International studio (53.1914)

J. Francis Murphy

AUTUMNAL BY J. FRANCIS MURPHY


for worse, is the spirit that has consistently
permeated his work—simplicity and fragrance—
a little immature, if you will, a little lack-
ing in the deepest, tenderest, human feelings,
but uniquely beautiful, uniquely welded together
by the most consummate technician American
landscape has produced. You may ask for a
different point of view, you may prefer a painter
to argue, theorize and dissect, you may even
condemn Murphy, if you will, as the replica of a
worn-out mode, but from the standpoint of a
mere manipulation of paint, a mere loveliness of
surface at once sensuous and chaste, he stands
unexcelled in the art of his country.
As a general rule your landscape painter is first
a painter and then, if at all, a companion of the
out-of-doors. Murphy is a painter last and pri-
marily a lover of the open, a kind of unmethodical
naturalist, with something ineradicably primitive
and rural in his blood. Eight months out of the
year he is living the country, not painting it, iden-
tifying himself with its characteristics, a part of its
routine. Brushes are never touched, canvases
never inspected and you find him pottering about
his Arkville home engaged in agricultural activi-
ties, exuberantly happy in his isolation from dealer

and customer, refreshing his genius from the airs
and streams of a simple, unsophisticated territory.
A subconscious stenographer is always at work
taking notes for future reference, but you do not,
perhaps, realize this in your amazement at seeing
your host in eager controversy over the pruning of
some apple trees. All the while nature is soaking
in through the open pores of his senses, and an
instantaneous glimpse of this or that shut tight
in his memory will reappear on canvas years hence.
During the winter months the assimilated im-
pressions of this long idleness take sudden shape
and crystallize into energetic working hours and
miracles of loveliness. Canvases that have been
stored away in the studio for years pass muster
before his rejuvenated point of view, and a half
dozen or so are marked for the season’s output. Go
into the studio about half-past three or four of a
winter’s afternoon. Palette and brushes are put
away, the cigar is lighted. Two or three pictures
are in evidence and as he chats, irrelevantly
enough, Murphy surveys them, subjecting them
to the pitiless, persistent inquisition of that
remarkable judgment, that sixth sense of the fit-
ness of things which remains the beginning and
end of his considerable genius. This discrimina-

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