: ian . ‘ ; nee : dotted teintndtndadatadadaniis aamtettatenie tater aban iedadatiaiad eitidrendataiaintetann inkiuaeaemataas abe haketaeee datetime tieketdednieaeiinits leaned Lait tn SS SEE RS II tT Eo AT sa ceipdnde sahlapaeah deadideceec aati aiatedetebetime ieaeaedliedk ten aetetede ae helmeted aterm aeeatiaiaeadadeadtaedeiaibce cod een aie teiadie sei eae hetegh ~ P . : PE LT —— - ae a * a eae ve us 4 ss Ay: a i 9 iad BALORING 0" RK’S ART GALLERIES i os ALFONSO D’ESTE. TITIAN Metropolitan Museum of Art EXPLORING NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES BY MARGARET BREUNING ILLUSTRATED a NEW YORK ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY MCMXXVIII > : NI os N ted | ~Prin wry A PREFATORY NOTE As the title of this book indicates, it is written to serve as a guide to the paintings of the public collec- tions in New York City for any one who has not already found his way to these treasures. In blazing this trail a certain number of fingerposts have been erected to indicate who is who and what his place is in the world of art. This generalized biographical and historical comment does not profess to be an exhaustive survey of the collections or a critical esti- mate of their painters. Any such serious appraisal short of a history of art would be impossible. Rather, it is hoped that the reader will embark on his own voyage of discovery and find that the landmarks given here in different epochs of artistic development will serve as good points of departure for many felicitous journeys of his own. M. B. CONTENTS Part One: THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART CHAPTER PAGE A Great Titian . ; ie ak ie ig ae Seeeite Marquand Gallery . .. . . 22 III Early Italian Paintings Sey ee Pes oe ne Se merece italian Painting; 0,0 ms i ae 5S Seerewmertherm schools. .,. in is 65 Meeeonanin fainting .° 4, st wR SMMC eine 2 ks twee ce DS SU eCRPP AMIN 6 ke CEI Meeeeamcenaneous Paintings .. . «+. 139 Mmeeeierican Painting . 9 1 ns om «. 15! eeeeran Collection 5. wo «6. ZO Part Two: OTHER NOTABLE COLLECTIONS XII Hispanic Museum 5 Pa Ue sees rae aes 18, The Barnard Cloisters . ! ‘ ay a0? Seeueriroomyn Museum .; - : we i 209 XIV Various Collections. ae 20 The New York Public Linea d ‘i, 220 _ New York Historical Society a ee P| The City Hall . o ake The Art Galleries and Their Postion: Ee 243 vil ILLUSTRATIONS ALFONSO D'ESTE. Titian. .. in. Frontispiece FACING PAGE JAMES STUART, DUKE OF LENNOX. Anthony van Dyck : : ee ; : MARS AND VENUS UNITED BY LOVE. Paolo Veronese THE NATIVITY. Fra Angelico : : : Y PARADISE. Giovanni di Paolo MADONNA AND CHILD WITH SAINTS. Gurolamo dat Libri : ; . i : : , 3 THE ANNUNCIATION. Roger van der Weyden ; THE HARVESTERS. Pieter Bruegel the Elder . YOUNG WOMAN WITH A WATER JUG. Johannes Ver- meer ; ‘ PIES Tb ye nara aaa i THE NATIVITY. £1 Greco : : HON. HENRY FANE WITH HIS GUARDIANS, INIGO JONES AND CHARLES BLAIR. Sir Joshua Rey- nolds { , F : : A : : THE CALMADY CHILDREN. Sir Thomas Lawrence .., BOY WITH AswoRD. Edouard Manet . f MRS. SYLVANUS BOURNE. John Singleton Copley NORTHEASTER. Wainslow Homer MADAME xX. John S. Sargent .., ARRANGEMENT IN FLESH COLOR AND BLACK— THEODORE DURET. James A. McNeill Whistler ix 26 30 42 44, 58 70 78 86 94 100 104 126 142 152 158 166 xX THE THINKER. SANTO DOMINGO DE GUZMAN, ILLUSTRATIONS Thomas Eakins El Greco ; VALENCIA. Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida . . THE SHELL HEAPS, FLORIDA. Winslow Homer THE SAND CART. George Bellows . PORTRAIT OF CHARLES W. PEALE. Benjamin West VIRGIN AND CHILD. Recently attributed to Nardo di Cidne ei °, FACING PAGE 174 198 206 210 214 230 238 EXPLORING NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES Part One: THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART CHAPTER ONE A GREAT TITIAN VISIT to the Metropolitan Museum of Art is frequently anticipated with apprehension. The entrance hall is far from reassuring in its pala- tial vastness; its flight of marble steps and enormous vistas of wings seem to sound a note of austerity and formality that are out of key for an informal ven- ture. Moreover, the Metropolitan contains such an amazing range of art objects, that after a little wandering on hard floors, many visitors become dis- couraged on finding themselves marooned, as it were, in the Oriental exhibits or possibly among antique casts or endless cases of small, wholly unknown and unappreciated exhibits. Museum docents are not always available while catalogues frequently prove perplexing. Yet every visitor, even with limited time or strength at his disposal, may make voyages of dis- covery for himself, and becoming assured of the ease 3 13 14 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES with which treasures are unearthed single-handed may pursue his own uncharted course hither and thither among the delights that are spread out for his delectation. One cannot be argus-eyed and look in every direction at once, but should resolutely fol- low a definite goal. One fine work of art viewed with leisure, appreciation and some comprehension of its history and significance bulks large in the memory, while scattered impressions of casually viewed objects glimpsed at random soon fade into a confused mélange. One could make no better commencement of such a self-conducted pilgrimage than to visit the Mar- quand Gallery to see the portrait of Alfonso d’ Este, of Ferrara, painted by Titian probably about 1523. Added to the thrill of beholding this superb work there is a piquancy of mystery and romance, for it was a lost portrait, now almost miraculously recov- ered, and in its early history was known to have been bartered by the Duke, its sitter, for political protec- tion from the Emperor Charles V. The Duke, like most princes of the Renaissance, was a connoisseur of art and especially appreciated the work of Titian. The great painter was frequently at the court of Ferrara and pointed out this portrait of his patron as his best work to the Emperor. ‘That, too, when there was at Ferrara that famous “cabinet” of his paintings which are now scattered among European museums. The best known of these, possibly, is the “Bacchus and Ariadne” of the London National Gallery. A GREAT TITIAN 15 When Charles was crowned Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and entered into an alliance with Pope Clement VII, he became feudal overlord and arbiter of the little cities, duchies, Papal States and tangled entities of the body politic of North Italy. While the Dukes of Este were powerful, they were also in a precarious position as Ferrara, their ducal city and seat, was exposed to the ravages of all the wars that might blaze out from the ever- smouldering embers of jealousy and enmity. Consequently despite marvelous fortifications and the military genius of the Duke, a little protection was appreciated. Politics were politics then as now and a price had to be paid for immunity, but it was a costly affair in this case, for Alfonso had to part with his much-cherished portrait. The Imperial Secretary kindly looked over Alfonso’s choice col- lection and concluded that whatever was omitted from the gift to his master the painting of the Duke should be included. Many diplomatic meas- ures were taken to shake the secretary’s decision, but it was useless. He was quite as decided on having the portrait as Alfonso was on keeping it. Not only had Titian declared it to be the best work that he had executed for the Duke, but no less a connois- seur and austere critic than Michael Angelo had greatly commended it. It is not strange that it cost _ Alfonso a bitter pang to surrender the portrait. But _ the Imperial Secretary was insistent and the Duke had to yield. Gracefully, one feels sure on viewing _ the portrait. There must have been great pomp and - « 16 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES elegance about even a slight gesture of this mag- nificent noble. Moreover, Alfonso had early learned — the necessity of paying for things with uncommon currency. His father, Duke Ercole I, had married him to the too well-known Lucrezia Borgia in order to strengthen the house politically. Lucrezia was both young and beautiful, but a little too adept at ridding herself of undesirable husbands to make her a pleasant match for any young man not sure of meeting her fancy. The last Italian documentary ac of the por- trait refers to it as hanging in the Emperor’s room in Bologna in 1533. Afterwards, according to other accounts, it was carried to Spain by the Emperor, where, in the latter part of the seventeenth century it appears to be listed in inventories of the castle at Madrid. From that time it disappears completely. The general supposition as to its fate was that it was destroyed by fire when the castle burned in the eight- eenth century. Then more than a year ago there was a report that it had been bought as an unknown ' work from a French chateau near Dijon. Conjec- ture alone can account for its reaching France. It may easily have been one of the spoils of Spain brought in during the Napoleonic Wars, but there is no certainty or knowledge of its history. All so- called attributions of ownership and identity are con- sequently missing. It is a picture without a pedigree, a fact which enabled the museum to obtain it for a sum enormously less than if it had been a painting by Titian which bore all the ascriptions of various A GREAT TITIAN i ownerships and provenance that make the genealog- ical tree of a painting. This portrait needs no attributions to establish it- self as a masterpiece. Since all the internal evi- dence in the character of the painting and design point to Titian, one may be content to accept the judgment of Bryson Burroughs, Curator of Fine Arts of the Museum, and rejoice that after years of hid- ing, this noble work has come into the light of day to delight us. It is interesting to note in connection with its purchase that the museum announces that “when sufficient income for the purpose shall have been received from the estate of the late Frank A. Munsey, it is the intention of the Trustees of the Museum to assign the portrait to his bequest ‘as a worthy first purchase from that benefaction, without which they would have hardly felt at liberty to buy this important picture.’ ” When you actually stand before this portrait you will probably be unmindful of anything but its serene beauty and power. It shows this Duke of Este in a rich panoply of furred garments, velvets and gold brocade. Jewels hold the slashings of the ample sleeves and a sapphire and pearl hang from a chain on his breast. The whole character of the man is in the painting of the hands, the one so negligently and gracefully laid upon the bronze cannon, with such space and atmosphere between the outspread thumb and the hint of lace ruffle coming out of the gold- tissued sleeve. Here is the hand of the dilettante and connoisseur, just as the thrust of the other hand 18 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES about the sword hilt reveals the power and vigor of his vital nature. It is a double echo of the crafty suggestion of the handsome face with its smooth mask of urbanity and its flashing eyes of almost con- temptuous pride. The face would, indeed, be hard, were it not for the beautiful painting of the hair that frames it and the silky beard, under which you sense the thrust of the resolute chin. It is probable that this prince of Este was about forty-seven years old at the time of the painting of this portrait. The violent, turbulent life of a great noble at this period has left its mark upon his fea- tures. The puffy folds about the eyes and the swol- len lids, the sagging of the face from the cheek bones, the sharpening of the aquiline nose, all emphasize that powerful and wealthy as he was, the cannon and sword were meet symbols to be included in his portraiture and that his gorgeous robes of cere- mony were but for the pageantry of his life of which tumult and strife were the background. Such a portrait is more than a powerful present- ment of an individual: it is also an epitome of the splendor of the Late Renaissance and those curiously contradictory elements that went into the web of its glittering tissue—frank sensuousness, refinement of esthetic sensibility, graciousness of elegant bearing and courtly manners, rapacity, the indifference of callous cruelty, passionate, pagan joy in living, and a delight in everything that contributes to making an art of existence and a pageant of life. It is all here in this canvas, so broadly handled and yet so subtly A GREAT TITIAN 19 and so marvelously invested with the actual sub- stance of this flesh and jewels, velvets and glowing stuffs. This is not realism; it is more than that, for it is not only the outward surfaces and textures, how- ever finely they are rendered, that we are made to feel in this vigorous portrait—it is the very essence, the substance of the things painted. It is interesting to know that the Duke was not content to be despoiled of his treasure. He does not have the bearing of a patient man. Later he had a second portrait executed by Titian, in which the pendent jewel of this portrait is replaced by the Order of St. Michael. A copy of this second por- trait is now in the Pitti Palace. Also, it appears highly improbable that this nobleman suffered many such despoilments, for his ceremonial placidity of sitter does not counterbalance the smoldering feroc- ity and intensity of his nature. One does not wonder on beholding him that Lucrezia Borgia, when she became his wife, found it quite expedient to give up her little laboratory experiments in poisons and settle down to the tamer duties of a Duchess. The portrait is the effulgence of a magnificent period, seized and preserved for us by an artist who was one of the glories of this very epoch and knew how to penetrate its secret character as well as give glorious presentment of its pomp and splendor. This artist, Tiziano Vecellio, or Titian, is himself a great and magnificent personage, the companion of his patrons whether prince, king, emperor or church dignitary. He was an artist of universal gifts 20 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES and majestic powers and in many ways summed up the Renaissance in his work. He was born of an old family and at ten or eleven years of age showed such unmistakable talent that he was sent to Venice to study under the great masters of his day, the two Bellinis, Gentile and Giovanni, and later under Giorgione. From the first his ability was recognized. He executed commissions for the Doges and Council of Venice, he visited the Dukes of Ferrara and Man- tua and put his genius at their command. He lived in Biri, a suburb of Venice in great luxury and ele- gance, receiving the world courteously and enter- taining in a truly royal fashion. The garrulous chronicler Vasari visited him there and comments on the splendor of his household and the charm of its host. There is a slight undercurrent of contemporary gossip about Titian’s love of gold. But it must have taken a great deal to keep up such an establishment as his and it is well known that dukes and emperors were slow in payments. Philip IV paid up some of his father’s debts to the artist, but did not show him- self so scrupulous about his own. Moreover, when your long score is against a prince who has a fine assortment of dungeons and plenty of men-at-arms the demand for services. rendered must be made in a propitiatory tone rather than a peremptory one. The artist lived to far past ninety and was carried off then by a visitation of the plague. An artist of great gifts and remarkable scope, there is no need to consider his work or its character here save to recall A GREAT TITIAN 21 the fact that his portraiture is the forerunner and example of all the great portraiture that followed, so that we may well look at the endowment of life and vitality that he has given to this haughty Italian duke, the seizure of the man in the fulness of his power and arrogance with such felicity of composi- tion, ease of pose and gorgeous depth of color, and realize how much later portrait painters owed to his serene and superb genius, CHAPTER TWO THE MARQUAND GALLERY HE Duke of Este, however magnificent, finds himself among his peers, as it were, since the Marquand Gallery contains some remarkable por- traits by masters of portraiture, as well as a collection of other important canvases of widely varying peri- ods and types. For this gallery is a sort of hall of honor, named, as the legend on the middle wall runs, “to commemorate the great services and gifts of Henry G. Marquand.” Mr. Marquand was one of the founders of the museum, its second president and one of its great benefactors. His portrait by John Singer Sargent hangs at the right as you enter from the main stairway. This portrait is a striking epitome of an intellectual, cultured individual. It is carried out with great facility, but also with breadth and repose. The sitter, turned in his chair with one long, thin hand flung out and the other supporting his head, is revealed as a nervous, energetic man beneath the outward composure of his reserve. It is remarkable how bodily gesture is made to accent the sensibility and endowments of the sitter, and the impression of mental activity outrunning lagging physical strength. Frans Hals, one of the great masters of portrait painting, is represented here by three canvases, two 22 THE MARQUAND GALLERY 23 of them—“Portrait of a Woman” and “Portrait of a Man”—gifts of Mr. Marquand. Frans Hals was so superb a craftsman that, even if there are to be no technical considerations in this rapid adventuring among pictures, one must realize a little how this gifted artist achieved his almost miraculous results. He was a Dutch painter, living and working in Haarlem, and for a time was a fashionable and much sought out artist; later he lost prestige and fortune and died a pauper. No one knows about his training or his teachers, for he comes to our knowledge only when he has perfected his craft and is a full-fledged master of the art of portraiture. Portrait painting was already popular in seven- teenth-century Holland when Hals appears in it. With the yoke of Spanish oppression finally re- moved from this sturdy little nation, a new era of prosperity and expansion set in and the peaceful arts flourished. What more natural than that the wealthy burgher should want his position and the continuity of his family marked by a portrait? Or what more natural, in an ultra-Protestant country where altar- pieces or religious subjects were not in demand, nor any grand style of mural decoration sought for princely palaces, than that painters should turn gladly to this form of figure painting? It was the sober realistic art of a sturdy, staid people, who wanted to have things represented as they were in a neat, tidy fashion. The slow, delib- erate building up of form that Hals found in prac- tice by contemporary Dutch portrait painters often 94 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES resulted in labored, formal work from which life had vanished in the elaborate process of its construc- tion. Hals painted directly and rapidly, giving to his canvases somewhat the character of a vivid sketch, with his decisive, crisp touches and bold brushwork. Yet for all his liveliness and summary procedure he was so accurate, in his laying in of light and color, of form and values, that in his best work there is the same completeness of rendering as in the laborious portraits of the conventional portrait painters of his day with an added endowment of miraculous life and vigor. In his late work he car- ried his swiftness of execution and trenchant han- dling still further, modifying his palette to blacks and whites to enable him to work even more rapidly, while his simplification of form became a marvelous technique of shorthand conveying brilliant impres- sions with the greatest economy of means. But always the accuracy and precision of the painter’s eye and hand, his knowledge and taste, must be reckoned with, as also his power to seize the essentials of his subjects and sum them up in a splendid ensemble. In this “‘Portrait of a Woman” you cannot fail to see what precision there is in the direct handling of the big brush, what exquisite rendering of the tex- tures in the white lace collar and cuffs, the rich stuffs of the dress and the pink petticoat beneath. But the seizing of personality is most amazing: the placid, self-reliant woman with her humorous, curious eager- ness piercing her formal pose. In her you are made to see how the stability and intensity of a people that THE MARQUAND GALLERY 25 so long had struggled for political and religious freedom is modified a little by security and pros- perity into serenity and content. This is more than the portrait of an individual; it is the portrait of a race and of a period, of a psychological moment held for all time in this beautiful gradation of light and even texture of surface. The Portrait of a Man” (H-16-8), by Hals represents the subject partly turned to the spectator, one hand on his hip and the other holding a glove. It is characteristic of the later period of the painter’s work, in its powerful modeling and restricted palette, its vigorous handling and full brush strokes. In fact, it is almost a monochrome of blacks and whites that melt occasionally into gray, giving a sobriety and dignity to the canvas. It is a trenchant, vivid portrait, direct, completely envisaged by its painter and rendered with such force and virility in its crafts- manship that at first it does not occur to the beholder to inquire by what subtleties and science this great work was accomplished. Rembrandt is represented in this gallery by two portraits. That of “Hendrickje Stoffels” is in the manner associated with much of his portraiture. This faithful member of the painter’s household is shown life size, slightly leaning forward in a fa- tigued posture—a fur cloak falling from her arm, pearls and a richness of costume. Poor Hendrickje, one would like to believe that even for a fleeting mo- ment this grandeur was hers and not simply studio properties. However, more of her, and of Rem- 26 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES brandt too, when the group of the Altman collection is reached. Here it is enough to note that this por- trait with its figure emerging from an amber