International studio (35.1908)

Frank IV. Benson


for which the Ten seceded.
The artist himself would
tell you, with the genial sin-
cerity with which training
of others has infused his
criticism, that Against the
Sky is one of the best things
he has ever done. It is
worth the affection of the
author of its being. It is
now owned by Mr. Thomas
Cole, of Duluth. The paint-
ing shows a girl all in white
with a yellowish parasol, a
winged hat and gray veil
seen against a sky of roll-
ing summer clouds, with
some glimpses of blue. It
is full of the breath of the
open world. The artist’s
insistent youth is in it, that
dower of a man gifted with
love of all outdoors.
For three months of every
year Mr. Benson leaves even
the sea breezes of Salem for
wider sea horizon. He has
bought a farm on the island
of North Haven, on Penob-
scot Bay, where he is by
way of learning new secrets
of light and shade, as well
portrait of a man by frank w. benson as those other things that
town dwellers learn when
they buy a farm.
It was James Russell Lowell who confessed
that he liked better to look at a picture of the sea
than at the sea itself from the shore. That sort
of thing was going out of fashion in Salem and
Boston, as well as in Cambridge, when the young
Benson began life as an art student at the Museum
of Fine Arts in Boston. He has grown constantly, as
his latest pictures give testimony. He is now some-
what more of a plein-air man than he was when he
and Tarbell first came home from Paris, prophets
of Monet and of Manet. Certainly, he is of the uni-
versal in his always deepening appreciation of both
the lower and the higher values in an open-air
scene. When he was getting command of his me-
dium in those two years in Paris under Boulanger
and Lefebre at Julian’s, with summers at Concar-
neau in Brittany, he was never of those overeager to
paint the lower values at the expense of the higher
ones, nor did his work alarm contemporary criti-

white frock bring her black-shod feet, in new shoes,
heels together, in a pose curiously interpretative of
charm in the awkwardness of childhood. The fash-
ion of the flowered frock, as well as the date of the
painter’s signature, 1897, indicate that this subject
is now a grown-up, and by the beauty of the large
dark eyes and the excellent shape of the head, able
to appreciate a child picture which is not beautiful,
but holds interest compellingly and well. The
Head of a Boy is a winning study of light on the
brow of a small man-child, with dark eyes of depth
and earnestness and a sturdy arm thrusting a hand
into his pocket. It is in the large, simple manner of
the Clarke portrait.
Against the Sky, shown in the exhibition of the
Ten American Artists last year at the Montross
Gallery in New York, and winner of the Corcoran
Gallery prize of 1907, has, like Mr. Benson’s Eleanor
in the 1908 exhibition, the quality of freedom

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