DOI Heft:
No. 201 (December, 1909)
DOI Artikel:Mechlin, Leila: Some american figure-painters
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20968#0210
American Figure Painters
National Gallery collection at Washington, a canvas uncontrolled nature, the bigness of the outdoor
he produced during that period, depicting, with world, the beauty of power.
studious effort and no small show of scholarship, A greater contrast could scarcely be imagined to
a moose hunt on one of the Adirondack lakes. exist than is observable between the works of
For a number of years, however, Mr. Brush has Winslow Homer and those of Thomas W. Dewing,
confined himself to one subject—to the painting Mr. Dewing pictures, almost exclusively, young
of what might be termed modern Madonnas. His women of a somewhat fragile and highly cultured
wife and children have invariably served as his type, in rooms, which, in environment, are equally
models and he has transcribed them with extreme aesthetic. He cannot, however, be classed with
literalness. The mother and rosy-cheeked baby in the painters of the mode, nor with the ultra
the Corcoran Gallery is one of his strongest works, impressionists, for while his women belong un-
but In the Garden, owned by the Metropolitan questionably to the upper classes they take their
Museum, and The Family, recently acquired by places in his compositions quite impersonally, and
the Art Institute of Chicago, are more pictorial, though he reduces his technical equations to the
Only lately has a note of grace crept into Mr. lowest terms he pays much heed to minutiae.
Brush's paintings which have most frequently It is true, as Mr. T. Martin Wood has remarked
presented the sad and toilsome side of woman's in his admirable article on George Elmer Browne,
life, suggesting the pain and hardship of her lot published in a recent issue of The Studio, that
rather than the holy joy
of motherhood.
There is a certain kin-
ship between the tech-
nique of George de Forest
Brush and Winslow
Homer, though the latter
paints rriore broadly than
the former. Here, how-
ever, all similarity ends.
Mr. Homer began as a
newspaper illustrator,
back at the time of the
Civil War, and is almost
entirely self taught. He
has followed no one, he
has not even consorted
with those of his kind,
he has mastered his art
in his own way, but he
has mastered it fully.
Mr. Homer has painted
the negroes, and the
Indians, but best of all
the seafaring people of the
New England coast, whose
life he has interpreted
with remarkable sympathy
and understanding. That
his pictures could not
have been produced any-
where save in America
and by an American seems ,
probable. They are, for
the most part, epics of the
sea, full of the force of portrait of walt whitman by john w. Alexander
188
National Gallery collection at Washington, a canvas uncontrolled nature, the bigness of the outdoor
he produced during that period, depicting, with world, the beauty of power.
studious effort and no small show of scholarship, A greater contrast could scarcely be imagined to
a moose hunt on one of the Adirondack lakes. exist than is observable between the works of
For a number of years, however, Mr. Brush has Winslow Homer and those of Thomas W. Dewing,
confined himself to one subject—to the painting Mr. Dewing pictures, almost exclusively, young
of what might be termed modern Madonnas. His women of a somewhat fragile and highly cultured
wife and children have invariably served as his type, in rooms, which, in environment, are equally
models and he has transcribed them with extreme aesthetic. He cannot, however, be classed with
literalness. The mother and rosy-cheeked baby in the painters of the mode, nor with the ultra
the Corcoran Gallery is one of his strongest works, impressionists, for while his women belong un-
but In the Garden, owned by the Metropolitan questionably to the upper classes they take their
Museum, and The Family, recently acquired by places in his compositions quite impersonally, and
the Art Institute of Chicago, are more pictorial, though he reduces his technical equations to the
Only lately has a note of grace crept into Mr. lowest terms he pays much heed to minutiae.
Brush's paintings which have most frequently It is true, as Mr. T. Martin Wood has remarked
presented the sad and toilsome side of woman's in his admirable article on George Elmer Browne,
life, suggesting the pain and hardship of her lot published in a recent issue of The Studio, that
rather than the holy joy
of motherhood.
There is a certain kin-
ship between the tech-
nique of George de Forest
Brush and Winslow
Homer, though the latter
paints rriore broadly than
the former. Here, how-
ever, all similarity ends.
Mr. Homer began as a
newspaper illustrator,
back at the time of the
Civil War, and is almost
entirely self taught. He
has followed no one, he
has not even consorted
with those of his kind,
he has mastered his art
in his own way, but he
has mastered it fully.
Mr. Homer has painted
the negroes, and the
Indians, but best of all
the seafaring people of the
New England coast, whose
life he has interpreted
with remarkable sympathy
and understanding. That
his pictures could not
have been produced any-
where save in America
and by an American seems ,
probable. They are, for
the most part, epics of the
sea, full of the force of portrait of walt whitman by john w. Alexander
188