radi- ance of enveloping atmosphere, its heaped up rough- ness of broken pigment and its monochrome of browns, is in direct contrast to the “Portrait of a Man” on the other wall. This latter painting, with its delicate, reserved power, its freedom from loaded pigment and its intensity of characterization, gives not only accurate rendering of the externals of cos- tume and feature, but reveals qualities of mind and heart. It is a great and noble portrait. At one end of the gallery is Anthony Van Dyck’s portrait of James Stuart, Earl of Lennox, who was a cousin of Charles I, of England. Van Dyck at nineteen was in the studio of Rubens in Antwerp, and even then had some reputation as a portrait painter. After two years’ study with this master he spent some time in Italy, painting portraits and studying the great Italian painters. Later, a few years after his return to Antwerp, Van Dyck was in- vited to London by Charles I, and there he remained for practically the rest of his short life. How pop- ular and how busy this fashionable court painter became is attested by the tremendous body of his work. Unfortunately, the demands on his time could not be met, so there is a great proportion of work which he left to his assistants after his first rapid study of the sitter in black and white chalk was completed. His practice of using servants of his establishment to furnish models for the hands of his JAMES STUART, DUKE OF LENNOX, ANTHONY VAN DYCK Metropolitan Museum of Art Ae ae te en THE MARQUAND GALLERY 2 sitters also is evidence against the sincerity of much of the portraiture labeled “Van Dyck.” Yet in his work, for the king or for his friends, the artist shows himself a consummate master of his craft. This portrait is typical of Van Dyck’s power to invest his subject with an air of good breeding and refinement that seems to correspond to an inward fineness and dignity of nature. This young noble- man, with his pendent jewel of the Order of the Garter, its star embroidered magnificently on his black coat, and his rich, but tasteful costume, has the negligent, self-assured bearing that bespeaks utter confidence in oneself and one’s position. Yet there is no assertiveness or insolence in the pose. The ease of the outspread hand on one hip and the graceful posture of the whole body appear natural and char- acteristic, as do the direct, fearless gaze and protec- tive gesture of affection to the greyhound huddled against him. For all the exquisite elaboration of the lace collar and details of his dress, there is breadth and vividness in this portrait. The face, particularly, is beautifully modeled, while the whole figure is handled with the precision and restraint of refined technique. Two portraits by the fifteenth-century Italian, Sebastiano del Piombo, show him abandoning the glow of his Venetian coloring for a sober austerity of color scheme. Both of these works were carried out in his Roman period when he was working under Michael Angelo. They reflect much of the influence of the great master. The portrait of Columbus, 28 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES a posthumous one, is more than life size, majestic and imposing. The other, “Portrait of a Man,” with its grandeur of design, its reserve and an almost severe restriction of palette, possesses great dignity and sincerity. The center painting of this hall, the “Colonna” Madonna and Saints, or “Virgin Enthroned with Saints,” is by Raphael, an early work carried out for the nuns of the Convent of St. Anthony of Padua, at Perugia. It belongs to the early period of — Raphael’s work when he lived in Florence. In this one artist there seems to be summed up all the varied expressions of the art of the Renaissance. He had been a pupil of Perugino and absorbed much of his manner. Coming to Florence, he came directly under the influence of Fra Bartolommeo and studied the work of Donatello, Leonardo and Pollaiuolo, so that on his Umbrian suavity and sentiment was grafted the Florentine science of mass, volume and movement. In the group of this altar-piece there is much of Perugino, especially in the type of the Virgin with her somewhat affected pose of head. The dignity and force of the heads of Peter and Paul and the careful architectonics of the harmonious composi- tion, with its depth of perspective and fine space re- lations, indicate other influences. The softness of the Umbrian landscape and the elaborate character of the ornamental details again remind us of Peru- gino. The figures of the Child and St. John are, curiously enough, clothed, because, as Vasari tells us, Py ee ene THE MARQUAND GALLERY 29 the nuns who ordered the altar-piece, “those simple and pious women willed it so.” The virgin saints crowned with roses, and the mood of emotional susceptibility to beauty of form and color, give this work a gentle serenity of impression. In the tympanum lunette is a figure of the Almighty in the act of blessing the group. The predella panels are in England in the possession of different individuals. A number of sketches for this composition are also in England. The painting passed from the possession of the nuns of St. Anthony of Padua—they were forced to sell it to obtain funds. It was bought by the Colonna family of Rome and kept by them for a long time. From that fact it is often called the “Colonna Madonna.” Allegory seems to us to-day rather a limping Pegasus to trust to for any inspired flights. Yet in this same gallery there are two magnificent allegor- ical canvases, “‘Mars and Venus” by Paolo Veronese and “Venus and Adonis” by Peter Paul Rubens. It is not difficult to realize why these artists turned joy- fully to allegory as an escape from either the con- ventional restrictions of religious subjects or the real- istic limitations imposed by portraiture. Veronese was a Venetian of the late Renaissance, one of the three great figures of the sixteenth cen- tury. Essentially a decorator, he was absorbed in rendering the pomp and splendor of life and the glory and magnificence of Venice. His beautiful arabesques of pattern with their silvery sheen and opulent color, as one sees them in this group, reveal 30 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES his ability to build up grandeur of design with easy fluency of painting. The blonde, radiant Venus, standing with her hand upon the neck of Mars, serves as a complete foil for the latter’s powerful figure as he bends his dark head against the nacreous whiteness of her shoulder. The deep blue drapery on the fig- ure of the goddess, the gleaming gold armor of the god, the fall of the reddish blue folds of his cloak, the beautiful architectural detail of the back- ground, the distant landscape, the woodeny charger (which is surely one of the horses of St. Mark’s come to life), are warp and woof of a splendid pat- tern. The breadth and luminous effect of the paint- ing are due in no small measure to the coolness of the high lights and the rich flood of color in the shadows, characteristic of much of the work of this painter, while the beauty of his space relations and the surety and mastery of his brush work are truly magical. In the ripple of light and color in his stuffs there is a remarkable range of tones, as well as a silvery brilliancy of sheen. Rubens is, of course, one of the Titans of paint- ing, and this glowing allegory of “Venus and Adonis” is carried out with such apparent ease and vigor that one might not suspect the precision, science and delicacy of technique responsible for its har- monies of composition and color. It was painted in his middle period when his violence of dramatic action and striking oppositions of color were modi- fied to a greater suavity and serenity. The beautiful nude Venus, with the set of the fine head on the MARS AND VENUS UNITED BY LOVE. PAOLO VERONES Metropolitan Museum of Art > THE MARQUAND GALLERY 3 slender white throat and her radiance of gleaming flesh, is a voluptuous pagan figure, even if it is a Flemish interpretation of paganism. One feels that Rubens suffered from no complexes, but gave rein to his delight in splendid types of robust manhood and luxuriant womanhood. This painting was at one time in the possession of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, a gift from the Emperor Joseph. It is one of several developments of the same theme by the painter, possibly influenced by Titian’s render- ing of the subject. Probably the landscape and dogs were put in by Rubens’s assistant, Jan Wildens. Since this is a loan painting, and might disappear, it may be better to discuss Rubens later with the Dutch school. | In decided contrast to these large allegorical can- vases with their gorgeous paraphernalia is the small painting hanging at one end of the Marquand Gal- lery. It is “A Visit to the Nursery” by Gabriel Metsu, a Dutch painter-of the seventeenth century. It is a genre picture, that is, a picture of familiar, everyday life, in which the setting and background are to be reckoned with as well as the figures. The lightness and delicacy of the work, the feeling for niceness of scale and distribution of light, are also factors of great importance. Metsu was a pupil of Gerard Dou, who in turn was a pupil of Rembrandt, so he stemmed directly from the traditions and in- fluence of the great master. Here we have the anec- dotal interest of the painting quite subordinated to the beauty of its substances and textures and the 32 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES lovely pattern of light that bathes the whole room, with no sharp contrast of light and shadow but rather a diffusion of golden atmosphere. In the glistening white satin dress of the young mother with its contrasting red jacket or the dull white linen wrappings of the child, the rich color of the Persian rug on the table and the brilliant gleaming surfaces of the silver vessels, you can see*how easily Metsu could vary his manner of brushwork to fit the occa- sion, giving crispness, or solidity or translucence as the various substances require, yet fusing them all into a beautiful harmony of surfaces, smooth and glowing. For all this exquisite nicety of finish, there is breadth and fine unity of underlying design to which each note of color and each varying com- ponent of detail serve as accents of emphasis. CHAPTER ‘THREE EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS EAVING the Marquand Gallery where we have lingered so long, we now pass through the right-hand door at the back and crossing Gallery 12 pass into Gallery 39, which contains Italian paint- ings of the fourteenth century. In the works of Titian and Veronese we have seen some of the last flowerings of Italian art; now we may trace a few of its beginnings. The term “Italian art” is a most misleading one, for it seems to imply something national and unified, whereas in its early history Italy was, as a matter of fact, broken up into city- states perpetually at war with each other. In these isolated towns and cities, separated by the violence of internecine war as well as actual physical distance, strongly individual forms of art arose. Influences seeped through the barrier of warfare and animosity and modified the native genius of local work, yet there is a marked character in the artists of different divisions of Italy—Lombard, Sienese, Florentine, Venetian or other schools. We may begin with Sienese art in this gallery, since there is here a remarkable altar-piece of the fourteenth century by Segna di Bonaventura, of Siena. Before we get to Segna, however, we must 33 34. NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES go back a moment to the founder of this school, Duc- cio di Buoninsegna, whose genius makes him one of the great figures among the early Italians. It is said that Duccio had a teacher from Byzantium. Whether this report is true or not, the fact remains that at this period Siena was in close contact with Byzantine art, particularly with its illuminated manuscripts, and must have been profoundly influ- enced by its peculiar artistic conventions. Byzantium (the modern Constantinople), as the capital of the Roman Empire under Constantine, was a converging point for currents of Oriental and Western influ- ences, Christian and Mahometan; these merged in a Christian art that was as far as possible from any realistic representation, but had a symbolical con- vention for natural forms. Its angularity and sharp- ness of line indicate how much both geometrical ideals of Oriental art and Eastern calligraphic design prevailed in this compromise. Mosaic was one of the favored materials for Byzantine work, the un- yieldingness of this medium exactly suiting the ri- gidity of accepted artistic theories. Even the brilliant blue and gold backgrounds of this work could not mitigate the strange, awesome effect of its repre- sentations of mysterious and ascetic figures un- touched by emotion or sympathy. Into this formal art Duccio managed to infuse warmth and gentle- ness, while not diverging too widely from its con- ventions of angularity and rigid symbolism. His great “Majestas,” in Siena, is not only impressive and resplendent in its richness of decoration, but it EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS 35 is endowed with a new sentiment of humanity and tenderness. 3 Segna di Bonaventura, as did many of the fol- lowers of Duccio, continued to work in the Byzan- _tine manner, rendering the folds of the draperies, as here, with fine gold lines. He preserved the mysti- cism of the old conventions while he softened the harshness of the outlines, adding something personal to the interpretation. Here we have angels and apostles on each side, and in the central panel the Virgin, clad in the rich blue tradition demanded, with a head covering of warm peach color and hold- ing a deep red drapery about the Child. In this altar-piece, we have the characteristics of late Byzan- tine art in the high finish, the definiteness of forms and the use of gold and gem-like color, but also we have a new ideal of a tender poetic character, which We associate with Sienese art. It is still decoration with little interest in solidity or structure, with con- centration on finish and brilliant color, but it is also imbued with gentleness and spiritual tenderness. There is here a “St. Catherine” by Pietro Loren- zetti, a follower of Duccio, that shows the Sienese love of ornament, rich tones and exotic types of beauty. The brocaded green and gold gown of the saint, her wine-colored mantle, the gold background, the crown and halo tooled in gold, make a decora- tive effect increased by the arched top of the panel with its ornamentation of black and red against tin- foil. here is also a Sienese “Life of Christ,” a 36 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES triptych, which is highly decorative; gold bands of stamped pattern divide it into sixteen scenes. The figures have a curious Gothic tempering which sug- gests Northern influence. The big processional banner by Spinello Aretino makes a brave showing. It was originally painted on both sides, but has now been backed by canvas. It represents Mary Magdalen enthroned with angels playing on instruments, and tiny kneeling figures in the foreground. The banner, executed for the Brotherhood of San Sepolcro, at Gubbio, must have made a fine effect in procession. It seems rather cold and hard with its pale gold, cool greens and rose, but the well-contrived design carries trium- phantly. Part of its original architectural border had to be cut off, so the banner was formerly larger and still more imposing. The origins of the Florentine school are repre- sented by an “Epiphany,” attributed variously to one of Giotto’s followers. Giotto was such a tremendous phenomenon on the art horizon that he left a host of disciples who continued, for the most part, to copy the obvious characteristics of the master with little comprehension of his depth and scope. Florentine art is something of a link between Greek art and the modern world, for it had close affiliations in its source with the Roman school (particularly in the work of Pietro Cavallini), and this same Roman school never quite lost sight of classic tradition. So that, if in Giotto we are surprised to find that dra- matic movement, solidity, mass in the human form EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS 37 and greater freedom of composition supplant the Byzantine stiffness and flatness characteristic of early Italian art, much of this superiority is due doubtless to Giotto’s contact with the Roman school. Even in this work by a follower of Giotto, there is more than a hint of the master’s power to convey emotion by bodily gesture, his love of the picturesque and the epic quality of his genius. The strange combination of the figures of the nativity, the angel and shep- herds, with the magi of the Epiphany makes a curi- ous ensemble, but there is a delightful, homely intimacy in the attitudes and gestures, while in the figure of the Madonna and Child there are dig- nity and a sense of brooding divinity. The color is clear and glowing. These disciples of Giotto, Giotteschi, as they were often called, were to continue the tradition of the great artist in more and more diluted power until the appearance of another original creative genius in the person of Masaccio. One of these Giotteschi, Taddeo Gaddi, was associated with Giotto as pupil and assistant for more than twenty years; he was also Giotto’s godson. An altar-piece by him in this room indicates clearly how clever a craftsman he was and how uninspired an artist. The robustness of the dignified figures of the saints and their slanting eyes recall Giotto, but the Virgin and the angels are far too sugary. It is a pretentious tableau rather than a lofty religious group. However, it is pleasant to re- call that even if Taddeo, with all his striving to reach the tremendous height of his master, still re- 38 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES mains a secondary figure, he had the honor of com- pleting the unfinished campanile, in Florence, at the death of Giotto and also the credit of designing and carrying out the Ponte Vecchio. Another primitive, this time of the Venetian school, is also here in “Christ Rising from the Tomb,” by Michele Giambono. As in the case of the artist of the Florentine “Epiphany,” Giambono is not an important artist or the founder of the school, but he is interesting because he illustrates how Venetian art was throwing off its purely Eastern character and be- ginning to be affected by the realistic tendencies of more developed schools. The first glance at this gaunt, emaciated figure with its distortions of line recalls Byzantine work and reminds us how long the Venetians remained under Oriental influence. For Venice, isolated on her lagoons, turned to the East for her commerce and was in turn profoundly in- fluenced by her intercourse with Eastern civilization. The magnificence of the aristocratic republic was amply expressed by the splendor of the decorative art of Byzantium and its formal hieratic style, so that it was long untouched by the artistic awakening of the rest of Italy. Decades after Giotto had painted his magnificent frescoes in near-by Padua, Venice continued to cherish these exaggerated, for- mal types of Byzantium with their green underglaze and elaboration of gilding and ornament. In other works of Giambono there is evidence of later in- fluence, both Florentine and Veronese, that modifies his set artistic expression and gives it some realism EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS 39 and vitality, but in this limp, almost grotesque figure with its emphasis of tragic pose the character of much of early Venetian painting may be appre- hended. The set of panels which form a predella, or base of an altar-piece, representing the “Life of St. Lucy” repay study for their vividness, the richness of their coloring and their really poetic treatment of this theme from the Golden Legend. They are of Tus- can origin and indicate that the painter had studied, or perhaps worked, with Fra Angelico, whose “Nativity” is to be seen in the adjoining gallery. In predelle where the conventions of a serious altar- piece did not limit the painter, there is always more freedom of subject and treatment. The fancy of the artist is allowed scope and more liberty of cre- ative expression, so that for all their seeming in- significance they usually have much interest and value. The panel representing St. Lucy refusing to move when bidden by profane persecutors, although teams of lusty oxen are harnessed to drag her, is a dramatic scene. A wooden panel, probably executed by Giovanni da Milano, of the “Virgin and Child with Donors” is amusing with its little donors kneeling solemnly at each end of the painting, anxiously getting into the picture and seeking approbation for their gener- osity in providing this fine decoration. There is the Sienese love of ornate design with something of the new science of Florentine painting, and even a touch of other influences, in this quaint little semicircular 40 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES panel with its warm color. A “Madonna and Child” on a wooden panel is by Lorenzo il Monaco and shows a sort of transition between Sienese art and the Florentine painting of the Giotteschi. There is no attempt at any literal representation, — the old hieratic type is still followed but there is a sense of animation and dramatic gesture with nicely chosen color. A series of three panels from a chest, or cassone, should be noticed, for it is a typical form of Italian decorative art. These octagonal panels with their elaborate borders, their gold backgrounds, coats of arms and emblematic banners represent scenes from the war of Charles of Durazzo against Otto of Brunswick and give a vivid commentary on feudal warfare. At the right you see Charles at- tacking the army of Otto, at the left entering the city of Naples, and in the center receiving the sub- mission of the conquered Otto. A note that must be inserted here is a reminder that in this period oil painting was not practiced. These paintings are executed in tempera, that is, the color was tempered by yolk of egg or other sub- stances. As a medium there is much to commend ~ it, because of its clearness, delicate bloom of surface and definiteness of outline, as well as the important feature of its surprising