International studio (35.1908)

Frank IV. Benson

this specialization of a distinctive New England
type. John Sargent, an expatriated Yankee of
Florentine birth, would almost surely have painted
this sitter in a decorative fashion. There was
possibly temptation for Benson in the chance, but
the deeper knowledge and sympathy prevailed.
The result is one of the noblest portraits yet
painted in this country. The work is equally
good in the Portrait of a Man, which is almost
startlingly revealing, immensely American in
fashion of painting, too, and the hands are, if
anything, better painted than the hands in the
Clarke portrait.
The artist’s portrait of his wife is in his first-
rank work. Here is an ancestress for some Salem-
descended person of the future to hang on the wall
of some Pacific palace of the twenty-first century,
and say with just pride, “Such was a gentlewoman
of the olden day and such
was the fashion of painting
her grace and firmness, her
delicacy and strength of
character, her dependable-
ness and alert vivacity of
mind and figure, and, too,
her intuitive big eyes and
her diaphanous, billowing
gown.”
The serenity and gra-
ciousness, the true portrait
distinction of lifelikeness,
is also in the Portrait of a
Lady, gazing out with direct
and womanly sweetness
upon a well-ordered and
not much to be improved
world. Some one has called
these subjects eighteenth-
century ladies, but they
are very much alive now,
only, like ancestral mahog-
any, not to be found in every
fashionable drarwing-room.
Breeding and simplicity are
as patent in this Portrait of
a Lady as breadth of hand-
ling on the painter’s part
and effective bringing of
the high light on the right
side of the face. Again, the
charm of thin silk muslin,
well offered. In the Portrait
of a Girl there are beauties
of line and poise effective

against a landscape backgrou nd with trees, water and
bluesky. TwoLittleGirls is a delightful composition,
an open-air picture, the children sitting at the base
of a spreading tree, and the sunlight irradiating
their faces and figures, the elder already touched
with wistful seriousness, the younger wearing the
true little sister look. In My Little Girl the artist
painted his child in white, with blond hair framing
a tenderly modeled face with straight, good brows
and big earnest eyes with more than a glint of
fun in them, and long-fingered hands quaintly held
to show good modeling, yet evidently a child-chosen
pose, one of the most successful of his pictures.
Another portrait is of an elder little girl seated in a
stiff, wooden rocking-chair, one of the kind with
short rockers and capacious arms. She is holding
her hands stiffly, too—they are extremely well
shown—and her black-stockinged legs below her