International studio (59.1916)

The Paintings of Helen TPatson Phelps

The paintings of helen wat-
SON PHELPS
BY STUART HENRY
Helen Watson Phelps is well
known as a practised craftsman in oils. It may
therefore seem at first strange that she is at the
same time a bold explorer in problems of light
and flesh such as the world is distinctly familiar
with in modern France. She is able to look upon
her art for the exclusive love of it and so has
attacked advanced positions on the progressive
firing-line of the world pictorial. Her sure brush
here may be accounted for by her years at
Julian’s and under Collin and Besnard.
Her nude forms in the chiaroscuros of green
woods, or in cosy interiors where mixed lights
tend to bring out the infinite beauties of the flesh,
evidence what the late Mr. Hopkinson Smith
would have indicated as an amazing lot of
thought. The American public, that is to say the
American taste, owing to its Puritan antecedents,
has shrunk from the nude in painting. And still
the Yankee papa or mama, who has shuddered at
the thought of buying a divinely artistic nude for
their home, has flocked as a matter of course with
the young offspring to the Broadway musical
shows where unclothedness frankly makes up in
interest for the absence of any true art. This
illogical attitude is happily improving.
Helen Phelps’s collection of works at the Arling-
ton Galleries this spring furnished a little sym-
phony of flesh and air harmonies. Through the
IFoods was a sylvan dream of two figures running,
so thrilled with nature in light and action that
it might have been sensitively called The Echo.
A Cup of Tea reflected a complicated interior
whose plexus of lights from rare objets de vertu was
counter-matched by the rich tones of the partly
draped model resting from her duties. The Pur-
ple Bowl was a scheme of flesh tones etherealized
in terms of a colourful imagination haunted with
a vague phrase of unrealizable beauty. Copper
and Gold, a beautiful and ample nude, is familiar
to the New York public, having been awarded
the figure prize at last spring’s exhibition of the
Association of Women Painters and Sculptors.
A similar canvas by this artist was one of the
late Mr. Hearn’s last purchases at the Academy.
Portraits is the other specialty of Helen Phelps,
to whom uninhabited landscapes—that favourite
subject of American painters—do not appeal.

Her Japanese Lady, with her engaging smile so
little expected in an oriental countenance, is a
rapid sketch, begun and ended quickly under
the impulse of a sudden inspiration. A more
elaborate and careful canvas is the Portrait of
Mrs. II., where a difficult problem of lighting and
of textures and hues is tastefully mastered. In
it the blending of naturally hostile colours is
accomplished with a refinement of harmony
which France has taught American artists. A
writer upon art has remarked that Miss Phelps
gets the spirit of the sitter. There is a distinct
and inherent individuality about each portrait,
so that no one can enter a portrait gallery and
say with an off-hand glance, “That is a Helen
Phelps!” This contributes to her successful
handling of children as subjects.
In her mountain studio at Elizabethtown, N.
Y., where she passes her summers when not in
Europe, she paints in the open air. In Paris, in
Normandy, in Italy, she wields her brush whenever
and wherever the mood is upon her. Out of the
wealth of travel, of sojourns in choice spots, and of
unusual opportunity, she has garnered many prizes
and honourable mentions along paths little fre-
quented by conventional American painters.
This is all the more interesting since she came
from cold New England. But, you see, her art
home has been the Left Bank of the Seine.


PORTRAIT OF MRS. H.

BY HELEN WATSON PHELPS

XX