permanency. Passing into Gallery 38, we leave the so-called “Primitives” and enter the sphere of the early Renaissance, which may be roughly marked as the opening of the fifteenth century. The “St. Ursula” at the left barely gets in under this chronological EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS 4I barrier. It is a Venetian painting, with much of the Gothic in its character. It has, somewhat, the gorgeous decorative effect of old miniatures or even of enamels in its gilded relief against a background of vermilion. The saint, in a mauve robe figured with gold and a deep blue and gold mantle lined with green, is surrounded by a resplendent group of her maidens clad in exquisite tones of pale pink, green and gray with gold patternings. It is a bril- liant and charming decoration, but it is also an apparent attempt to differentiate individuals and _ get away from the conventional generalization of types. This fact is quite evident if you gaze closely at these clustering maidens with their little blobs of noses and round staring eyes. The legend of St. Ursula and her maidens departing on their pilgrim- age to meet a tragic death was one of the favorite stories of an age that loved its stories told over and Over again as any bedtime child. But it is seldom that such a magnificent little St. Ursula or gay bevy of maidens is met with. | The series of scenes from the tale of the Argo- nauts also shows this delight in story-telling. The panels were probably parts of chests. We have a curious interpretation of classic myth in the idiom of another people and another psychology, as also an indication of the growing interest in classic sub- jects and antiquity. The “Crucifixion” by Pesel- lino, a Florentine who did not live long enough to fulfil his promise, is particularly interesting for its background of naturalistic landscape. The glowing : 42 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES sky and the dark pines and cypresses of his own Tuscany with hovering clouds above are far differ- ent from the medizval character of its conventional figures and foreground. The most absorbing painting in this gallery is the little panel of the “Nativity” by Fra Angelico, al- ready referred to. It is quite possible that some of the work was carried out by fellow workers or pupils, for in some details there is a difference of handling. But this fact does not detract from its importance or its immense significance as the work of a figure that looms large in the epoch following the Giotteschi. On the wall near the entrance is a “Madonna” at- tributed to Masolino, which shows the character of Fra Angelico’s painting to a marked degree. It is not difficult to understand how such a painter exerted great influence, for in Fra Angelico we see the old medizval ideas giving way to the naturalism that marks the fifteenth century. It is, doubtless, the in- fluence of Fra Angelico upon Pesellino that ac- counts for the modern feeling of the landscape in the “Crucifixion,” with its effect of distance and atmosphere. Fra Giovanni da Fiesole—or, as we know him better, Fra Angelico—was a Dominican monk who came to Florence about the middle of the fifteenth century and became a member of the community of San Marco until he was summoned to Rome to work for the Pope in the Vatican. Because of his naive, almost childish, faith and ecstatic joy in both his re- ligion and his painting, he was called by the monks THE NATIVITY. FRA ANGELICO Metropolitan Museum of Art EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS 43 of his order “Angelico,” the angelic, or sometimes, “Beato,” the happy. Much of his work reflects this ecstasy of emotion, this delight in joyous color and tender, sweet interpretations of holy legends. Part of this predilection for clear, brilliant color and ex- quisite detail of flowers and happy creatures who dance and sing eternally bathed in blissful rapture, came from his early training as a miniaturist for illu- minated manuscripts. His later work shows his reaction to the influences of the Renaissance, particu- larly to the scientific spirit of Florentine painters. From an idealist with a simple clarity of anecdote garnished with marvelous delicacy of color and charming types of saints and angels, he became an innovator, employing difficult feats of foreshorten- ing and aerial perspective, and, as in this panel, showing robustness of conception and strength of composition. True we still have the delightful gar- land of angels above the roof of the stable and the exquisite tenderness of the Madonna’s bowed head. But the figure of Joseph is solidly modeled and shows power of characterization. The Holy Family kneeling in the little court into which the curious ox and ass gaze reflectively, as well as the peeping shep- herd, lose no whit of their deep devoutness because the painter has become a close observer of natural phenomena or records his observations in a scientific as well asa religious temper. This panel lacks the dazzling clarity of pure high color that marks much of this artist’s work, but it shows a matured and tem- pered idealism that marks a high point of his powers. 44 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES It is impossible not to feel the influence of Fra Angelico in the beautiful “Madonna and Child” which we have referred to, here attributed to Maso- lino. Since this painting is from the estate of Theodore M. Davis, which is still in litigation, there is no need of going into any technical question about a work which may not eventually become museum property. It appears, however, that Dr. Richard Offner’s attribution to some follower of Fra Angelico is probable. It is a distinguished painting, exquisite in color,.imbued with spiritual significance, carried out with solidity and vigorous handling. There is in it a fine balance between naturalism and poetic interpretation that gives the work great power. Giovanni di Paolo’s “Paradise,” depicting figures newly arrived in a Paradise of flowery meadows where angels guide them to a radiance pouring from some celestial source or showering upon them in golden rays, has the full richness of Sienese coloring. It is a Tuscan hillside made into a wonderful mille fleur tapestry, with its fine, sinuous line enmeshing leaves and flowers, fruit and nibbling rabbits as back- ground of the delightful groups of fashionable fif- teenth-century figures with charming costumes and graceful gestures, or churchmen in all their splendid regalia of office. Each little cluster of figures makes a separate composition, yet takes its part in the pleas- ing pattern. Doubtless there was originally another panel to show the tortures and terrors of the lost _ against this foil of glowing beauty. PARADISE. GIOVANNI DI PAOLO Metropolitan Museum of Art . EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS — 45 Francesco di Giorgio, also a Sienese, presents an amusing “Triumph,” which indicates the new fash- ion of classical subjects, although there is nothing classical in the rendering of the theme—a lady in a brocaded gown is drawn in a gilded chariot by two lean griffins and is surrounded by an escort of blonde ladies clad in brocades and quite modish with pearl necklaces and gloves, while more attenuated griffins bring up the rear of the procession. Another Sienese painter, Benvenuto di Giovanni, is represented by an “Assumption of the Virgin” in the old ideal of decorative and poetic work, charac- teristic of this school, while Bernardina Fungai, in his “Nativity,” shows how much later artists of Siena were influenced by other schools. It is, certainly, a far step from this healthy and blooming Virgin ele- gantly attired to the severe, ascetic, spiritual type of the Madonna of Segna di Bonaventura! The land- scape is filled with a multiplicity of detail in the background and many diverting incidents, but the artist has been able to subdue all this elaboration into a pleasing ensemble bathed in a cool, silvery light. At one end of the gallery there is a large painting of “Four Saints” by Filippo Lippi which is in a bad state of preservation, the head of one of the saints being quite obliterated and much detail and color totally lost. Yet from this wing of an altar-piece in a damaged condition, one may see what breadth there is in the handling, what plastic quality in the figures with their broad masses of rich color melting 46 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES into one hue and then into another, producing not only a wealth of color but a subtle refinement not to be found in other contemporary work. The seiz- ing of character marks the especial characteristic of Lippi, for he did much to humanize the religious conventions of his day and make his saints and holy figures near to their living models. Yet there is a gentle, poetic quality also in his sensuous beauty. To realize how far he advanced in his realization of naturalistic types, compare the “Madonna and Child” by Bramantino, a Lombard painter, which hangs near. In Bramantino’s work there is no warmth or sympathy, the human form, or his ideal- ized representation of it, is used only as a motif in decoration and remains cold and aloof. There are a number of interesting panels, such as those from a cassone, which show Florentine buildings in the background or those depicting scenes from the life of King Nebuchadnezzar on three sunken panels, or the panels by Botticelli, which were probably for the decoration of a chest to contain clerical vest- ments. In this last work there are no subtleties of color but sharpness of outline and clarity of pattern. Like all such narratives, progressive action is shown by the depiction of different incidents of the same episode against a common background. The sub- ject of the panels is the miracles of St. Zenobius. The line is energetic, giving precision and vigor to the contours. The colors are brilliant, with no deli- cacy of finish, but lending an emphasis to the mosaic of the lively design. EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS 47 Two marriage salvers, deschi da nozze, contribute a touch of the domestic intimate life of the early Renaissance. These platters, really wooden panels of twelve sides, were used to carry gifts and were themselves, no doubt, the most treasured part of some wedding offering preserved for the decoration of the new home. The paintings on these two salvers of the late fourteenth century are carried out in an absolutely realistic manner, rather than with a decorative intent. They apparently illustrate episodes in some familiar story and have a gay, en- gaging character quite removed from the more seri- ous aspects of contemporaneous paintings concerned with religious subjects. One of these salvers shows so charming a mountain landscape that one does not wonder that its proud recipient, or her descendants, cherished and preserved it. In the next gallery, number 35, we make ac- quaintance with a great story teller, Benozzo Goz- zoli, whose pageant of the “Adoration of the Magi” makes such a splendid decoration on the walls of the chapel of the Riccardi Palace, in Florence. The panels here are parts of a small altar-piece, painted for a chapel in the Church of San Pier Maggiore in Florence. They represent the fall of Simon Magus, as told in the Golden Legend, the conversion of St. Paul, a miracle of St. Zenobius and an incident in the life of St. Benedict. There is not much religion in these entertaining panels, but there is the charm of well-told incident related in a chatty, intimate style with a certain gorgeous panoramic boldness of 48 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES presentation. There is much of the medieval and Gothic in both the conception and technique, but the spirit of pageantry and vitality shows the artist to be a true child of the Renaissance, an engaging nar- rator of incident, if somewhat inclined in his larger works to be redundant and garrulous. His magnifi- cence of decoration had much effect on artists of his own and a later day. The predella panels by Botticini depicting respectively “Tobias and the Angel,” the “Marriage of the Virgin” and the “Burial of St. Zenobius” show.a phase of this delight in story-telling, although here the subjects are reli- gious and the treatment more suitable to such themes. There is much breadth in these charming little scenes. The panels of a cassone depicting hunting scenes, the work of Piero di Cosimo, are full of classic allusion in their satyrs, strange animals and centaurs in com- bat, carried out with decisive line and vigorous com- position in browns and ambers. This work has full Renaissance flavor in its conceptions and vital, alert style. A charming head of “John the Baptist” by the same artist is in the next gallery, 36, which holds — the Dreicer collection. The “Nativity” by Fiorenzo di Lorenzo shows the influence of Benozzo Gozzoli in its picturesque interpretation of Biblical story and its idyllic setting of Umbrian landscape for the figures. In its small compass this is remarkably varied and shows the artist a delightful raconteur able to give piquancy and interest to a much-painted theme, as well as suavity and charm through the landscape setting. EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS 49 The “Descent from the Cross,” school of Filip- pino Lippi, follows in its general plan the altar- piece now in the Academy, in Florence, which was begun by Lippi, but finished by Perugino. The composition indicates that it belongs to the late period of Lippi’s work when his natural repose and idealism were being supplanted by a realism and a search for dramatic impressions. The tondo by Lorenzo di Credi depicting the Ma- donna kneeling in adoration before the Child lying on the ground, with the infant St. John also kneeling and an angel supporting him, is finely composed with its beautiful background of landscape and fine space filling. The figures have more majesty than is usual in di Credi’s work while the beauty of the brilliant surface, almost enameled, and the ease of the rhythms make this a delightful work. “Three Saints” by Lorenzo Costa, for all its im- posing proportions and pleasing passages of color, has little significance. It may be that working with Francia, the great eclectic, Costa became too suave and many-sided to have much flavor. But it is in- teresting to note in this painter of Ferrara, who forms something of a link between his school and that of Bologna and Venice, how much the different local schools influenced and were in turn influenced by each other. Two horrible examples are in this gallery in the sense that it is painful to find artists of even average ability drawn into imitation of a dominating figure of their contemporary artistic world. In the sugary 50 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES “Girl with Cherries” by Ambrogio de Predis, pupil and assistant of Leonardo da Vinci, and the ‘“Ma- donna” by Gianpetrino, which is palpable imitation of Leonardo, one sees pleasing talent gone wrong. The imposing figure of “St. Christopher,” a fresco, of the school of Pollaiuolo, is of colossal size. It indicates the attempt of the artist himself, and his followers, to find a means of full artistic expression in the human form, usually rendered with dynamic force and scientific thoroughness of anatomical structure. | In the next gallery, 34, we arrive at the High Renaissance in paintings of the fifteenth and six- teenth centuries. The “Madonna and Child,” a tempera painting by Giovanni Bellini, although from the Theodore Davis estate, cannot be passed by, for it is perhaps the loveliest of this artist’s earlier works. The figure rises majestically, filling the arch of the panel and creating an impression of more than hu- man power blended with adoring tenderness. Its pearly coolness of color illustrates the merits of this medium, which have already been referred to, for the exquisite bloom of the color, the incisiveness and clarity of the whole painting, with its beauty of surface and transparency of tones, make a decided impression. There is a solemnity in this figure, a fine sincerity in its conception and a mastery in its handling, with no attempt at chiaroscuro or exag- geration of emphasis, but reliance on contour for its modeling. Another “Madonna and Child” by Bel-’ lini dates from the early period of his use of oil as EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS 51 a medium. This manner of painting had been in- troduced in Venice in the latter part of the fifteenth century by Antonello da Messina. ‘This early oil painting contains a quality of nacreous light that is reminiscent of his tempera paintings. The Mother leans out against a dull reddish-orange curtain. She is hardly characterized in the aloofness of her some- what hieratic expression. The Child seems to look with fascinated gaze at some object not in the pic- ture. Another almost similar composition by Bellini in which cherubs attract the Child’s attention 1s often referred to in explaining this curious effect. Here he models with fused light and shade, em- ploying marvelous richness of color and surety of drawing while keeping the interest concentrated on the religious content of the subject in a tender, poetic version of the sacred theme. A “Pieta” by Carlo Crivelli, a contemporary of Bellini’s, shows the old Byzantine tradition con- tinued in the work of this Venetian, who lived apart from the artists of his day, at Ascoli on the Marches, and perpetuated Gothic influences. This ‘“Pieta” indicates some of his characteristics in its precision of contours, its monumental character, its emaciated forms and its elaboration of ornament, gilding and decorative accessories. There is deep sincerity in this painting with a fine dignity of presentation. The fluent rhythms and balance of composition give it an impressive character. A painting by Carpaccio, “Meditation on the Pas- sion,” forms a curious contrast to the usual style of 52 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES this painter of ceremonial and pageantry. Here the dead body of Christ rests on a broken marble throne. On each side of him sit lean, withered old men surrounded by symbols that identify them more or less clearly as St. Onuphrius and St. Jerome. There is an enormous stretch of background infused with a melancholy beauty and filled with a remarkable amount of detail. The meditation on the atonement, as the evident theme of the painting, gives an austere character to the work, accentuated by its mystical symbolism. ‘Though not characteristic of Carpaccio in its general tenor, it illustrates his combination of religious painting with decorative style, employing rather exotic material for much of his meticulous and overabundant detail. The fact that this paint- ing has a false signature attaches a curious interest to it. A rather affected portrait of a man is attributed to Andrea Solario. A pleasing “Virgin and Child” is by Vincenzo Foppa, of the Brescian school, dec- orative in its skilful combinations of rich color set off by the gold of the haloes. There is a little of the majestic quality of Bellini’s Madonnas in this Virgin. An imposing “Madonna and Child,” by Bartolomeo Montagna, portrays the Madonna in her conventional blue mantle before a beautiful land- scape background of peaceful river and fortified town. The whole painting is full of atmospheric effect, cool and pearly in tone. The figure of the Madonna is given dignity and pathos, and a warmth of humanity, yet is finely restrained in its treatment. EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS 53 A “Madonna and Child” by Bartolommeo Vivarini shows the influence of Carlo Crivelli in its orna- mental treatment, its frank decoration of fruits and flowers and its crispness of contours. The Madonna is curiously imperturbable, unmoved apparently by the angels who play on instruments or the Child who seems to demand her attention. A portrait by Vincenzo Catena gives an impression of a vigorous, powerful man with a direct, active nature. It is a far more interesting work than the canvas of the “Circumcision” by the same artist, also here. A portrait by Moroni of “Bartolomeo Bongo” is a life- size figure seated and turned partly to the beholder. It is a distinguished, realistic portrait broadly han- dled and finely designed with harmonious balance of rich, dark tones, but it has not much penetration of character or intimacy of revelation. The portrait of “Cosimo de’ Medici” by Bronzino is much like the one in the Academy in Florence, but evidently an earlier work. Bronzino was court painter to Cosimo. Although he was no colorist, he had a remarkable power of interpreting the character of his sitter and gave his portraits a fine distinction. A predella by Perugino is an important work, for it is rare to come upon any painting by this artist in our galleries. It is a rather hackneyed composition that the painter employed more than once, and the figures are also familiar in much of Perugino’s work. The impassivity and exaggerated serenity of many of these figures, detached from each other and from the scene in which they appear, is characteristic of 54 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES the artist, as is the placidity of the landscape and the haze in which it is wrapped. There is a depth of religious emotion in this work, emphasized by. the strange self-absorption of the figures and the stretch of empty landscape. One cannot judge of this painter by so small a fragment of his work, yet even here may be discerned much of his power of composition, his understanding of perspective and warm color, as well as his poetic, contemplative mood. There are many other interesting paintings in these last three galleries which so casual a guide cannot pause for, but the wanderer may enjoy them at lei- sure. Among them the “Man and Woman at a Casement,” probably by Uccello, illustrates the Florentine passion for geometry and realism. It will probably impress you as remarkably modern. Or, there is the “St. Barbara,” by Francia, with its mingling of Perugino and Raphael and its suggestion of how little borrowing avails if it cannot be assimilated. CHAPTER FOUR LATER ITALIAN PAINTING TALIAN painting of the sixteenth to the eight- eenth century is shown in Gallery 30; this is reached from the previous gallery, 34, by crossing the adjoining one, reserved for special exhibitions. This later period