International studio (46.1912)

INTERNATIONAL
• STUDIO
VOL. XLVI. No. 183 Copyright, 1912, by John Lane Company MAY, 1912

| ■K HE EIGHTY-SEVENTH ACADEMY
BY CHARLES DE KAY
A Of the three hundred paintings in
the Eighty-seventh Annual Exhibition
by the National Academy of Design, one in fifteen
is a wintry scene, with snow on the ground, one in
thirty is a figure in the nude. Is this the result of
a mistaken forecast of the weather for March and
April on the part of the artists, leading them to
offer pictures better suited to sultry days than the
nipping winds dispensed us? These candid land-
scapes and soft flesh tones, at any rate, serve to
enliven the four galleries not a little and to give the
exhibition what it is apt to lack, a special stamp,
an individuality when compared with its forerun-
ners.
Remarkable how many different notes can be
played on a theme like snow, which seems always
and inevitably the same! Lewis Herzog is the
herald of the early snowfall, as feathery and soft,
almost, as John Twachtman used to paint it. Guy
C. Wiggins has a city square with lofty buildings
and fences covered with colored advertisements
seen through a haze of invisible flakes; Mrs. Char-
lotte B. Coman tries to suggest “vanishing ” snow;
Robert Nisbet’s Robe of Gold introduces large
flakes falling distinct in the foreground; Miss Ann
Crane paints a massive bridge in the dim, moist
air of a winter’s eve; Sheldon Parsons sees the
winter woods smothered in ropy snow; Walter
Nettleton surprises the snow-wrapped brook with
its babble stilled among the Berkshire woods, and
Ernest Roth registers more prosaically the appear-
ance of a ledge of rocks in winter, such as one sees
on Manhattan Island. Walter L. Palmer, again,
has his own way of painting the snow-clogged for-
est. But how differently does Elmer Schofield see
a frozen river with its greenish snow-ice, its darker
green water-spaces,- the mauves and blues and
browns over the fields and along the banks!
Charles. Rosen takes the first Hallgarten prize of

$300 with a Rocky Ledge of no particular beauty;
Corwin Linson depicts ice work; George Bruestle
tells us about a thaw in January, and the marine
painter, F. K. M. Rehn, describes an aisle in the
woods, with a thin carpet of snow, which brings
out all the colors of the leafless forest.
Note that these paintings for the most part do
not give us snow after a receipt but as the painters
see it themselves, note that each has an individual
way of looking at it.
And so with the nudes. How creamy and en-
veloped is the seated damsel Miss Helen Watson
Phelps depicts in The Coiffure, with oils of a pastel
quality; how charming in composition and line are
the two young girls by Luis Mora, in Embroidered
Patterns; how firmly drawn and realistic the inno-
cent-faced Cicada by Sergeant Kendall! Nor-
wood Macgilvary harks back to the eighteenth
century with his couchant Circe holding a wine-
glass below a cluster of grapes in The Wine of En-
chantment. To this flesh painting there is little
realism, less, even, than to Miss Lillian Genth’s Sea
Nymph. M. H. Bancroft, William Fosdick, Vic-
tor Hecht, Frederick Frieseke have as many differ-
ing ways of rendering the undraped figure, the last
mentioned calling to his aid the sunlight falling
through leaves. Yet these painters of the nude
are not so much at their ease as the painters of
snow, not so varied in their attack of the problem,
not so individual. In view of popular prejudice
are they more self conscious, perchance?
A picture that strikes one as dramatic through
its composition and masses of light and shade is
Jonas Lie’s view of an East River bridge, called
Morning on the River, in which he has expressed
the majesty of a great highway of steel and iron
spanning a busy thoroughfare where tugs and
canal boats, steamers and dredges tell of unrelent-
ing toil. Another large canvas that gives a similar
tale with less dramatic effect is the Building of the
Coffer Dam by Gardner Symons. In strong con-
trast is'the winner of the Saltus medal, The Hills
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