• STUDIO •
VOL. LIV. No. 213 Copyright, 1914, by John Lane Company NOVEMBER, 1914

OLD SUBJECTS IN NEW VEST-
MENTS
BY JESSIE LEMONT
Three Continental impressionist
painters, born but a couple of years apart,
although widely separated by country, present in
their canvases extreme divergence in conception
and exposition of theme, yet reveal a certain simi-
larity in big, broad and unique brush handling.
Giovanni Segantini, of Arco, by some called the
supreme genius of modern Italy, a romantic
Millet, “bathes his thoughts in Nature and
clothes them in the local colour of his life in the
Engadine Alps.” Henri Martin, a native of
Toulouse, “suggests Puvis de Chavannes set
afire.” Henri Le Sidaner, from the lie Maurice
beside the North Sea, with its melancholy mists,
“a very poet who compels Nature to sing her
intense moods with lyric tenderness,” paints a
world of dreams.
These three artists, different of race, of tem-
perament, of predilection, used at times analogous
line effects and a thick streaking in of colour, and
again employed a flecked laying on of pigment dis-
similar to other contemporaneous impressionists-
Original, arresting and effective for a luminous
vibrancy and also for a veiled and mysterious
quality achieved by these methods, they were in a
way by chromatic steps the technical precursors of
Augustus Vincent Tack.
In subject matter not transported by the Vir-
gilian bucolics of Segantini, nor enamoured of
luminous white-veiled floating forms like Martin,
nor yet haunted by the poetic visions of Le
Sidaner, Augustus Tack reveals to us originality
and power both in conception and technique.
Four large canvases recently completed by
Augustus Tack might be called a symphony in
four movements, with humanity for its theme.
The force of the elemental flows through these

paintings, each of which is complete within itself,
yet is part of a great whole. In each the back-
ground suggests illimitable space stretching out
luminously beyond the range of vision. Each is
dominated by a single human figure, Biblical in its
bigness, symbolic of humanity’s heights and
depths.
In the first of these paintings, entitled The
Remorse of Eve, the mysteriously glowing back-
ground throws into deeper shadow the figure of a
woman who comes forth with faltering steps from
beneath the boughs of a great tree. The over-
hanging branches arch the top, and the massive
trunk sweeps from top to bottom the entire right
of the picture, darkening to dusk the pathway
along which the figure passes and contrasting
sombrely with the far-distant brilliance of the
background.
The woman’s form is brown as of the earth and
heavily built, yet with the vital grace of primal
creatures. The abundance of wavy hair is thrown
forward over the face, as if to veil its tragedy; the
left arm is flung across the face, as if to hide the
vision of the Unknown toward which she advances;
the hands are obliquely and gropingly extended
and are clasped with an upward gesture as of
prayer. She walks with slow and dragging step,
her strong form droops with its burden of realiza-
tion of finality, of exclusion from the joy forever
lost in God’s Garden of Eden, to which there is no
return. The faint reflection of that vanishing
radiance lights her on her way into the Unseen.
The symbolism of this figure is portentous. It
represents the slow-gathering consciousness of
avoidable but irretrievable loss.
The finality of despair of this Eve is relieved by a
suggestion of wild freedom that leaps up even in
the praying gesture of the hands and in the drag-
ging step, which has a latent fleetness; the whole
drooping form contains a repressed vigour, at once
pagan and primitive. It holds an impulse which

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