of Italian art, though containing a few great names, is in general one of decadence, marked by the decline of political power in Venice, then the art center of Italy. Two of the great names, Titian and Paolo Vero- nese, have already been considered in the Marquand Gallery; a third, that of Jacopo Robusti, or Tinto- retto, is represented here. ‘Tintoretto was a sobri- quet applied to the painter; he began life as an apprentice to his father, a dyer, and so earned the title of “Tintoretto,” the little dyer. He is not adequately represented here. From the preliminary sketch of “A Doge in Prayer before the Redeemer,” formerly in the possession of Ruskin and occupying a place of honor in his dining-room at Denmark Hill, it would be difficult to judge of the genius of the painter. It is an interesting composition—the Doge, with four patron saints of his family to attend him, occupies the center of the picture where the apparition of a majestic Saviour appears with an element of dramatic surprise. The Doge’s palace is 55 56 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES — at the left, while a landscape of shipping and palaces fills the background. There is some impression of Tintoretto’s vigor, abrupt foreshortening and dra- matic effects in this unfinished work, but there is no revelation of his power of bold projection, vehe- mence of attack, sense of rapid sweeping motion, or wealth of resonant color. In his methods of broken tones he anticipated much of the later tenets of im- pressionism. His influence might have extended far and developed a new school, but for the political catastrophes that overtook Venice after his death. His portraiture deserves consideration by itself, for he was preéminently a portrait painter. An example here (from the Davis collection, which pops up in this listing like the head of Charles II in the unfortunate Mr. Dick’s memoirs) is of “‘Varchi, the Historian,” with its correct, ceremonial attitude, demanded by the manners of the time, and its subordination of costume and setting to the in- herent dignity and intellectual sobriety of the sitter. It is a portrait that, because of its simplicity and quiet handling, gives the impression of a penetrating and truthful characterization. A “Holy Family” by Andrea del Sarto, a Floren- tine painter living and working well into the six- teenth century, depicts the Child, St. John, the Vir- gin, and a glimpse of St. Joseph in the background. Its composition reminds us of other groups by this artist, notably his “Charity,” and in its grandiose style and statuesque character indicates what a strain it must have been to the artists of the day to keep up LATER ITALIAN PAINTING 57 with the vogue for grandeur set by the monumental work of Michael Angelo. Del Sarto’s marvelous fa- cility in drawing led to his being called the “faultless painter,” but it also led to his falling into a formal academic mannerism in his later work. The bril- liant coloring of this painting has none of the soft fusion of color and light seen in his most impressive works lending a note of mystery and the melt- ing of lighted forms into the shadows. But even here, where there is harshness and hardness of tone, there is suavity and easy dignity of handling. There is little religious feeling, perhaps, in the work, but it is heroic and monumental in conception and structure. The handsome altar-piece by Girolamo di Libri, of the Veronese school, was painted for the church of San Leonardo, near Verona. The Virgin is seated with the Child beneath a luxuriant tree of rich, green laurel, whose deep glossy leaves seem to rustle against the blue sky. Four saints are grouped about her while three delicious child angels play and sing for her edification. There is much symbolism in the whole painting, skilfully woven into the compo- sition—the dead tree represents the tree of the for- bidden fruit of man’s fall, with the peacock, resplendent of tail, perched on its branches, a symbol of the resurrection—but the interest of the big can- vas lies especially in the beguiling landscape of the background with its rocky height crowned with a castle and its swelling green fall of hill and valley. The color appears rather garish and startling here, 58 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES yet in a dark church it would be subdued to pleasing warmth to accentuate the grandeur of the compo- sition. | The “Four Saints” by Correggio, an early work, is rather gaudy in its oppositions of blue and vermilion and has none of the transparency of tone or dramatic effect of illumination so often found in his work. A portrait of a young man by the Venetian Lorenzo Lotto shows how much of subjective interpretation this painter was able to infuse into his realistic por- traiture. His richness of coloring and his power of penetrating the character of his sitter are well illus- trated in this painting. “St. Matthew and the Angel,” by Savoldo, a pupil of Bellini, attempts an intricate study of different lighting effects, with moonlight from the window, candle-light in the room and a glimpse of figures in firelight outside. The colors and textures of the deep pink robe of the saint and the mauve and blue of the angel’s gar- ment are finely realized with the conflicting rays of light playing upon them. Two more portraits are by Moroni—one of “A Warrior,” in which he shows himself the professional painter, depicting his subject in rather a conventional attitude, dressed in rich velvet, gold striped, near a pedestal on which rests acasque. The portrait of “A Prioress” has re- markable characterization in the strong, rather heavy features under the close cap and overfrilling of transparent white. The whole scheme of grays and white lend emphasis to the vital force of this middle- aged face, hardly spiritual, for all the open book of = MADONNA AND CHILD WITH SAINTS. GIROLAMO DAT LIBRI Metropolitan Museum of Art LATER ITALIAN PAINTING 59 prayer, but powerful. Beneath the parapet against which the figure stands, is a legend showing that this Prioress was of noble birth as well as ecclesiastical distinction. A late Venetian, Pietro Longhi, is represented by some charming panels, genre scenes, which reflect the intimate life of his day with glimpses into boudoirs and drawing-rooms and a flavor of intrigue and ex- travagant, opulent living. There is sensuous beauty in these little scenes which have no shadow of moral- izing or rebuke but give delightful transcripts of a colorful, picturesque society, decadent, possibly, but graceful and amusing. Canaletto, another late Ve- netian, is seen near by in “The Piazzetta,” showing the entrance to the Grand Canal with many famous buildings, notably Santa Maria della Salute, in the distance. The mathematical preciseness of the com- position and the concentration on architectural detail incline one to believe the statement that this artist’s canvases were plotted with a T square and compass, but they are usually redeemed, as in this case, from a formal architect’s rendering by the nobility of the conception, the crisp touch, the bath of atmosphere, balance of shadowed masses and the breadth and openness of the sky. The rendering of the different building materials is carried out with exact knowl- edge of their textures and substances, but the free- dom of handling and the beauty of atmospheric effects deliver the work from photographic realism. The canvases by Guardi, shown here, lack the beauty of color and luminous qualities found in his best 60 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES work. Guardi gives the sparkle and color of Vene- tian water and skies in limpid tones where Canaletto renders something of the city’s grandeur and the romance of her historic past. _ A colorful painting by Carlo Caliari, the son of Paolo Caliari, or Veronese, as we best know him, shows how the decorative quality and glowing color of the father were continued in the harmony of the son’s warm color schemes and good design. The “Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes” by Tin- toretto indicates how little religious sentiment the time demanded of such a theme. The gay, indiffer- ent groups of colorful ladies intent on anything but the miraculous happening, the interesting concentric pattern with its wave on wave of linear design focus- ing on the figure of the Christ, make this a curious conception. Its position on the wall high above other canvases prevents much appreciation of its qualities. Moreover, the light is so unfortunately distributed upon it at most periods of the day as to make a view of the entire canvas at one glance impossible. In this gallery there are also paintings by such late artists as Guido Reni and Salvator Rosa. Neither should detain one long. Guido, a follower of Carvaggio, a late painter of central Italy, is an able enough painter, but the sentimental rhetoric of his work is not alluring. - In Salvator Rosa’s self- portrait the skull and melodramatic pose reveal him as a romanticist out of his time, to be sure, but with much of the later-day feeling for landscape and décor. a es, ee Oe ee ee LATER ITALIAN PAINTING 61 Passing from this gallery into Gallery 31-A, we find a ceiling by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, who has been called the “last of the old painters and the first of the moderns.” This decoration was painted for the Palazzo Barbaro, in Venice, in the period at which the artist’s powers were at their height. The subject represents the glorification of some ancestor of the Barbaro family, probably Francesco Barbaro, who had many claims to fame, among them the de- fense of Brescia when it was besieged by the armies of the Duke of Milan under the famous condottiere, Piccinino, an incident replete with thrilling details, but only one of the long series of wars and conflicts between the Italian cities. This ceiling was part of a whole scheme of dec- oration for a complete room, but this magnificent centerpiece deprived of its rightful setting is still realized as a glorious performance. ‘The hero, in the manner of the time, is represented in classic cos- tume seated on a ruined cornice, his general’s baton held in his right hand while his left arm rests on the Lion of St. Mark. There is no attempt, apparently, at portraiture, but the conventionalized, majestic fig- ure is surrounded by allegorical virtues, all resting in a sea of clouds flushed by sunset. The spirit and vivacity of the painting, the beauty of color and the richness of imagery are sustained in the structure of design of this sumptuous work. There is re- markable luminosity and buoyancy of form in this decoration with its floating figures gleaming through radiant clouds that reflect a light from some distant 62 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES source. The mastery of aerial perspective and the freedom and facility of his work leave one amazed. It may seem a bit theatrical, but in its proper setting of architectural decoration it could leave little to be desired. Passing into Gallery 32 we find a ceiling by Pin- turicchio, painted for the reception hall of the Petruzzi Palace, in Siena. This room has been re- produced in its actual dimensions and the twenty- two panels set in their original relation with the squares of ornament surrounding them. Four of the six lunette-shaped panels that were at the outer edge and mouldings and ornamental reliefs, cast from the original decoration still in the Palazzo, complete the elaborate scheme. This vaulted ceiling had long been hidden by the ceilings and partitions of the wretched rooms built into the once magnificent palazzo, now almost a crumbling ruin. The room was almost square and the ceiling, as may be ob- served, was separated from the walls by brackets and arches on each side. These brackets, decorated with gold on blue, support a sort of gilded candelabra and tablets with mottoes. Above are eagles from whose outspread wings floating ribbons and clusters of grapes spread out. The panels between the arches have allegorical figures—Muses, easily recognized by their symbols. In the central panels of the quad- rangle are gods and demigods, and triumphs of war and peace. In the middle, supported by puzti and floating garlands, was evidently the coat of arms of Pandolfo Petrucci, a tyrant of Siena, for whom the LATER ITALIAN PAINTING 63 decoration was executed. The walls of the reception hall were also decorated with frescoes by celebrated artists of the day and with carved wood pilasters by the famous Bandi. Pinturicchio came to Siena to carry out the decorations of the Library of the Duomo. It is said that in this work he was assisted by the youthful Raphael. In those glowing panels he shows himself a magnificent illustrator and re- corder of pageantry more than in these small ones where he was restricted in his composition. He com- menced the work for Pandolfo in 1508 and com- | pleted it in 1509, three years before the death of the Tyrant. This same Pandolfo had the picturesque and checkered career common to tyrants and great political adventurers, for he was exiled in youth by the Noveschi, a band of nine men who governed the city, but later he returned via a scaling ladder up the city walls and by machinations and intrigue, as well as by force of arms, obtained absolute power and put an end to the rule of the Noveschi, which had flour- ished for two hundred years. Among other interest- ing details of his life are the assassination of his father-in-law and an alliance with Cesare Borgia. An alliance which proved too dangerous to be maintained. If one wearies of gazing upward at the marvels of this ceiling, there are delightful bits of Italian fur- nishings and some beautiful illuminated miniatures from manuscripts in the room. One of the most in- teresting of these exhibits is the cover of a Sienese book of accounts with portraits painted in the manner 64 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and coats of arms of the magistracy administering the commune. It is one of the few account books that can bring anything like a thrill to the unmathematical and casual mortal who dislikes the very thought of accurate reckonings. In Gallery 31-B is one of the most fascinating ex- hibits of the museum, beautiful drawings by Michel- angelo for his “Libyan Sibyl” of the Sistine Chapel. Even the casual glance we may give them in passing assures us of the marvelous quality of line that creates this plastic form, almost titanic in its monu- mental simplicity. You see vitality and an austere dignity in these unfinished sketches, sculptural vi- sion, nobility of conception and power of handling, even in this study of the nude male model that is to serve for the figure of the Sibyl in the finished fresco. CHAPTER FIVE THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS LTHOUGH we may retrace our steps at this point and enter Gallery 40 back of Gallery 39, the retreat is only topographical, for in point of chronology the Northern schools follow the Italian. German, Flemish and Dutch art were influenced in varying degrees and manners by Italy, since Chris- tian art penetrated this Northern world through Rome. The beginnings of these schools are most uncertain. Furthermore, at no stage of their various developments do we find the illumination of a garru- lous, picturesque, if inaccurate, biographer, such as the Italian painter, Giorgio Vasari. The north of Europe developed painting much more slowly than Italy, for in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when Giotto and the Giotteschi were covering the walls of Southern churches with great frescoes, the Northern artists were still spending their gifts upon the meticulous illumination of miniatures. It is pos- sible that the actual beginning of Flemish painting came from the natural enlargement of these manu- script miniatures into pictures, for the early artists show the qualities of the trained miniature painter in devotion to decorative detail and precision. As far as it has been possible to trace the origins of Flemish art, it appears to begin in a burst of glory 65 66 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES with the work of the two brothers, Hubert and Jan Van Eyck, in the fifteenth century. It is probable that these gifted artists were the final flowering of a school of lesser and now forgotten artists, but there is nothing to indicate who or where the forerunners of this remarkable pair were. If they were not the originators of painting in oil, they were the first artists to use this medium consistently and effectively. This perfection of a mechanical invention gave them a vehicle to express their native genius. The early development of oil painting in the Netherlands may be due in a large measure to the fact that tempera frescoes possess no permanency in so damp a climate, but tend to peel off. Moreover, the type of North- ern church architecture with its extensive use of win- dows left little wall space for decoration. Evidence of a long experimentation in the North with the grinding and manipulation of colors with oil is indi- cated further by the proficiency in this work shown by artists of the German school of Cologne, who were contemporary with the Van Eycks. Unfortu- nately it is not possible here to judge of the flower- ing of Flemish art in the work of these two brothers. Yet some of the general characteristics of the early school may be realized from the polyptych of the “Life of St. Godeliéve” with its five panels crowded with the incidents of childhood, marriage and mar- tyrdom. In this late fifteenth-century painting much of the style of the miniature painter is still evident in the exquisite precision and elaboration of ornament. THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 67 The rather awkward angular figures seem crowded into the composition in a straggly effect rather than with any balance of masses. There is, however, ob- vious skill in the portraiture, power to depict figures, landscape, architecture and the setting of interiors with meticulous accuracy of detail. Sincerity and homely tenderness of religious sentiment pervade this work, although there is none of the depth and ecstatic fervor of greater Flemish works. These quaint panels show so little of the influence of Italy in their leaning to naturalism and sober simplicity that it may well be that the first impulse to painting came to the Flemish artists from the French minia- turists, as is often held, rather than from the gran- deur and breadth of the Italian style. You feel that these artists looked about them in their everyday world and painted what they saw there with careful observation of tone and texture, perspective and light, and in this naturalistic setting placed their fig- ures from holy legends or Bible story. A late fifteenth-century work, a triptych, “Mass of St. Gregory, St. Michael, St. Jerome,” is even more reminiscent of a miniature in its carved and gilded setting and its enameled surfaces. The saint tramples a little hesitantly upon the writhing dragon, but this uncertainty in the drawing of the figure is more than atoned for in the finished craftsmanship of the detail. The glowing landscape backgrounds and the rather painful symbolism of the passion combine delight in natural forms with a real depth of religious feeling. The “Adoration of the Magi,” 68 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES by some painter of the school of Ghent, takes a favorite subject which allows an ornate development, since the gorgeous textures and colors of the stuffs and the gold and embroideries, jewels and regal paraphernalia follow the costumes and settings of miracle plays rather than any attempted verisimili- tude of period and people. With the “Annunciation” of Roger van der Weyden there comes an echo of the Van Eycks, for this artist’s early master, Robert Campin, was prob- ably a pupil of Hubert Van Eyck. Van der Weyden is supposed to have started life asa sculptor. There is something oz sculptural solidity and relief in his figures. The angularity of the forms and the curi- ous rendering of draperies do not conceal his power of composition in placing the Virgin and Angel quite lucidly against an elaboration of background. ‘he delicacy of contour of the Virgin’s face and the ex- pressiveness of her bodily gesture also reveal indi- vidual gifts. The charming landscape seen through the pillars, the sharp pattern of the tessellated floor, the richness of the costumes and furnishings, show familiar characteristics of the Flemish school, yet for all his precision and minuteness of record there is breadth of effect. A “Deposition” attributed to Petrus Cristus recalls that this artist during a visit to the court of the Duke of Milan, at Naples, was probably responsible for initiating Antonello da Messina into the technique of oil painting, and that Antonello introduced it in Italy. THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 69 A pupil of van der Weyden’s, Gerard David, is represented here by two canvases, neither of which shows how much of an artist he was at his best. The ‘Virgin and Child,” one of a number of replicas, breathes a homely tenderness from its domestic set- ting, but has none of the old fervor of religious feel- ing. David’s pupil, Adrian Isenbrandt’s ‘Ecce Homo,” on the other hand, preserves much of the medizval mysticism and sobriety of earlier work. In Memling, represented here by a “Virgin and Child,” we have one of the great artists of the Flemish school. The firmness of contour and the solid modeling of the heads of the Virgin and the Child are notable, as well as the gentleness and re- ligious devoutness of the conception. “Adam and Eve,” attributed to Mabuse, brings us well into the sixteenth century when the influence of the Italian Renaissance gained more and more upon the Northern painters. We shall come upon more work by this artist, but this small panel indicates his skill as a craftsman and colorist, as well as his rather superficial, if decorative, treatment of his themes. The design is taken from a print by Marc Antonio, with the detail of background suppressed for these melting blue ranges of hills and stretch of green valley. The arabesque of the trees is pure orna- ment. It is thoroughly a classic pastoral in the Ital- ijanate manner with none of the old devoutness of religious sentiment. In this same gallery we come upon beginnings of Dutch art in the “Pieta,” or “Mourning over the 70 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES Body of Christ.” Early work of this sort is ex- tremely rare, for in the later ardor of the Reforma- tion, the Dutch scraped off their church frescoes or whitewashed them over and destroyed pretty gener- ally any vestiges of a religion that was synonymous with both religious and political persecution. Hence, — it is not until the seventeenth century when the Dutch were free from outside domination that their art developed in its thoroughly national character. This “Pieta,” with its angular, distorted figures in awkward grouping and exaggeration of gesture, re- flects the Gothic character of all early Northern schools, and is a reflection of the gloomy, mystic temper of the North with its borderland of the gro- tesque and horrible, a residue from old folklore and legend. This intensity of religious emotion makes itself felt in this painting, however little there is of reality in the attenuated forms and naive attitudes. Another early Dutch work, “Madonna and Child,” is attributed here to Aelbert van Ouwater, who worked in Haarlem in the last half of the fif- teenth century. If not actually by his hand it is of his following and has the directness and seriousness of the period. There is a painting of the Madonna, in the National Gallery, in London, by Dirk Bouts, a Dutchman from Haarlem who later became iden- tified with the Flemish painters, that is remarkably like this one in its handling. Not only in the con- trast of pale flesh tones with the rich blues and reds of the garments, but in the arrangement of the fig- ures, and the marvelous quality of the translucent THE ANNUNCIATION. ROGER VAN DER WEYDEN Metropolitan Museum of Art THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 71 surface that gives it the glowing splendor of a jewel. The Madonna is thoroughly Dutch, and how quaintly Dutch, the Child, but through the window there is a glimpse of a landscape that might be Italian. Passing into Gallery 37, we may turn to sixteenth- century Flemish painting in its transitional mo- ment when Renaissance art was seeping into the North, though the old methods were still in evi- dence. In the “Adoration of the Kings” by Quentin Massys there is still much of the Gothic in the atten- uation of the figures, and the extreme nicety and precision of detail, yet how much breadth, freedom and variety are also here and how little conventional piety. Massys has been called the last of the Gothic painters, but note what elaborate Renaissance Italian architecture there is in the background of this work and the suggestion of a classic ruin in perspective. It is interesting to see how he has subordinated this ornate architectural background to the figures who loom up more than life size before it and hold their own against its rich arabesques of pattern. The Vir- gin is the graceful, languid type that followers of this artist imitated for many years. The richness of the color—blue, green, purple, red—the uplifted, jeweled vessel, the gold embroideries and sheen of silks and velvets make the whole effect sumptuous. Another rendering of this subject, “Adoration of the Magi,” by an artist of the Antwerp school, in its ornateness and opulence brings to mind the close- ness of the origins of Flemish art to that of the 42 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES skilled artificers in crafts that required the most pa- tient, minute perfection of detail, the most exigent training of hand and eye, whether it is the handicraft of the jeweler, the illuminator, or the weaver of tapestries. It also reminds us of the florid taste and luxurious scale of living of the rich burghers of Antwerp who liked this display of technical inge- nuity, the profuseness of ornament and richness of display. Decidedly in contrast to this painting is the other “Adoration of the Kings,” by Hieronymus Bosch, a Dutch painter of the sixteenth century. Bosch is often a contriver of diableries, grotesque and boldly extravagant, with the satirical thrust that is found so often in the work of the Netherland artist of this time. Here unexpectedly there is no satire or mockery, but graciousness and an almost poetic ten- derness. The traditional treatment—the Virgin in her dark, blue robe sits enthroned holding the Child on her lap, while the kings bear gifts and Joseph kneels reverently—is enlivened by a remarkable as- semblage of details. Small angels hold up the can- opy of the Virgin’s throne, the landscape background holds no less than the city of Jerusalem, a lake and a castle on a rocky height. There are not only shepherds, the usual ox and ass, but a wealth of curi- ous minutia, such as the owl hidden in the hole in the wall, the bird’s nest with eggs, the little dog, that give the painting the character of a picture puzzle where one may continually come upon a new find. The freshness of the interpretation of an old subject, THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 73 the gay whimsicality of the treatment and the rich- ness of creative imagination make this a fascinating picture, while its blond glowing color indicates a high degree of technical ability. To Lucas van Leyden is attributed a tempera painting on linen, “Joseph’s Coat,” probably one of a series depicting the story of Joseph’s life. Van Leyden is one of the most important of the early Dutch painters, and as an engraver his work ranks still higher. He was a friend of the great German master, Albrecht Diirer, whose praise and esteem he won. In his painting his portraiture has power and directness while his more ornate compositions in the style of this one lack interest and originality. There is something a little borrowed and insipid in this reflection of Italian ideas. His talent and tempera- ment do not seem congenial to the mood of elegance. It is interesting to remember that Lucas van Leyden Was in a sense the forerunner of the later Dutch naturalistic school, for he had a vivacious interest in the forms and aspects of the world about him while his power of swift draughtsmanship recorded his sensitive vision and left a host of fascinating sketches of his daily world, trivial and commonplace as it might seem to more pompous artists. Of the work of Engelbrechtsen, a “Crucifixion” rather painfully realistic is noteworthy because van Leyden was fora time his pupil. A portrait by Martin van Heem- skerck, a straightforward and able performance, re- calls the supposition that this artist was the first to introduce portrait painting into Holland. 74 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES In this gallery we come upon the third of the Northern schools, the German, which was, itself, for a long time composed of local schools with strongly marked characteristics, accentuated by the natural boundaries of river and mountain that tended to keep districts immune from direct influence upon each other. German art developed late, following down into the fifteenth century the archaic, rather stilted style of the old miniatures and conventional altar-pieces, with obvious influence of French work. The painter-engravers, such as Schongauer, Diirer, Cranach, however, broke up the isolation of differ- ent artistic communities, for the engravings circu- lated widely and spread a type of art that emphasized linear design. The theme, already so familiar, of the “Adoration of the Magi” is developed here by the so-called “Master of the Holy Kinship.” It has the crowded, huddled composition of much of Gothic work, with naive delight in decorative detail, es- pecially in such touches as the gold sky against which the landscape rises quite unabashed by this splendor. | The banners, the adoring little angels, the splendid costumes and the bit of Italian carving, are all more - expressive than the faces and gestures of the group. This artist, who is supposed to have been a designer for stained glass, makes this surmise quite credible by the static arrangement of his figures and the lovely color of his painting, beautifully modulated for all its gorgeousness. A painting of another type is the “Christ Blessing, Surrounded by Donor and Family,” by Ludger Tom THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 75 Ring. It is an amusingly naive conception, for the figure of Christ is completely engulfed by the self- satisfied family of generous donors in the central panel, while each side contains an additional bene- factor. Most conscientiously, with no regard to the possible awkwardness of the revelation, the age of the donor is painted above each figure. Power of portraiture, interest in naturalistic representation and deviation from the conventional standards of eccle- siastical paintings are obvious in this work, as well as the lack of ensemble, angularity of forms and flat- ness of modeling. Another instance of this power of German portraiture is the “Portrait of a Man and His Wife” by Ulrich Apt, a member of the Augs- burg school. In this double portrait something of the Renaissance influence appears in its greater seren- ity and balance of mass, and its effectively modeled heads. The painting of the fur, the stuff of the woman’s green gown and close white headdress and the stretch of landscape glimpsed through the win- dow, with its river, town and distant mountains is, if somewhat brittle, the work of no mean artist, while the curious look of understanding and secrecy that seems to pass between the pair is arresting. The portrait by Bernard Strigel shows more fluency and sophistication. It is the work of an artist about whom little is known. The craftsman- ship of this work speaks for itself. A remarkably fine portrait, showing Italian influ- ence in its sensitive handling, its delicacy of model- ing and fluency, is labeled “Portrait of a Gentle- 46 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES man” and dated 1491. (The artist is not known, for the initials “H. H.” behind the sitter’s head do not convey much identity. The curiously posed hands, the fleeting, sidelong glance of the eyes and the ex- quisite bit of landscape in the background add to the fascination of this work. It seems much more subtle, more facile and more graceful than the usual German portraiture of this date. It is a painting at which one would like to linger for speculation as to its esthetic genealogy as well as for enjoyment. In this gallery there is also-a portrait by Hans Holbein of “Lady Guildford” that records a high mark of German portraiture. Holbein spells the Renaissance in Germany, following Diirer by nearly a quarter of a century. Hans Holbein first came to notice because of his wall decorations in fresco, as well as his paintings and the remarkable series of engravings, “Dance of Death.” He also designed metal work and stained glass, but finally devoted himself to his particular gift, that of portraiture, be- coming court painter to Henry VIII of England. Holbein was one of the infant prodigies who fulfil their early promise. He traveled in Italy and the Netherlands and both Italian and Flemish influences may be felt in his work. Yet he is free from imita- tion, assimilating merely enough of foreign methods to enhance his native talent and strong racial charac- teristics. This portrait of “Lady Guildford” illus- trates his power to combine absolute fidelity of ob- jective truth with subtle design and minute detail. The lady’s elaborate headdress with its gold brocade THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 77 and pearls towers up impressively in a sort of pyra- mid. Her black dress cut squarely at the neck is hung with heavy gold chains, and a further decora- tive note is added by the swirl of the grapevine carved around the column at the back. There is a marvelous skill in the precision of the execution, in the delicacy of the modeling of the head against the sky, in the power of the incisive line that holds the graceful detail into such firm design. To this incomparable rendering of the physical characteris- tics of his sitter he adds a vivid summary of her na- ture, a miraculous revelation of her character in terms of objective truth. Among the collection of the museum’s miniatures, there is an exquisite one by Holbein, also of an English subject, “Thomas Wriothesly,” that shows how broadly a miniature may be handled and with what consummate skill and maturity of knowledge he executed this type of work. , Unfortunately, the great Diirer is not represented here by any painting adequate to convey his genius. Lucas Cranach the Elder’s “Portrait of the Duke of Saxony” brings us one of the last of this golden age of German art, before it became so engrossed in sen- timent and story-telling that art became a secondary consideration. Cranach is an original artist, curi- ously archaic, showing no concessions to schools or fashions of his day. His compositions are usually awkward, the portraits often having the air of crowding into their frames. Frequently in his work the emphasis on linear design betrays the engraver. 78 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES He was, in fact, not an able technician as far as brush- work is concerned, but there is a peculiar individual charm in his line and fantastic conceptions. As court painter to the Duke of Saxony he did the portraits of all the ladies, portraits so much in demand later that they were widely imitated. His curious capri- cious fancy is shown in the “Judith and Holofernes,” also in this gallery, with its strained, almost ridicu- lous proportions, exaggeration of costume and ges- ture. Yet this painter represents so vividly the psy- chology and genius of his time and race that he pos- sesses an unusual fascination in all his work, even his strange, brown nudes which seem to follow no ac- cepted canons of beauty. In Gallery 36, which holds the Dreicer Collection, we find an ornate portrait of “Eleanor of Austria,” attributed to Mabuse. Her hair is bound witha nel fillet under her hat. The hat’s brim is looped up with big pearls. Both neck and shoulders are fes- tooned with barbaric gold and pearl ornaments and there is a hard, metallic luster to all this splendor that gives the portrait a rather garish effect. This same paraphernalia of costume and jewels is found in the portrait of Eleanor by Clouet, which now hangs at Hampton Court. There are so few paintings that can be authoritatively assigned to Martin Schon- gauer, that we cannot be precisely sure the painting of “Three Saints” here is actually by his hand. But it matters little, for it is of his school and shows the influence of Schongauer in the clarity of the design and the naturalistic treatment of religious themes. yp fo wunasnpy unjyodosja jy WACIAY AHL TAOANUd UALAId ‘“SUYALSHAUVH AHL THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 79 The rich coloring may be due to Flemish example, for van der Weyden is supposed to have been Schongauer’s master, but in the essential character of the work it is thoroughly German. Schongauer, the first of the great engravers, brought a new im- petus and interest to art through the widespread cir- culation of his prints. In his painting he depended largely on linear pattern with something of the in- tricacy of calligraphy. Yet his feeling for subordi- nation of detail and clear good design sets him apart from the men of his day. You see something of the ornamentalist here in the elaboration of the rose trellis of the background. A painting by van der Weyden, “Christ Appear- ing to His Mother,” shows this artist at a high mo- ment of his power. The placing of the figures, the beautiful background of landscape glimpsed through the pillars and the effective frame of the recessed doorway with its wealth of detail scrupulously ren- dered give distinction to this work. It is the central panel of a triptych of which the two side panels, showing the “Deposition” and “Holy Family,” are in the cathedral at Granada. Passing through Gallery 36 into the galleries of Italian paintings and through Gallery 29 of Spanish works, we come upon Flemish paintings of the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries. At the left as we enter is “The Harvesters” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It forms one of a series of paintings on the seasons in a vast panorama of hill and valley, village and harvest fields which reach up into the fore- 80 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES ground with figures of workers or other peasants at rest beneath a tree. It is almost an epitome of the peasant, of his world and his labor, given in these external truths of his surroundings and his bodily gesture. For all its incredible detail it is carefully drawn, yet with a freedom that gives the impression of extemporary brushwork rather than a pulling of everything into the hard and fast bounds of a pre- conceived design. The underground painting with its colors worked in gives a blond warmth to the whole work. It is impossible te judge of the wealth of this artist’s endowments from this one painting, for he was a symbolist, a satirist, a painter of re- ligious themes and of tremendous canvases of land- scape and figures, as well as an engraver and draughtsman. But at least it is easy to realize how out of the fashion of his day he was in depicting peasants and the realism of their surroundings when borrowed Italian elegance was the fashion of the day. It is dificult to turn away from this painting, each figure, each pose is made to say so much of individual character and of the type and yet is related so clearly to an epical interpretation of both man and nature. Rubens, the great figure of Flemish art, is repre- sented here by several religious subjects, portraits and a big canvas of “Wolf and Fox Hunt.” Rubens is so colossal a figure, bestriding his own time and that of posterity by the sheer force of his genius, that it is hard to write of him in a measured way. He was a darling of the gods, handsome, rich, a friend and associate of princes at whose courts he sometimes, THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 81 as he jestingly said, “played the diplomat,” and an incomparable artist so that his whole life is a progress from one triumph to another. He seems to have been endowed with unquenchable energy and vigor to supplement his illimitable invention and superb craftsmanship so that he has left behind so enor- mous a body of work that its bulk alone is amazing. He studied and absorbed both in Italy and in Spain, the works of the great Italian masters, adding the resources of the Renaissance to his own native talent and evolving a sort of composite style that yet was entirely his own in its complete assimilation of for- eign influences to his own gifts. As you will see from this early painting it is an exuberant, rather grandiose, style, full of vigor, color and movement. Yet when you look closely at this canvas you will also recognize what a patient craftsman this artist was and how delicate his technique. He modified the Venetian method of translucent underpainting, or, perhaps, it is better to say he grafted it on to his Flemish training, which already had this tradition of reducing the underpainting to a transparent thin- ness in which the opaque color was blended. In some parts of this painting you can see the wispy lines of color dragged into this underpainting with that marvelous sureness of hand and precision of rapid brushwork which distinguish Rubens for all time. He drew as he painted, keeping a smooth beauty of surface except in the high lights where his brush loads on the pigment, as we noticed in the “Venus and Adonis” of the Marquand Gallery. The 82 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES figures on horseback are supposed to be the painter himself and his first wife, Isabella Brandt. It is probable that the background was painted by Jan Wildens. In all this struggling mass of figures, to which the big progressive rhythms give such aston- ishing movement that there is nothing static in the whole canvas, there is a coherence of design in line and mass that knits the composition together harmo- niously. In his work you can see the solution of Florentine problems of mass, movement, and space composition with the splendor-of Venetian coloring and individual brilliance of conception and technique. Rubens is not often thought of as a portrait painter, for his big allegorical and religious pieces were more in the line of his robust execution and exuberant creative imagination. Yet one has only to remember the superb portrait of Isabella Brandt in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, to realize what fluent, crisp modeling of form his lively brush could effect, and what a marvelous endowment of vitality and glowing beauty it could bestow upon the sitter who was congenial to him. In the “Portrait of an Old Man” the character of the man is seized and rendered vividly with a penetration that blends physical char- acteristics with habits of mind. It is unfinished, for the eyes are not painted in, vet it is surprisingly alive in its ruddy coloring, its sense of weight and mass and its suggestion of complacent egotism. There are also religious studies by Rubens here, and two portraits by another great figure of this century, Van Dyck, whose work we have already noted. THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 83 In the next gallery, 27, we find both Flemish and Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century. The severity of the Reformation had left no opportunity for ecclesiastical art. In republican Holland there was no court or reigning family to paint, but there were wealthy burghers who liked to have their pres- tige and their wealth confirmed for later generations, while all the guilds and rich corporations seized upon portraiture as a means of recording their importance. But along with this portraiture, there was a develop- ment of landscape painting (early seen as back- grounds of conventional figures such as the Ouwater “Madonna” of Gallery 40), those lively little genre paintings called “conversation pieces,” and still life of a most elaborate character. Most of all it should be borne in mind that Dutch art, unlike Italian, which was developed to embellish public places, church or palace, was a domestic art intended for home adornment, dealing with its subjects in an inti- mate rather than a grand manner. One of the early Dutch portrait painters is Miere- veld, represented