DOI issue:
American section
DOI article:Lloyd, David: The first annual exhibition of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.28251#0359
The Corcoran Exhibition
THE DEEP SEA
BY WALTER L. DEAN
painted Sunset and Moonlight of Ralph Albert
Blakelock display another manner. In the atrium
would be found the harbour scene by William E.
Norton called Tranquillity, which was reproduced
in colours in these pages some months ago. Near
another Blakelock is a painting called Evening,
showing a stretch of heath under a sky nearly
salmon in hue. This is an interesting painting to
examine closely; but back away from it and, the
colours taking their intended place, the ground is
plunged into a finely suggested mist. The canvas
is by E. C. Messer, a Washington artist. There are
fifteen local artists represented in all. To the ex-
hibitions of the Washington Society of Artists, which
used to be held in the hemicycle of the Corcoran
and which embraced work from other quarters as
well, no little of the credit is due in breaking the
ground for this larger show. Another Washington
artist, James Henry Moser, has studied the colours
and tones of a mountainside by night in his Mt.
McIntyre. It is an inviting canvas. The eye looks
into it as well as at it. A like simplification is in
Ben. Foster’s two exhibits, Misty Night and Fire-
flies and Moonlight. In the first he has risen to
an unusual effect in the prismatic ring round the
moon. In the other he has chosen a subject of no
little charm, but great difficulty. Though it seem
strange, it is probably true, that it is easier to
manage the moon than a firefly. Robert Reid in
Evening has rendered with fine skill and his keen
sense of colour the clearness of early twilight in the
heights, a view from some little distance of a rising
cleft in the hills that retains a sense of expanse, the
pale yellow disk of the moon rising just effulgent
enough to strip off remoteness from the scene. All
such problems of limited illumination involve the
obstacle of a brief time for observation, though in
this respect they merely typify by their obvious
character the conditions of landscape work gen-
erally. At any period of the day, nature is rarely
of the same appearance five minutes at a time.
Though the thing is done on the spot it is largely
done from memory; and a painter at the mercy of
the weather and the process of the suns is not alto-
gether unlike a man trying to catch his hat in the
wind.
If our supposed visitor had reached this point in
making his vicarious observations of sunrises, and
IX
THE DEEP SEA
BY WALTER L. DEAN
painted Sunset and Moonlight of Ralph Albert
Blakelock display another manner. In the atrium
would be found the harbour scene by William E.
Norton called Tranquillity, which was reproduced
in colours in these pages some months ago. Near
another Blakelock is a painting called Evening,
showing a stretch of heath under a sky nearly
salmon in hue. This is an interesting painting to
examine closely; but back away from it and, the
colours taking their intended place, the ground is
plunged into a finely suggested mist. The canvas
is by E. C. Messer, a Washington artist. There are
fifteen local artists represented in all. To the ex-
hibitions of the Washington Society of Artists, which
used to be held in the hemicycle of the Corcoran
and which embraced work from other quarters as
well, no little of the credit is due in breaking the
ground for this larger show. Another Washington
artist, James Henry Moser, has studied the colours
and tones of a mountainside by night in his Mt.
McIntyre. It is an inviting canvas. The eye looks
into it as well as at it. A like simplification is in
Ben. Foster’s two exhibits, Misty Night and Fire-
flies and Moonlight. In the first he has risen to
an unusual effect in the prismatic ring round the
moon. In the other he has chosen a subject of no
little charm, but great difficulty. Though it seem
strange, it is probably true, that it is easier to
manage the moon than a firefly. Robert Reid in
Evening has rendered with fine skill and his keen
sense of colour the clearness of early twilight in the
heights, a view from some little distance of a rising
cleft in the hills that retains a sense of expanse, the
pale yellow disk of the moon rising just effulgent
enough to strip off remoteness from the scene. All
such problems of limited illumination involve the
obstacle of a brief time for observation, though in
this respect they merely typify by their obvious
character the conditions of landscape work gen-
erally. At any period of the day, nature is rarely
of the same appearance five minutes at a time.
Though the thing is done on the spot it is largely
done from memory; and a painter at the mercy of
the weather and the process of the suns is not alto-
gether unlike a man trying to catch his hat in the
wind.
If our supposed visitor had reached this point in
making his vicarious observations of sunrises, and
IX