International studio (48.1913)

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INTERNATIONAL
STUDIO
VOL. XLVII1. No. 190 Copyright, 1912, bp John Lane Company DECEMBER, 1912

GARI MELCHERS—PAINTER
BY J. NILSEN LAURVIK
Of the relatively few contemporary
American painters whose work is known
abroad none has won greater honors than Gari
Melchers, whose canvases are vital contributions
to that refreshing naturalism which swept out and
forever disestablished the old studio conventions.
Born in America of foreign parents, this alien
note in his make-up has been further fostered by
the training received in French and German
schools, until today Gari Melchers expresses in a
high degree that cosmopolitanism which is one of
the characteristic marks of the modern American.
And yet there is something about his work that
savors as strongly of Germany as of America.
The one seems to have confirmed and comple-
mented the other, producing a rugged naturalism,
tempered and revivified by latter-day French art,
whose teachings he has absorbed and made his
own in a manner convincingly personal. This has
been accomplished without any straining after
effect, without any attempt to shock or startle the
casual eye of the world by tricks of technique or
eccentricities of style.
His work is distinguished by a straightforward
frankness that abhors the pretty banalities of the
conventional studio picture, and though a deft
and quick workman he is not cursed with that
ready facility which turns out a masterpiece every
morning before breakfast. A seeker after charac-
ter, he can be as deliberate as an old master and
no one deplores the haste and hurry of America
more than he. Few have a more deep-rooted
regard for their art than he, and no consideration
of expediency can swerve him in the pursuit of his
one ambition—the creation of a good work of art.
Every canvas from his sincere brush is an
affirmation of his dictum, pronounced some years
ago, that: “Nothing counts in this world with the
painter but a good picture; and no matter how

good a one you do, you have only to go to the gal-
leries to see how many better ones have been
done.” In this spirit of never-flagging endeavor
have come into being some of the most virile and
stimulating pictures produced by an American-
born painter.
His themes are unaffectedly simple—goat-herds,,
shepherdesses, the clear-eyed peasantry and the
wind-blown sailors of Holland. Although he has
made occasional excursions into other fields, he
has never wholly forsaken the scenes of his earliest
inspiration. Year after year he is drawn back to
the little studio at Egmond-aan-Zee, where the
homely picturesqueness of the natives still furnishes
him with subject matter, as in the days back in
1886, where he made his real debut with The
Sermon, in which is truthfully depicted an episode
out of contemporary Dutch life.
The exhibition of this picture in the Salon of the
year marks the advent of the real man, who was
to develop into the personality we know today.
Although he had made his initial entrance into the
world of art some four years earlier with a picture
called The Letter, which was followed the next year
with two pictures entitled A Woman of Attina and
Pater Noster, both well hung and well received, it
was not until the appearance of The Sermon that
his art created a distinct impression. During the
two or three intervening years he had been occu-
pied with various tentative experiments that
resulted in nothing notable.
He did not altogether “find himself” until that
summer in 1884 when he made a casual visit to
Holland after a brief visit to his home in America.
The discovery of these simple, unspoiled people
put him on the track of his own esthetic evolution
and from that moment dates his life as a produc-
tive artist. Here he found something that
aroused slumbering traits of character, quite as
unsuspected by himself as by his colleagues and
fellow-pupils, among whom were Kampf, Vogel
and Hans Hermann.

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