here by several works, one of them “Ta Dame de la Collarette,” in which he appears a meticulous craftsman expending a marvelous fidelity of observation and exquisite precision on rendering of the white lace collar over the dark stuff of the dress. It is admirable work, but not especially vital or original, Many pupils of Rembrandt appear here, Maes, whose “Portrait of a Woman,” life size and stolid, shows him wavering between his own predilections. and his desire to follow the manner 84. NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES of his master so that little comes off in the large can- vas. In his small conversation pieces this same painter shows himself an admirable painter of light. Van der Helst also is represented here. He is an artist of great unevenness, wavering between one manner and another, achieving the distinction at times of having his work taken for that of Rem- brandt and having a decided influence upon Van Dyck. Cornelis de Vos and Ferdinand Bol also show the decidedly high average of Dutch portrait painting and its following in the tradition of Rem- brandt in the treatment of light and shadow. Rem- brandt himself is represented here and Hals. An unusual portrait, “Head of a Man,” is by Adriaen Brouwer. Brouwer, even more than Hals, has left a reputation for riotous living and dissipation. He drew from the loose life and wild companions of his choice the subjects of his paintings, tavern life, revelers, gamblers and companions of debauch. His pictures were in great demand in his lifetime, his early death being due to excesses and not to neglected genius. Probably such a type as this man with his enormous nose, quite eclipsing Cyrano’s in its Gar- gantuan dimensions, fascinated him so that the paint- ing may have been an impromptu affair. There is nothing savory in the subject, unkempt and shabby, but there is a residue of pride in the drooping eyes under the draggled plume of the battered hat, and in the somewhat defiant assurance of the set of the head. All this the artist has been swift to seize and record in nervous, trenchant line, with firmness and THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 85 surety of brushwork so that the disdain, compla- cency and half-impertinent swagger are set down for us with delicate appreciation of texture and color as well as a penetrating insight of character. A painting by van Goyen introduces us to one of the earliest Dutch painters of landscape, one of the first, that is, to love landscape for itself and not merely as décor for his architecture or background for figures. His color is low and subdued, but with it he renders the character of his country, big skies, low horizon lines, flat expanses with gleams of water in pools and streams. A landscape by Philips Koninck reveals something of the ambition of the painters of our Hudson River school to embrace a vast area in a panoramic view. But here in the flat stretches of Holland with little diversity of topography the effect is monotonous. The attempt to give variety by introducing detail destroys the veracity of scale unpleasantly. A third landscape by Jan Siberechts, a Flemish painter of Antwerp, has much more vivacity and a clear, bright color that is far removed from the usual low tones or actual monochrome of the landscape painter of this period. ‘There is, too, a vividness of feeling, as though the emotional reac- tion of the pleasant, intimate scene had been recalled and set down spontaneously which, with its direct- ness of handling, gives it a curiously modern look. “Piping Shepherds” is by Aelbert Cuyp, a painter who had an unstudied sincerity in recording the nat- ural effects that came under his observation, with especial power in rendering light and a sort of 86 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES drowsy, golden atmosphere that bathes his luminous canvases. ‘This is evidently an early work with a certain touch of naive directness that is not charac- teristic of his later paintings. There is a poetic tinge about this Dutch pastoral that gives it an individual character. The warmth of the sky, the placing of the masses of the groups of men and cattle, and the refinement of texture show a great advance in land- scape painting even with the use of rather lifeless conventions of foliage and figures in the detail of the landscapes. A “Harbor View” by Willem van de Velde, the Younger, is the work of a Dutch painter, who, like Van Dyck, became a court painter to an English king, in his case the second Charles. Van de Velde is famous for his seascapes, usually filled with shipping. This canvas shows his power of rendering space and his cool, clear color. The clouds seem static in the highly polished sky, but the vivacity of the drawing of the ships—hulls, masts and sails—gives liveliness to the whole work. The prodigious still life near-by is by Jan De Heem. It belongs to a popular branch of Dutch art in the seventeenth century. It shows the Dutch love of naturalistic detail, rich color, gleaming surfaces and ornate lavishness. The insistent lobster, the silver tankard, brass ewer, the fruit and all the elab- orate paraphernalia of the setting are painted con amore in an orgy of shapes, colors and gleaming high lights. It is the sort of magnificence to find a place in the luxurious home of some burgher stolid enough to gaze unflinchingly at the erubescent lobster and YOUNG WOMAN WITH A WATER JUG. JOHANNES VERMEER Metropolitan Museum of Art p THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 87 to delight in the florid decorative ensemble. It pos- sesses microscopic fidelity and good arrangement, but little zsthetic interest. The Biblical subject, “Isaac Blessing Jacob,” by van den Eeckhout, reveals the closest imitator of Rembrandt among his host of followers. It also reveals the futility of attempting to walk in the steps of genius. In the next room, Gallery 26, there are two por- traits by Frans Hals that call for a full stop. They are the portraits respectively of “Balthasar Coy- mans” and “Dorothea Berck.” The sincerity of the portraiture, relying so little on the usual explicitness of Dutch portrait painters, may at first conceal the brilliancy of the execution, the masterly simplifica- tion of form that gives the impression of breadth and simplicity. The modeling is accomplished in a great measure by the distribution of light and care- ful rendering of values. Yet for all this objective nicety the artist does not fail to seize the essentials of character. Some remarkable works by Rembrandt are also in this gallery. The “Sybil” shows him nearer to the men of his time, perhaps, than his later work. He has evidently built on a linear pattern that has been lost sight of as the plastic significance of his design evolves through these masses of pigment shot through with warmth and color. The light concen- trates on the face of the girl, giving something dis- tinctive and noble to her gesture. “The Philoso- pher” and the “Noble Slav” are perhaps too well known to need comment. In the golden dusk of 88 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES these canvases, with its exquisite shading from high luminosity to deepest shadows, there are evoked fig- ures that have much the effect of sculpture, with an added power of revealing the soul and mind of the sitter in this strange isolation of other-world light and shade. The “Flora” is a late work and quite different from his usual manner in its emphasis on line and clear-cut contours. Pieter de Hooch, whose “Scene in a Courtyard” is here, is one of the painters who attained a mastery of light, even conquering the problem of the oppos- ing effects of indoor and outdoor lighting. His work is, however, difficult to judge in this setting, for a canvas by Vermeer on each side diverts the eye, so that in a later gallery this artist may well receive the attention he merits. These paintings by Jan Vermeer of Delft are two of the treasures of the museum. Both contain the single figure of a woman, as indeed the majority of his canvases do. Young women occupied quite placidly in some ordinary household occupation, but invested with a quality of poetic beauty through ~ balance of color and mass, refinement of handling and a remarkable solution of three-dimensional com- position that keeps the whole design rather flat, well within the frame and bathed in a luminous silvery light. In “Young Woman with a Water Jug” Vermeer’s method of placing a figure against a series of rec- tangles that are the basis of the design is carried out; THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 89 one of the rectangles proves to be a wall map which echoes the fashion of the day as well as provides just the balance needed for the larger masses. The whole figure with its clear, white headdress is suf- fused in a silvery radiance that does not dissolve the solidity of the figure. Throughout the canvas there is an exquisite sustained harmony of pale yellow, blues and white. The light strikes the figure from the side and falls through the room with no contrast of violent light and shadow, but a silver serenity per- vades and surrounds every object. The technical triumph of the work is in itself a thing for pure enjoyment, yet it is never obtruded. The elaborate pattern with its fresh glowing color and bath of light and air is built up carefully with absolute surety and scientific knowledge, but the breadth and beauty of the whole texture of the design most impress us. The other painting, “Lady with a Lute,” glows with a golden rather than a silvery radiance, but there is here, too, the beauty of matiére in the enameled sur- faces of color, and incredible magic in the simplicity and sophistication of the audacious and brilliant design. This gallery also contains landscape paintings by later men. Such a painting as “Landscape” by Jacob Ruisdael, a large one of stream and rocky banks, seems very far from our modern ideas of landscape work in its heaviness of tone, its rather crowded composition with emphasis given to negli- gible detail and much methodical convention in the 90 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES painting of foliage and trees. Yet there is obvious evidence of the artist’s melancholy temperament seeking to penetrate the mystery of nature and find solace in such communion. This is hardly a repre- sentative landscape, for in his best work there is © imagination and a grandeur of conception in the sweep of his skies and the fine balance of masses. Salomon Ruysdael’s “Drawing the Eel” is the older idea of landscape with figures, here given vivacity and gaiety. Jan van de Cappelle’s “Mouth of the Scheldt,” in its monochrome of amber tones, has movement in its clouds, buoyancy in their vaporous masses that makes them float easily above the flat expanse of watery world below. Adriaen van Os- tade was a pupil of Frans Hals. His rather mediocre talent was devoted to genre pictures of peasant life such as the one here, “The Old Fiddler,” executed with animation and freedom and a sense of enjoy- ment with the life he depicts. He shows surety in his technique, but is rather heavy in tone, which even his artificial lighting does not always relieve. David Teniers the Younger, who far outranks Ostade at this sort of thing (that is, when he is at his best), is represented by a group of small landscapes in Gal- lery 28, and a typical “Marriage Festival” in Gallery 27. These give an idea of his transparency and warmth of coloring as well as his power to paint fig- ures effectively even in so huddled a composition as this. A painting of “Interior of a Church” by Anton de Lorme (the figures are by Terborch) is another THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS gI form of art that late Dutch painters developed, that is, architectural subjects, not only the pleasing red roofs and warm tones of brick of their domestic ar- chitecture, but such lofty interiors as this of Gothic churches, either with figures or empty and stately, with effects of high illumination and deep shadow. CHAPTER SIX SPANISH PAINTING OR a moment we turn back to Gallery 29 of Spanish paintings. Two of the great names are here—E] Greco and Goya. For Velazquez we must wait with the exception of a fine loan canvas, “Queen Mariana,” until we reach the Altman Col- — lection. Zurbaran, a contemporary of Velazquez, is represented by two canvases. Primitive Spanish art, religious in theme, had plenty of hard, bright color with carving and gilding to set it off, but later it became somber in keeping with its harsh, ascetic flavor. -In the main the Span- ish artist borrowed more than he invented, turning first to the Netherlands and later to Italy. The Italianate “Lucretia,” by Ribera, in this gallery indi- cates the later fashion, although it does not show Ribera at his best. El Greco, a Greek as his name indicates, was a native of Crete. At an early age he went to Venice to study art, later arriving in Spain where he found an intensity of religious fervor suited to his tempera- ment. Though a foreigner, he found Spain so con- genial that he is said to have been more Spanish than the Spaniards. The “Nativity” in this gallery recalls similar themes in the Northern schools and also suggests a great contrast in attitude and han- 92 SPANISH PAINTING 93 dling. The love of naturalistic detail and ornament so characteristic of the North is not here, nor the bal- ance and proportion of Renaissance art, rather the setting and detail are sacrificed to a vehemence of movement that sweeps through the whole canvas and beats in an ecstasy of religious exaltation. El Greco’s forms have often been compared to flames in their surging toss of movement and exaggerated elonga- tion, both of rippling draperies and of limbs. The architectural background is only suggested—it looms out of a strange ashen radiance woven with wavering shadows and tremulous flashes of brilliance into an unearthly sort of chiaroscuro in which reality is dis- solved and forms flicker and waver as though caught in a gust of wind. Everything irradiates from the Child: the emotion of adoration and worship beats through the whole canvas, swaying the ecstatic lam- bent figures to its pulse of rhythm. Although the color is rather dimmed, there is still the opposition of wine reds with deep blues set off by murky blacks and dingy whites to indicate how much of the vibrancy and vigor of effect was due to subtlety of color as well as to design. There is much to remind us of modern work. Perhaps the first impression of this exaggerated, vehement work is modern, because of the juxtaposition of patches of color in a sort of im- pressionistic manner and the geometrical three-di- mensional design. But the creative invention and power of vital unified design is more profound than these obvious manipulations. Stand and analyze the work, and you find how marvelously the exaggera- 94 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES tion of design has been sensitively organized to pro- duce this impression of life and movement through- out the painting and how harmoniously the big rhythms sweep up the extravagant gesture and sharp diagonals into an eloquent unity of impression. The portrait that hangs near this group is sup- posed to be of El Greco, himself, but it is not repre- sentative of his power in portraiture, rather is diluted and uncertain in its effect. The “Holy Family,” in Gallery 36, which we have already penetrated to gaze at other works, is a fine example of the artist’s — period when his design was more compact, and his palette became distinctly personal. The paintings of Goya shown in this gallery only indicate certain phases of his remarkable scope. To gain any idea of the tremendous range of his work one should study his prints. The painting of the “Bull Fight” shows his audacity in contrast to the polite conventions of his day. It also shows him as a modern, ahead of his time and anticipating much of the methods of later Frenchmen in his use of color, his realism, his power to give the feel of place, the beat of the sun, the choke of the clouds of dust and the excitement of the spectators. The composition is peculiar in its sharp division into two halves by the arrangement of the double arena, which is said to have been an ordinary device. But it is not difficult to see how his winding scarf of col- orful figures holds the sectors together. Goya is supposed to have entered the bull ring at one time, and was always fascinated by its fierce, violent drama. DEB eNATIVIFTY. “EL. GRECO Metropolitan Museum of Art SPANISH PAINTING 95 In his early work he departed from tradition not only in using contemporary material, but in his almost ferocious attack, his intensity of color contrasts and his audacity of design; later, however, he modified his palette and used more restraint. In the portrait of “Don Sebastian Martinez,” his early dramatic impressionistic treatment is subdued to this almost austere, simple handling with transparent under- painting, giving its color scheme of silvery grays and steel blues great luminosity. Yet for all its precision and quiet handling there is in this portrait vivacity and life, there is subtlety in its seizing of character and soundness in its modeling. The por- trait of “Don Tiburcio Perez” is a marvelous record of objective fact in execution, surety and liveliness of characterization so that the figure firmly set against the illumination of the canvas has solidity and life, a bodily gesture that confirms the vivacious glance of the eyes and the handsome, rather sensu- ous face. It is, unfortunately, impossible to consider other phases of Goya here—his satire, his terrific fury of turbulent attack upon the political abuses of his day, his idyllic charm of design for tapestry that links him to Watteau, his diabolical fancies of witches and unholy revels in his “Caprices,” or his grim record of the French invasion and its attendant horrors in “Disasters of War.” But it is possible to feel that he was thoroughly Spanish, however much he owed to other men—Ribera, Tiepolo, Bassano, or Tinto- retto—or that with all his vehemence and passion he 96 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES is able to concentrate upon design with depth of ar- tistic penetration and knowledge. Zurbaran, who in point of time precedes Goya, has the old austerity of the Spanish artist, which some one has summed up as a “passion for reality with aspiration to the ideal.” This “Battle with the Moors,” painted for a Carthusian Monastery, shows the Virgin and Child seated high on golden clouds looking down upon a clearing in the forest where there is a battle raging between Moorish cavalry © and Spanish soldiers. Pikeman are entering the bat- tle in the foreground. One more than life-sized fig- ure of a cavalier turns toward the spectator as though about to lean out of the frame as he points towards the combat. In the green tone of this canvas, its harsh realism and its ascetic note, there 1s the reflec- tion of the Spain of the Inquisition. It is a church militant, which crushes the unbeliever ruthlessly, that one feels exalted in this fierce, stark present- ment. The composition is both curious and effective with its thrust of spears across the canvas and its wan flashes of light. In quite another mood is his “Young Virgin,” probably one of the series of por- traits of young Sevillian girls endowed with a quasi- saintliness of attitude. Everything concentrates on the round white face of the girl seated so primly at her embroidery, a formal pattern of flowers strewing the foreground. ‘The warm orange-red of the draperies symmetrically looped behind the demure figure is a note often found on Velazquez’s early palette. The insipidity of the rendering with SPANISH PAINTING 97 its sentimental pretense of religion is a far cry from the fierce devotion of the other painting. Murillo, represented here only by a pretentious portrait * handled in an insensitive manner, turned the religious passion of Spain to sentimental account with his use of provincial types and picturesque set- tings for sacred legend. He attained immense pop- ularity by his facile, eloquent interpretation of religious subjects, often reaching great harmony of color but seldom rising to any greatness of imagina- tion or distinction of technical execution. * The museum has acquired the portrait of “Don Andres de Andrade y Col,” by Murillo; a vigorous work, since this book went to press. CHAPTER SEVEN BRITISH PAINTING ASSING again through the galleries of Flemish and Dutch art, we reach Gallery 24, British art. It seems a natural transition, for the Dutch counted most in the early development of British art, concerned as it was with portraiture and land- scape painting. This development took place in the eighteenth century when European art was passing through a period of decadence and decline with the waning of the Italian influence. The early decora- tive impulse that produced such beautiful work in the illuminated missals of Ireland died out when the Flemish and French influences began to cross the channel in the fifteenth century. When the Renais- sance came to England it found no body of local art or tradition of painting to quicken into new life, as it did in France, Germany or the Netherlands. The reaction in England was mainly literary, developing great prose and poetry rather than pictorial expres- sion. There are, of course, traces of church paint- ings, altar-pieces and frescoes, that indicate the religious decoration of the medizval period. But it was not a widely practiced art. During the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries foreign painters were welcomed in England to paint the portraits of 98 BRITISH PAINTING 99 the great and furnish the palaces and country houses with their works. William Hogarth is often called the first English painter, for his art is unmistakably English, tinged with the atmosphere of his surroundings and the psychology of his day. Hogarth was first appren- ticed to an engraver and even after he turned to painting continued his engraving. The meticulous finish, the care for detail, that mark his genre pieces, reveal his early training of eye and hand. But he was essentially a painter and a gifted one in his easy handling, his power of enveloping his work in at- mosphere, his feeling for values and his color. Yet, because of the didactic, satirical character of his famous