repeated in the limpid stillness below. A
feAV lines of scattered clouds across the upper
heavens, and this poetic creation is complete. More
direct in intention and more solidly painted is The
Piasa Bluffs. A vigour that sometimes takes an
imperative hold upon Mr. Sylvester has set its
stamp upon this work and is seen first in the bold-
ness of conception and again in the very definite
carrying out of the idea. In the psychological
analysis of this composition, it would be difficult
to determine exactly what the initial inspiration
had been, whether the bluffs themselves with their
frank reflections would have occasioned the picture
or whether the fortunate opening of trees on the
nearer bank, as affording a suitable vista of dis-
tance across the water, might have been the nucleus
of expression, so intimately are they associated.
Certain it is that both divisions are quite essential


LANDSCAPE

L. H. MEAKIN