International studio (53.1914)

J. Francis Murphy

tion, this intuitive, incommunicable thing which,
despite the thousand specious pleas of sensational-
ism, marks the A B C of abiding art, broods over
every canvas the man paints. It has fought for
his artistic chastity at a time when poverty
pinched and a whimsical sense of humour pictured
the hereafter as a place where one need not go to
bed hungry. It is the abiding distinction between
his work and the work of nine-tenths of his capable
contemporaries. Gifted with no particularly
novel point of view, absolutely devoid of doctrine,
psychology and the large universal vision, unfor-
tunately unsympathetic to the message of music,
it is—I repeat—Murphy’s unerring sense of pro-
portion, his dignity of demeanour which lends him
that indefinable poise we call classic, and it is not
one whit too dar¬
ing to claim that
Murphy pos¬
sesses this inher¬
ent aristocracy
of attitude to as
marked a degree
as you find it in
a painter like
Corot, in a com¬
poser like Mo¬
zart. Others
have sounded
stronger, deeper
notes, others
have possessed
an infinitely
wider range of
expression; no
one of his coun-
trymen has surpassed Murphy in the accuracy of
his touch, his mastery of values. As you watch
Murphy prepare a tone on his palette, his fingers
dipping here and there with the cleft, instanta-
neous precision of a surgeon, you will catch a
glimpse of that remarkable faculty, intuition, dic-
tating at full speed, and you will realize that the
man himself is merely a kind of medium through
which some peculiar outside influence chooses to
translate itself into an abiding beauty.
Murphy’s significance to the landscape painting
of his country lies in his recognition of certain
modern tendencies, coupled to a fundamental
faithfulness to what one might call his classical
inheritance. Inness and Wyant are his artistic
ancestors, and on their platforms Murphy natur-
ally enough set up shop. An unprejudiced ob-
server must admit that he often beat his elders at

their own game. But the high noon of Murphy’s
creative ability lay in the path of those waves of
effort going out from the experiments of Monet
and his followers. The smoked glasses of the past
fell from Murphy’s eyes. The mud and molasses,
the studio lighting, essentially false in pitch, of the
older men had served them and served them well,
but Murphy knew that henceforth his problem
was the individual one of mating the modern
appreciation of real light and real air to that
sober, serious vision of his elders which is alone
congenial to his temperament, and which he never
subordinates to a mere dexterity, a mere objective
experimenting. This new Murphy, dating from
1900, forsakes a mere prettiness and attempts the
commendable difficulty of interesting you in deso-
lation. Gaunt,
naked uplands
are bathed in a
luminous bath
of golds, grays
and greens, quiv-
ering and vibrat-
ing like heat
waves, snapping
and sparkling
like frozen jew-
ellery. Martin
and Twachtman
had felt this call
of the open, this
quickening of
the brighter vis-
ion. But, all in
all, their efforts
were fugitive, in
Martin’s case notoriously intermittent, and it re-
mained for Murphy to spring securely and defi-
nitely into the saddle of the higher tonalities of
to-day. The enduring nobility of his achieve-
ment is the fact that this brilliancy, this charm
of surface, this glint and glow is combined with
a purity of intention, a heart quality besides
which a man like Monet, for instance, appears a
mere impersonal recorder.
Murphy has been charged with monotony, with
diffidence. To those people (and I bear in mind
a particular few) who think of him as a mere
formulist gifted with a certain pretty but rather
uninspired facility for painting, I advance the
significance of his recent record wherein he has
consciously accepted disapproval and neglect in
his experimentings with a more emphatic attitude,
a more powerful handling. 'Prue, he is concerned

Courtesy of N. E. Montross, Esq.
A SHOWERY AFTERNOON