genre paintings, with their scathing arraign- ment of contemporary morals, Hogarth’s art was not regarded so highly in his day as was his sermonizing. English art is seldom entirely free from a literary background so that its appeal is often a confused one. In the case of Hogarth, the story-telling idea for a long time obscured the real genius of the artist, as far as the public was concerned. His two paintings in this gallery are portraits, the sort of elaborate family group with pretentious setting that were in vogue at this period. “The Price Family,” an early work, shows the artist still burdened with many of the prevalent conventions of gesture and style, yet in the easy arrangement of the rather formidable group and the liveliness of the presentment his originality and artistic endowment are evident. One feels a neat little tweak of satire, too, in this and in 100 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES the portrait of the “Jeffreys Family,” as though all these rather pompous, self-satisfied persons had no defense against this keen observer of men and man- ners. Later, in Gallery 14, we are to see Hogarth’s portrait of “Peg Woffington.” It will probably ap- pear surprisingly familiar to you, even if you have never looked at it before, because so many of our early American portrait painters were greatly in- fluenced by Hogarth’s work and in many cases imi- tated it quite obviously. In this painting it is possible to realize what a fine colorist Hogarth was and how good a draughtsman. Sir Joshua Reynolds was a dominating figure of the artistic world of the eighteenth century in Eng- land. Van Dyck had been dead a hundred years when this young artist got to work (he was first to be an apothecary ), yet how much of Van Dyck there is in Reynolds! When a young man he visited Italy and studied the Italian painters evolving, from the best he found in the great masters, a system of art procedure to govern all painting. One of his pupils said of him, “No one ever appropriated the ideas of others to his own purpose with more skill than Sir Joshua.” His work shows a careful sifting out and rearrangement of the material thus appropriated. The fact that this material was drawn from allegori- cal or historical paintings carried out on a large dec- orative scale, did not deter him from applying their esthetic principles to portrait painting. Later he expounded his system to the students of the Royal Academy, so that there is no doubt of his artistic jApy fo wnasnpy unjyodosja py SCIONADN VOHSOL IS ‘MIVId SHINVHD AGNV SANOL ODINI ‘SNVIGNYVOND SIH HLIM ANVA AUNAH ‘NOH BRITISH PAINTING 101 convictions. He believed in the grand style, in fol- lowing the antique, in rejecting naturalism and avoiding “impolite,” that is, original painting, and above all in basing the whole work of the artist on a definite body of classical precedent. His own work falls far short at times of illustrating all these sound principles, he was never a good draughtsman, his color was often trite, and there is no spontaneity in his learned work; but, he knew how to get a good likeness and give his sitters the suavity and ele- gance the times demanded. He is usually happy in his portraits of children, such as the delightful “Georgiana Augusta Frederica Elliott,? and the little girls who hold up their baby brother so pre- cariously in the portrait of “Lady Smith and Her Children.” Unfortunately he found this vein too rich in ore and worked it out to a thinness of senti- ment and weakness appalling in some of his simper- ing misses. Although Reynolds is often thought of as a painter preéminently successful in the portraits of aristocratic ladies, such as this “Lady Smith,” set in her fair pensiveness against a backdrop of land- scape, he is particularly felicitous in representing the English gentleman—giving him an air of someone to the manner born with a serious distinction that makes itself felt as an essential quality of the sit- ter. The “Sir George Coussmaker,” or the “Hon. Henry Fane with His Guardians,” well illustrates this ability to present the cultivated, dignified Brit- ish gentleman of his day quite as serenely aristocratic and assured as the cavalier of Van Dyck’s portraits. 102 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES > In Gainsborough, whose “Mrs. Grace Dal- rymple Elliott” is here (she is the mother of the “Georgiana,” by Reynolds), we find an artist who had no schooling and no interest in acquiring it. He was obliged to paint portraits to gain a living, but his real joy was in landscape painting. He, himself, confesses that he often works a “landskip” into the background of a portrait in pure delight in the work. From this portrait of Mrs. Elliott, we may see the artist’s feeling for decoration, his taste, and his artis- tic discernment. It is the work of an artist who feels an inner compulsion to creative expression, rather than to discreet pursuit of academic formule. The draughtsmanship is far from impeccable in this painting, and there is something a little odd in the placing of the figure, yet what appeal lies in the simplicity and directness of the work, in the precision and delicacy of its handling! The rendering of the yellow satin overdress against the soft tints of the flesh and the ivory tones of the flowing satin skirt is refinement itself. The restricted color scheme seems to emphasize the life and vigor in the figure and the vitality of the presentment. The charm and grace of the lady are, no doubt, partly hers in her own right, but also they spring from the personality of the artist who invested every subject with the poetry and sensibility of his own nature. The land- scape background is no perfunctory muse en scéne, but a glimpse of lovely countryside sympathetically portrayed. Without ever aspiring to the grand style that so intrigued Reynolds, Gainsborough is more BRITISH PAINTING 103 fastidious. The small portrait of “The Painter’s Daughter, Margaret,”’ showing the head and shoul- ders of a young girl with posies in her hair and a flush of youth, is probably a study for the larger painting of both daughters. It recalls the happy family life of the artist, filled with music, friends and delight in natural beauty—a harmonious life unspoiled by success and depending more on the re- sources of a rich nature than on any gifts of fortune. Romney had a gift for the pictorial; he seized the possibility of a picture in every sitter with grace and good taste. His self-portrait here is vigorous and forcible although unfinished. It is in the por- trait of “Mrs. Fitzherbert?? (whose marriage to George IV, when he was Prince of Wales, brought many political and religious complications but no throne for the lady), that the real talent of the artist is shown—the gift of revealing a quality of exquisite femininity with graceful line and felicities of color. The portrait of Lady Hamilton as “Daphne,” in Gallery 14, is a vivacious study of this fascinating woman who furnished much of the in- spiration of Romney’s work. There is nothing of Daphne in the conception, to be sure, but the artist painted this sitter so many times that he had to play variants on the theme. Lawrence is represented here by a number of paintings, none more popular than “The Calmady Children,” a portrait which the artist himself is re- ported to have considered highly. This has been engraved many times. It was called “Nature,” in 104 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES the stilted sentiment of the day, by the engraver who wished it to be a best seller, as it proved to be. The work is a decorative composition in its space-filling and skilful linear pattern. It seems a little too sparkling, perhaps, a trifle forced in its cleverness and brilliance. Much more serious as a work of art is the portrait of the “Rev. William Pennicott,” de- veloped with greater reserve and sincerity. The head is well defined so that there is a sense of mass and weight, while the characterization harmonizes with the dignity and poise of the bodily gesture. The brilliancy and facility of Lawrence’s per- formance unfortunately degenerated into superficial work before he was thirty, so that his portraits are extremely uneven in their value. Beechey, whose tremendous “Duke of York” is in this gallery, is at his best a pleasing painter, har- monious in color and thoroughly competent. Much better than this inflated, rather dull presentment of royalty is the “Portrait of a Lady” in Gallery 14, to which we must refer for many of the English painters. Hoppner is here, too, florid sentiment and rather opulent charms of flesh shown in his solid lady and her solid infants—“Mrs. Gardiner and Her Chil- dren.” His painting of whites held boldly against each other and the warm flesh tones is worth noting. — Lely, is also represented here to remind us of how long foreigners reaped the rewards of fashionable portraiture in England. Tit CALMADY CHILDREN. SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE . Metropolitan Museum of Art BRITISH PAINTING 105 “Hautbois Common” by John Crome, or Old Crome, brings us to the beginning of English land- scape painting, since there is no canvas by Richard Wilson in this group. Crome shows Dutch influence and rch of Wilson, too, but most of all he is him- self, highly individual-mannered artist with so- lidity and power in his work. He is one of the first of the English landscape painters to use a personal idiom in his interpretation of nature. His trees are still brown, to be sure, but there is light and air throughout this little canvas with its pattern of sun- shine and feeling of mass in the cluster of trees against the pale sky. He studied nature at first- hand and gave a feeling of bigness to his simple compositions, while in such work as “Mousehold Heath,” in the National Gallery, London, there is a bath of golden atmosphere that envelops the whole scene. He drew around him a group of paint- ers in the so-called Norwich School. “Glebe Farm,” by Constable, turns over a new leaf and a new chapter, for with Constable we come to modern landscape painting. He paints a country he knows and loves with sensitive feeling for its color and atmospheric effects. ‘The accepted conven- tions of artificial grandeur and stateliness still in vogue, which made it imperative to build up a land- scape of bits of classic detail into an accepted archi- tectural design, has no place here in this simple transcription of valley, village and hill. The vil- lage-church spire replaces the classic ruin, and the 106 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES greens and blues of nature take the place of the pic- torial convention of browns, grays and ambers that had come to represent color in landscape. The blue sky with its big clouds that break in their drifting to let shafts of wan radiance fall in flecks of light between the leaves of the spreading trees, (“Constable’s snow,” as it was derisively called by his detractors), the moist atmosphere that envelops the scene, the bright hues of the damp turf, are all a heresy which was to found a new faith. It is an intimate scene, an observed mood of nature, with its rustling of leaves and movement of clouds, its gleam of flowing water. It is easy to see how closely it derives from the Dutch painters, but it is also easy to feel the difference of attitude from the Dutch re- cording of objective fact. Here is the new subjec- tive note, the personal reaction that is, in some de- gree, to color all modern landscape painting. More- over when you look at these lively greens, you see that they are composed of many notes of green placed closely together. Constable, in this division of tone to gain greater intensity of light and color, is the first of the impressionists. It was the glowing warmth and wash of air in his “Haywain,” exhibited at Paris, that gave inspiration to the French artists in their research for light and color. A very blue sky and sea with a stretch of yellow beach, on which the figures are secondary in im- portance, is by Bonington. It is handled broadly, and indicates how much this young Englishman had absorbed both of Venetian color and the theories of BRITISH PAINTING 107 the French painter, Delacroix. He did not live long enough to prove what his early promise merited. “Saltash,” by J. M. W. Turner, brings us to a man who had a most ardent press agent in Ruskin, who devoted volumes to expounding Turner’s art, never praising it for its real qualities, but rather com- mending it for virtues which it did not have at all. This early canvas has a somberness which we do not associate with Turner’s work, but it is a serious able work, for all its browns. It has the strength, the solidity and structural dignity that were later sacri- ficed to capricious handling and arbitrary exaggera- tion. Across the room is “The Grand Canal, Venice,” a decided contrast in its opulence of color, its sketchy handling and attempted improvement on nature. It marks his middle period, while the “Whale Ship” shows his final development. This work is the quintessence of the theatrical—a vast melodramatic setting of nature in which the great leviathan and the ship are phantoms suspended for a moment in a strange welter of sky and sea, in which mystery is the keynote, and weird, prismatic illu- mination breaking through this swirl of spray and mist reaches an mth degree. The painting has, doubtless, lost its first opalescence of color, as much of Turner’s pigment has, but in its unearthly splen- dor, its magic of sea and sky, its symbolism of the struggle of man with the titanic forces of nature, it reveals much of this artist’s power. Yet this is the painter Ruskin extols as giving accurate tran- scriptions of natural forms and careful nicety to his 108 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES | work! How much Turner really was a student of nature one may see in this room—his water-colors convey a better impression of his ability to use pure color veraciously, with facility of technique and feel- ing for composition. It is impossible to know much of so many-sided a painter as Turner, gifted and arbitrary, with something of the showman in his desire to go someone better in each phase of his work, but it is not difficult to realize how much his paintings of diffused light and his luminism were borrowed from by later men. ~ However grandilo- quent he became, however exaggerated in his forcing of light, his translucency of color and his dissolving of solid forms in a beating, incandescent flood of radiance solved for the luminists many problems that they might long have struggled with deprived of his aid. Making a detour to reach Gallery 14, other paint- ings of the British school are found in the European collection of George A. Hearn. Here is a delicious version of childhood in “Master Hare,” by Rey- nolds; a fine Lawrence, in the portrait of “Lady Ellenborough”; a “Lady with a Coral Necklace” by Hoppner which, though not a great technical per- formance, is yet full of blandishments of rosy notes. The landscape by Gainsborough shows his trans- parency of lighting, the sensuous beauty of his land- scape with his direct, spontaneous rendering and many curious mannerisms of brushwork. This is something seen and loved and impulsively given back to us with the emotion of its first delight. Its highly BRITISH PAINTING 109 personal character reflects the poetic nature of the painter—an interpretation of nature as seen through sensitive eyes and rendered with grace and freedom. The landscapes by Wilson are important canvases, since they are the museum’s only examples of work by the first of the English painters of landscape. Like many another of his day Wilson began as a portrait painter, but he abandoned this work for his ruling passion, the art of painting nature—then the most unfashionable and unprofitable of arts. It is recorded that Gainsborough himself hung land- scapes in the hall where his patrons passed so that they might be induced to buy one. Wilson tried no such expedient, but departed to Italy where he be- came a mannered classical painter, much as the Ital- ianized Claude Lorraine. But subject matter is negligible in his work, since his interest was in the absorption of light by shadow, the diffusion of sil- very light, the weight of moisture-laden clouds and the depth of recession of his atmospheric effects. From these canvases one cannot judge his full powers of handling of the beauty of his graceful line. Yet you may see how far removed it is, for all its outworn paraphernalia of décor, from the stufh- ness and somberness of contemporary landscape painting. It is not difficult to realize why Wilson was called the “father of English landscape.” George Morland is represented here by a char- acteristic work, “The Midday Meal”—a man carry- ing food to a pig pen with pigs following him—not an elevated subject, but carried out in a thoroughly 110 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES original way with fluency and delightful color. Morland, whose reputation as a ne’er-do-well has. been carefully handed down to us, follows some- thing of the manner of Dutch genre painting, but develops both his brushwork and his subject in his own way. His work is familiar through the many color prints made from his sentimental themes. The portrait of “Henry Forsyth,” by Raeburn, shows the artist at a high point he did not always reach. It is carried out in the manner of Hals—in its balance of light and dark masses and beauty of fused tones. The lack of elaborate setting concen- trates on the solidity of the painting, the careful definition of the planes and the subtlety of the mod- eling. It is a fine portrait. Here are also works by artists of the Norwich School, founded by Crome, two luminous ones by Cotman, a landscape by Crome himself, and the beautiful “Stour Bridge” by Con- stable, which in many ways seems all that one can ask for in a landscape. The painting by de Hooch, though not British, cannot be missed. Here it does not have to con- tend with a Vermeer on each side for its appreciation. The problem of opposing lights—the outdoor sun- light and the indoor lighting—is here solved with a fine harmony. The richness of the coloring, low in key, and the beauty of the surfaces delight one. There is a pleasing, unctuous, tactile charm through- out the canvas. CHAPTER EIGHT FRENCH PAINTING HE beginnings of French art cannot be studied in the museum, for the only actual primitive is “Martyrdom of Two Saints,” of the school of Marmion, painted probably toward the close of the fifteenth century under decided Flemish influence. This double painting is to be found in the Dreicer Collection, Gallery 36. The important thing is to keep in mind that there was a French school of art before the Renaissance, which combined the fused elements of its civilization—Celtic, Gallic, Greek (in the South), Roman, German—as well as the outside influences, such as the Byzantine brought in by Charlemagne. It is differentiated from other work of the same period in certain obvious charac- teristics, such as its early emancipation from Byzan- tine formalism, its power of composition, and its taste. The decorative feeling is especially apparent in all the early missals, illuminations, church fur- nishings, stained glass and tapestries. On viewing this work there always arises the fascinating specula- tion as to the character this highly developed art would have finally reached, had not the Italian Renaissance diverted it from its natural growth. The Renaissance was ushered in by Francis I, who brought Italian artists to decorate his palace at Iif 112 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES Fontainebleau. But there was a sturdy native art beside the imported one, for the school of Clouet was also flourishing, producing remarkable por- traiture. An example of sixteenth-century painting, of this school is also in Gallery 36, a portrait of Francis I, himself. It is much like Holbein’s work, as is the pendent portrait of Eleanor of Austria, at- tributed to Mabuse. Eleanor’s second husband was Francis I. As we have already noted, a portrait of her by Holbein is at Hampton Court. It is thought that Francois Clouet, was at one time a pupil of Holbein, so the interesting question of influences and contacts may be traced even in these few works. Two exquisite portraits by Corneille de Lyon, who painted the court of Henri II, are in this same gal- lery. They show the characteristic pale green back- ground, transparency of painting and refinement of work that characterized this painter, while also pre- senting a vigorous handling and remarkable realism. In the first room of French paintings, Gallery 20- A—we come into the grand siécle, when the author- ity of Louis XIV imposed itself upon every activity of French life and art became officialized by the es- tablishment of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, eminently warranted, no doubt, by the example of the Académie Francaise, which was dis- ciplining French literature. The court painters of the time are represented here by Nicolas de Largil- ligre, who actually flourished for sixty years, living and painting into the reign of Louis XV. The two florid portraits here of the “Baron and Baroness de FRENCH PAINTING 113 Prangins” are in the taste of the time, with all the grandeur of costume and setting that even so osten- tatious a period demanded. Yet for all this efflores- cence of satins and jewels, of flowers and ornate de- tail, you realize how well it is all painted and with what sincerity and vitality it is carried out. Something of the grandiose flavor of the age is brought to us in the small allegorical canvas of “Venus and Sea Nymphs,” by Coypel. This painter assisted in the decoration of the new palace of Ver- sailles, that rose from a sandy waste at the wave of the king’s scepter—at least when he waved it at architects, painters, and sculptors. Quite in contrast to this period, or, in fact, to any epoch of French art, is the “Mendicants,” by the Brothers Le Nain—a genre painting concerned with professional beggars and their patrons, with no trace of sentimentality, but with a sober realism and aus- terity that is intensified by the low key of the paint- ing. Little is known of these three brothers, except that one did miniatures, one executed portrait sculp- ture, and all three collaborated in this type of sub- ject, which has more rapport with