International studio (49.1913)

Contemporary Art and the Carnegie Institute


Medal of the First Class, Carnegie Institute, 1913

humorous fantasy suggests nothing so
one of Pietro Longhi’s imperishable
comedy episodes. These Precieuses
in their extravagant headdresses and

THE MARBLE
WORKER

BY GLYN W.
PHILPOT

note of nationality. Fechin is Russian to the core,
and therein lie his strength and his esthetic
significance.
Being in no sense an inventory, but rather a
brief indication of the extent and variety of the
current exhibition, it will be sufficient for our pur-
poses to cite a few of those artists who, like Man-
cini and Fechin, have been successful in escaping
conventional studio formulas and have to greater
or less degree attained a distinctly personal ex-
pression. It is impossible in this connection to
overlook the delightfully ornate and diverting
little panel by Miss Ansingh, entitled The Unin-
vited Guest. A newcomer from Amsterdam, Miss
Ansingh has furnished one of the surprises of the
exhibition with this delicately wrought scene
which in
much as
Venetian
Ridicules
voluminous skirts are rendered with exceptional
zest and
vision at

paints as no one else could, or doubtless would,
and will clearly go down to posterity as one of the
most audaciously personal and richly endowed
craftsmen of the age.
Side by side with Mancini in point of manipula-
tive dexterity, though vastly his peer in unspoiled
naturalness of feeling, may be placed the Slav,
Nikolai Fechin. The introduction of Fechin to
the American public is one of the more recent
triumphs of the Carnegie Institute, and it is
important to recall that not a single one of his
canvases has returned to Russia unsold. Display-
ing a higher degree of technical achievement than
the Portrait of Mlle. Lapojnikojf, with which he
made his debut three years since, the Lady in
Pink is nevertheless equally Slavonic in spirit.
There is no self-consciousness in work such as the
young Kazan painter places to his credit. He is
enormously gifted, yet he employs his gifts not in
the mere exploitation of cleverness, but in express-
ing spontaneously and without professional parti-
pris the fundamental characteristics of each sitter.
The chief note in these remarkable canvases is the

truth, and one hastens to welcome a
once so tasteful and so spirited. A
glance around the galleries brings to
light another point of attraction in
Alfred Hartley’s At Low Tide, a small
canvas treated in a semi-decorative
vein, with no little feeling for nature
seen simply and with instinctive sub-
tlety and suggestive power. These,
with a few others, such as Arthur B.
Davies’s Sleep and Robert J. Enraght
Moonv’s The Well, the latter imbued
with an engagingly personal pre-
Raphaelite fancy, are among our in-
dividual preferences, though they
have not, save in the case of the
Davies evocation, been selected for
official recognition.
As to the prize pictures, it may be
well as a concession to curiosity and
historical completeness, to mention
that the Medal of the First Class has
fallen to Glyn W. Philpot’s The Mar-
ble Worker, the Medal of the Second
Class to Henri Martin for his large
and luminously decorative apotheo-
sis of Autumn, and the Medal of the
Third Class to Gifford Beal’s some-
what commonplace and insensitive
The Manor House. Mr. Philpot’s
picture, which at first sight strikes
one as a brilliant performance, is in
essence an “academy.” There is a

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