International studio (35.1908)

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INTERNATIONAL
• STUDIO •
VOL. XXXV. No. 140 Copyright, 1908, by John Lane Company OCTOBER, 1908

T

HE WORK OF FRANK W. BENSON
BY MINNA C. SMITH

Salem is a city by the sea of the best
New England sort, with fine old houses
standing in dignity among their gardens, turning
formal faces toward the street, as in Hawthorne’s
day, and with fine old-school townspeople, who
look upon Boston as rather new, and upon Bos-
tonians, the best of them, as descended from Salem
ancestors. There are not too many towns left, even
in Massachusetts, where old mahogany that was
always there prevails in furniture, and its tone of
antique distinction and stability in the American-
ism of the dwellers therein, who are unmixed with
any but the pure Puritan strain.
It is of interest that in Salem was born, and in
Salem is at home to-day, Frank W. Benson, one of
our radical painters, whose name, with that of
Tarbell—their names are always linked together—
was once tocsin to a lot of young rebels against
academic pronunciamentos, himself a leader among
them. His plein-air standard is planted these
many days deep in conservative soil, as we shall
presently see. Its colors float to the breeze no less
valiantly than of old, although now he has ceased
to be merely associate of the National Academy,
but is full-fledged academician. His wonderful
Moonlight at Sea in the last spring exhibition has
all the beauty of romance—and technique!
Mr. Benson must be numbered among our
younger men. His forty-five years seem youth
to those who were contemporary with the excite-
ment in the latter eighties over impressionism,
following upon the discovery that not to Munich
but to Paris young America must go for training in
accord with our national needs. To the twenty-
year-olds of to-day, brought up on fresh air, reared
in the knowledge of sunshine, ignorant of midnight
oil or of unventilated pre-Centennial ideas about
art, our excitement over impressionism is as a

tale that need not be told. To them the plein-air
movement is, quite simply, a paternal influence
upon American art, and the secession of the Ten
American Artists in 1897 an historic event, too,
almost as deep in the mists of time as the formation
of the society itself, the Society of American
Artists, now reabsorbed into the Academy. As
the conservative son of Salem, his radicalism re-
absorbed, his paintings show Benson at his
best, a painter of distinguished, good-looking or
beautiful people. His portraits have in them the
eternal verities of art, truth of feeling, native
liking—gift, if you will—and a strong and finished
technique.
The portrait of Professor Benjamin F. Clarke,
of Brown University, a recent one of Ben-
son’s works, has great distinction. There is
something in its quality more than in the posing
of the sitter in his doctor’s gown which suggests
that superb Van Dyck on the right wall as you
enter the Salon Isabel in the Gallery of the Prado.
The conquering of intellect, the personality of the
scholar as it affects the artist in both cases, is direct
in its appeal to the beholder. Beholder is the right
word, for the gentle aloofness expressed puts one
in just that mental attitude before both pictures.
The subject is a lawyer in the Van Dyck, but the
result in each portrait is a permanent record of a
human type of brilliant, penetrative order. Com-
parisons are not out of the way in regard to manner
of painting either, and it would be most interesting
to see the two pictures side by side. One may well
believe that in strength of modeling, in free, spon-
taneous, sympathetic sweep of brush, in masterly
drawing, the Clarke portrait would hold up its
head with dignity beside the old master. This is
not calling Benson another Van Dyck, or evading
modern forms of praise by old-style comparings.
It is simply a statement of the power and breadth
which he has reached. And with all its universal
excellence, New England has claimed her son in

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