International studio (31.1907)

Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh


WOMAN WITH BY LTTCIEN SIMON
WHITE GLOVE
earnest, and capably trained as a craftsman. The
third prize is the most inexplicable of all and goes
to a Polish lady, Olga de Boznauska, of Cracow.
Her picture is of a seated lady in black with a big
hat, her hands clasped. These hands are more or
less painted in detail and are well lit, but the face,
presumably in the same lighting and surely of
greater import, is misty, vague and almost lost, the
detail being as if seen through several veils of filmy
stuff. It has a certain charm of not too clean colour,
but it is in the nature of some experiment not yet
completed. More comprehensible is the lovely
portrait by Maurice Greiffenhagen, also of a lady in
black, that gets one of the honourable mentions
and which is delightfully frank and human in the
painting, besides being well drawn and constructed
and having something of the semblance of flesh and
bones. To Walter Granville-Smith goes another
honourable mention, for his Old Mill, a large
picture that only narrowly escaped the prize at last

year’s Academy show in New York, but was more
successful the following summer in the display of
the Worcester Art Museum, where it received official
recognition at the hands of the jury. It is a poetic
composition, of a most difficult theme, capably
rendered in agreeable colour and is full of artistic
significance. The third mention goes to Lawton S.
Parker, of Chicago, for his An English Girl, like-
wise a portrait—for the portraits seem to have
found favour this season—wherein there is a pretty
young woman seated by a mirror in which her
figure is reflected. This is broadly painted, with
considerable certainty of brush work and is an
excellent performance.
Thus, disposing of the prize winners, we may
welcome the foreigners first of all, as strangers
within our gates. There is a long list of them and
many of them are most distinguished. Place aux
Francais, then, and to Paul Albert Besnard we take
off our hat for his Portrait of My Children, not a
new work, but one of great artistic merit. Here is
an interior wherein are four children and three
adults, painted in a masterly manner, with rare
appreciation of values, charm of colour and naivete
of arrangement, by a man who knows his metier
from the ground up. The canvas is not surpassed
here. Lucien Simon, the prize winner of last
season, has a portrait of a Woman with White
Glove, that is admirable, and again we have a
trained craftsman with something serious to say,
saying it with rare ability. Just a portrait this, but
in addition, a human document. Jean Franfois
Raffaelli, who must be classed with the Gauls, has
a delicious figure of a beautiful young Maid of
Honour seated in a church, waiting, which he has
rendered with all his daintiness of touch, his vi-
brating colour scheme, indicating, as is his wont,
clever character sketches in the background.
Charles Cottet has a triptych of some fisher people,
a Farewell Feast, with a part devoted to Those
Who Remain and another to Those Who Depart.
It is impressive, full of pathos and has the true ring.
The man knows these toilers, knows his Breton
peasant, his ways and life, and he puts it all on his
canvas without any suspicion of the perfunctory,
avoiding those pitfalls into which so many of his
profession stumble when they have made their
fame and there come the demands of the public,, for
Cottet is sincere and invariably artistic.
Rene Billotte, of the jury, has a large landscape,
Moonrise at the Quarries of Argenteuil, disclosing
great knowledge of construction and, over a some-
what prosaic theme, he casts a glamour of poetry,
with the tender tones of evening and a rising moon,

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