Holland than with France. It is to the credit of the newly formed Academy and to its head, Louis the Magnificent, that for all their homely subject matter the three brothers were elected members of the Academy, and Mathieu was appointed official painter of the little town of Laon, their birthplace. They seem to have been little affected by the artists of their day, or in turn to have had any influence on other painters of 114 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES the time. They were realists, soberly working at a moment of artificiality and exaggeration. The great figure of Nicolas Poussin belongs to this period. Because of his subject matter and style, as well as his life in Italy, he may seem more Italian than French. Yet there is always the background of — French tradition to reckon with. Also there is the important fact of his Flemish ancestry to be recalled — in any consideration of his artistic endowment. Had he remained in France and not escaped from the all- penetrating rays of Louis le Saleil, his genius doubt- less would have been sacrificed in a large measure to the further illumination of this radiant monarch. Poussin was able to develop his gifts in conformity with his own nature. In Italy he studied the work of Raphael, copying, we are told, prints of his pic- tures to teach himself drawing. He also studied the antique, probably mostly from bas-reliefs. Look- ing into his own nature he found a real love of land- scape that nothing formal or pedantic could stifle. From Raphael, from classical sculpture, from his — love of nature, he formulated the academic, classical style of French art. We recognized at the opening of this chapter that the French have as a race many strains subtly blended. One of them is, of course, Roman, and the precision, the almost frigid order- liness of much of French painting and writing springs from this side of the national character. In Poussin it accounts for his power of systematic or- ganization of principles into a coherent, working plan, on which his procedure is founded. The logic, FRENCH PAINTING 115 the order, the adaptation of his various sources of in- spiration, all show this inheritance. In his paintings he created an ideal world, an Arcadia where there was no struggle or suffering, no harshness of climate, no rigorous labor—an idyllic beauty of landscape and heroic beings, harmonious, exalted, entirely removed from our ordinary human experience. But because there is something of the classic in his own nature, something even of the real Greek tradition of beauty and serenity, this Arcadia is not stilted and trivial; rather is it a noble conception haunted with a melan- choly of the presence of a great past. The classical figures, the idealized scenes, and the grand style of -Poussin’s works became, for the Academy, a sort of measuring rod for determining the merit of all paintings, but for us to-day the beauty of his landscapes and the nobility of his con- ceptions are of greatest interest. In “The Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun,” the giant gropes toward the first rays of morning light guided by a workman of Hephestus clinging to his mighty head, while the yokels of the countryside gaze at his Brobdingnagian proportions in amazement. It is not so much an illustration of an old myth as a dramatic rendering of it. The harmony of the landscape and the figures is the particular gift of Poussin; the bal- ance of line and mass, and the architectonics of the design with its flat planes giving such recession, re- mind us of Raphael. The shadowy mystery of the morning, the tinge of light on the clouds, the rich greens of the foliage, the receding plain and hill, 116 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES show close observation of nature at first hand, with sensitiveness to subtle effects. Color, never too good, has probably deteriorated, as in so much of this painter’s work, but there is in it a timeless beauty, an abstract perfection, a translation of classical an- tiquity into a new tongue with pure accents of serene beauty. In “St. Peter and St. John Healing the Lame Man,” there is much more of Raphael, particularly in the obvious geometrical composition and in the figures. The color is warmer and functions more clearly in building up form, but the artificiality of the group leaves much less pleasing an impression than the theme in which the landscape and figures form a harmonious whole. The other great figure of this period, also an Italianized Frenchman, was Claude Gellée, or Claude Lorraine. In his work the landscape is more important than the figures. He, too, became imbued with classical lore in Italy. But he studied nature directly, and has left a large collection of drawings that show us how much he was interested in the shapes and contours of natural forms. He did not, of course, paint directly from nature, a procedure quite out of rapport with classical tenets, but he was the first to study effects of atmosphere and light, filling his landscapes with a tranquil radiance and breaking up the planes of light skilfully in his tre- mendous vistas. His compositions are built up of bits of classic formule. Roman ruins, Italian scen- ery and architectural detail are fitted cleverly to- FRENCH PAINTING 117 gether into a panoramic grandeur often on the simplest of linear designs. ‘David at the Cave of Adullam” is less typical, because of the emphasis on figures—which he drew badly in a would-be Raph- aelesque manner—than “A Seaport,” of Gallery 14 which, if not actually by Claude, is probably a copy of one of his paintings. Here can be seen how he has built up an idealized landscape, a sort of improve- ment on nature in its splendor and magnificence. This heroic, incredible scene derives a calm beauty from the balance of its tonal masses, a bigness of structure that gives breadth to a canvas filled with an almost wearying excess of hard, tight detail. If it is an entirely artificial scene assembled from a vast storehouse of classic material, yet it reflects an inner significance of antiquity like an echo of Virgil. Nothing in its array of detail is really veracious or vital, yet the effect of the whole is of serenity and stately simplicity. With Boucher’s “Toilet of Venus,” we arrive-at the next fashion of painting that came in with the Regency and expanded still further under Louis XV. Itis an echo of the artificial, pleasure-mad age for which it was painted, the grand manner of Louis XIV giving way to affectation and extravagance. The great figure of Watteau, who introduced the type of subject that became the mode of the time, cannot be studied in these galleries. He introduced the fétes galantes and charming pastorals that de- lighted the jaded courtiers, but more than all he Was a great painter whose influence did much for 118 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES both French and English landscape painting. Boucher is a lesser figure, but in this painting one must realize how good a draughtsman and de- signer he is, with his graceful line and decorative balance of color. In this work his brushwork is fluent, but too often the pressure of his enormous output impaired its execution. Here he sets the flesh tones of the nude figure against all this heaped- up opulence of draperies, jewels, gold dishes and rustling stuffs with fine feeling for color pattern and space filling. In the Pierpont Morgan Wing, several galleries are devoted to French decorative arts of the Regency and of Louis XV, in which one realizes the exquisite fitness of Boucher’s decorative panels to the milieu for which they were destined. Here, isolated from its setting, it is difficult to judge the work properly. | The name of Fragonard belongs to this period. He was a master of color and technique, but, alas! cannot be studied here. Chardin is another impor- tant artist of the period, who, however, did not choose amorini and rosebuds or graceful nymphs, but drew. his subject matter from the everyday life that surrounded him in his humble bourgeois existence. His sober, realistic art shows him a man of exquisite artistic sensibility. He was also a marvelous colorist, anticipating many of the later impressionistic prac- tices. ‘Preparations for a Breakfast, which hangs here, illustrates his typical subjects, but not his genius; while the figure painting of a “Young Woman Knitting” must, if his, belong to a period FRENCH PAINTING 11g before his powers had matured. Greuze, in his “(CHufs Cassés,” represents a phase of the affectation and sentimentality of the day. His saccharine sub- jects are drawn from lowly life, but with no sincerity or directness; rather are they superficial theatrical works which are pervaded with artistic tricks. With Nattier, we come to one of the portrait painters of the court, and an able one. The por- trait of the “Princesse de Condé as Diana” with its ostentation of classic setting shows how decorative his paintings were, how pleasing his color. The rhet- oric of the figure belongs to the rococo period in which it was painted, but the effective disposition of the color surfaces and the grace of the arrangement are individual assets of the gifted painter. Drouais and André Aved, both represented here, are lesser figures of the same type, who followed Nattier’s “magical” style as well as their powers permitted. On the wall opposite is a beguiling portrait, “Mlle. Charlotte du Val d’Ognes,” by David, an artist who did not want to be considered a portrait painter at all. Yet it is his portraits, such as those of the Bona- parte family or the famous one of Madame Ré- camier, that interest us to-day, while his frozen, classical paintings, which he considered his master- pieces, impress us as lifeless allegories, cold in color and insipid in sentiment. Yet David is the epitome of his time, the very embodiment of its psychology, as few artists have been. He marks the transition period between the reign of Louis XV and the Revo- lutionary upheaval, when the reaction against the 1200 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES licentious and frivolous court, and the new ideals of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality preached by the - doctrinaires, sent men to the simplicity of Spartan life and customs as a panacea for the decadence of their own times. It was a bad moment for art; David, the accepted artistic arbiter of the day, felt that the ideal of painting should be that of antique sculpture, or rather the bad reproductions of antique sculpture in Roman style most accessible to the artist. Color, vitality, light and shadow all went by the board at his bidding. It was not only the lifelessness of his pretentious tableaux, the aridity of this monu- mental style of subject that made them such bad ex- emplars; it was the frigidity, the coldness, the mo- notony of its technique relying on a cold perfection of draughtsmanship, outline rather than plastic form. But in this portrait of “Mlle. Charlotte,” we see how much charm inadvertently slipped into the work of this excellent portrait painter when he was off his guard and not doing second-hand conceptions of austere Romans. Nearby hang two portraits by his celebrated pupil, Ingres, who modified the pseudo-classicism of his master in many ways. He spent a long time in Italy studying the primitives and finally fell under the spell of Raphael so that his work became infused with Italian influence. He never abandoned the antique ideal in his perfection of line and emphasis on contour, but in many of his portraits shows much charm of color. In the portraits of “M. Leblanc” and “Mme. Leblanc,” the figure is placed in full FRENCH PAINTING 121 light and modeled in flat tones. Both paintings have something of the character of a colored drawing. Yet these portraits are powerful evocations both of personality and of bodily gesture, carried out by a superb synthetic line that creates a tenseness of life in its contours. The simplification of factual state- ment brings to the work an abstract, impersonal quality not marred by a distracting detail from the exquisitely fine balance of all the subtle relations of the design. In the next room, Gallery 21, we step into the nineteenth century and the establishment of the artistic leadership of France. The early nineteenth century was everywhere a moment of reaction against old standards. In France the seeds had long been sown in literary circles by Jean-Jacques Rous- seau, Chateaubriand and Mme. de Staél. Now others come trooping fast under the banner of Romanticism —Victor Hugo, Lamartine, de Musset, and a host of others, while across the water Walter Scott was re- discovering the Middle Ages and working this rich vein of romantic material. A little sketch (in Gal- lery 17) for the painting of “The Raft of the Medusa,” now in the Louvre, is by Géricault, one of the first of the Romantic painters. This sketch ap- pears trite and conventional in its handling, as indeed it is for the innovation was in the theme. In taking this subject from contemporary life rather than a classical allegory, and portraying realistic suffering in the wretched band of shipwrecked men, Géricault plunged into a new artistic epoch, without perhaps 122 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES realizing it as he did not live long afterwards. It is a revolt from the impersonality, the objectivity, the austerity of the classical Academic mood to the sub- jective, the emotional, the mysterious, the colorful. A far greater artist, Delacroix, was to develop this movement, in particular bringing back the splen- dor of Venetian coloring to his romantic themes. A painting by him will be found also in Gallery 17. The Romantic movement found an echo in the land- scape painting of the Barbizon group, who painted in the forest of Fontainebleau or the open stretch of country around the little village of Barbizon. Corot is usually included in this group, although he came to it late in life. There are a number of his paint- ings in Gallery 21, to which we now return. This group of paintings by Corot shows different phases of his work as a landscapist, but none of his superb paintings of single figures. In the “Ville d’Avray,” “Souvenir of Normandy,” or the earlier “Ferryman,” he is the lyric poet, the romanticist in that he infuses nature with the sentiment of his own reactions toward her. You cannot but feel the poetry of these harmonious compositions, with their balance of light and shade, their generalization of natural forms so that trees are but soft blurs of rus- tling foliage against an exquisite paleness of vibrant skies, and natural forms are only vaguely perceived through the veils of shimmering mist that fill the canvas. Yet, he stems directly from Poussin, he is a painter of landscapes with figures where there is complete harmony between the figure and its set- FRENCH PAINTING 123 ting, and he is classical in the balance of all this sen- suous beauty with a cool austerity and measure of reserve. Corot was the son of prosperous bourgeois parents, and was apprenticed for a time to a draper —he was a wretched clerk, drawing under the coun- ter in his master’s shop and wasting the hours of his errand-going by loitering about the quays, sketching. Eventually his father gave in to his son’s mad desire to be a painter and supplied him with a modest in- come, although he never believed in his talent. The boy went to Italy, after some study in France, and found himself. Here he drew—he had been badly taught and had much to learn and unlearn—and was confirmed in his love of landscape painting. During his three years’ stay he learned that marvelous short- hand of his brush that gives significance to a few outlines and with solidity of workmanship as foun- dation, seizes the fusing of tender colors in exquisite harmony of modulated tones. “Lake Albano,” in this collection, is of the early Italian period, showing something of his later palette in its milky tones. It also has seriousness of composition, and ease of han- dling. Corot was still using a small, fine brush at this period, but this he afterwards abandoned for a large one. When popularity came at last to Corot, he was past sixty, and the public clamored for repeti- tions of his misty dawns and vaporous twilights with reedy pools and silvery water, until there were, as someone has said, “too many dawns at the Ville d’Avray.” Yet it was in this period of repetition of subject and rather empty content that he executed a 124 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES group of figure paintings which mark another, but no less important, side of his genius. The “Path Through the Trees” is a canvas that one likes to linger by. It has solidity in its masses of trees and depth in the recession of this green glade. The filtering of light through this dense foliage gives exquisite nuances of tone, while the feeling of space and movement in this forest haunt with its gleams of silver water enchants one. The figures beneath the trees are more than accents of de- sign—they have a sort of inevitability as part of the landscape. This work shows the heritage of Poussin, of Claude, of Virgil, the work of a painter who brings the wealth of his own nature to any subject. But it is before anything else a painting by a great painter who was able to impose his vision of the world upon natural forms and evolve through subtle values and a delicate personal idiom of ex- pression a silvery beauty of landscape—tenuous, yet firmly built, tremulous beauty of the stirring foliage and flickering light in the ebbing of mist before the shafts of the sun—some echo of his own delight in natural beauty. Rousseau is another of the Barbizon painters. His work is found in this gallery and in Gallery 17. He, too, was a romanticist in that he had the feeling of sentiment for nature, but he is not imbued with the classical spirit of Corot. His study of objective fact became almost a passion with him, and his pro- cedure was logical and scientific. He was much in- fluenced by Constable’s work, which he saw at the 2 FRENCH PAINTING 125 Salon, and followed his practice of color division. Yet his canvases are mostly somber and tonal, rather than full of light. The rugged rocks and huge oaks of the forest appealed to his interest in veracious de- tail. Sometimes he succeeds in giving breadth as well as accuracy to his work, with a quality of ele- mental strength and permanence, but often he gets no further than a painstaking fidelity of meticulous record, robbed of inspiration or spontaneity. Millet is another member of this group. He is represented in this gallery by “Autumn,” the figure of a woman guarding a flock of turkeys on a bare hilltop against a broken sky of shower and storm; bits of sunlight break through beyond the rim of the hill. In this canvas you see that Millet, like Corot, finds supreme harmony between land- scape and figures, but Millet’s dramatis persone are peasants, not nymphs. They belong to the fields they labor, the harvests they reap, the primeval forces of nature on which they depend. Millet did not think of striking out a new and profitable type of subject but when he fled to Barbizon he found his métier in painting the people and scenes he knew and understood. He had, himself, been reared in a peasant household in an atmosphere of devout piety. Some classical education fell his way, so he had a lifelong delight in Virgil and Theocritus. Escaping from a most unsuitable teacher, Delaroche, who at- tempted to imbue him with a meaningless neo- classicism, he subsisted for a time by painting small nudes, which found a market, but did not bring a 126 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES. real livelihood for him or his family. Millet then settled in Barbizon and in the refuge of this haven took up his life work, the epic of the peasant sprung from a background of toil and destined to its recur- rent cycle of seasonal labors. The sense of rhythmic movement in his heavy figures, their mass and so- lidity, with his finely ordered composition and the dignity and authority of his line makes his work — heroic. Yet while he was inspired with profound humanity in all his work, he was a painter and not a story-teller or social reformer, as many people fancy. His most popular canvas, “The Angelus,” — which the public invested with a vast amount of sentimentality, is inferior artistically to the body of his work. His drawings and etchings have a mon- umental simplicity. Unfortunately the peasant be- came popular, and any number of inferior artists ex- ploited this material. We shall see the work of many of these commonplace painters who treated peasant life with the same superficial sentimentality with which Greuze painted his themes of lowly life. A little wooden panel depicting “Don Quixote” is the work of a prodigious man, Honoré Daumier, who should in some respects be reckoned with the Romantics, however pronounced a realist he was. At twenty-five he was famous as a caricaturist, inces- santly holding up to ridicule the pitiful figure of the little Bourgeois, whom he studied with scientific re- lentlessness, or the rapacity, ineptness and smugness of an episodic Government which was a good target for his satire. His political caricatures landed him WITH A SWORD. EDOUARD MANET Metropolitan Museum of Art x ‘3 ; - ’ ; ‘ Ld % FRENCH PAINTING 127 finally in prison after forty years of tremendous toil in which his numerous magnificent lithographs were executed. Frenchmen have said of him that he had “something of Michael Angelo under his skin,” and Daubigny is reported to have exclaimed when he first saw Michael Angelo’s frescoes, “It’s Daumier.” In this panel Don Quixote, mounted on a white horse and accompanied by Sancho Panza on his mule, rides down the ridge of a hill toward the foreground where a dead horse lies. It is one of a series of Don Quixote pictures, for the dramatic clash of the ideal and the real in the story of the knight of the rueful countenance appealed to Daumier, as did the de- lightful absurdity of his fat little squire. Even in so slight a work as this it is possible to gain some idea of the artist’s power to create voluminous form with a play of light and dark masses and to give meaning to the formal structure of his slightest theme. Daumier was a great influence on the men of his time—Millet is one instance—and one of the really great men of the nineteenth century. In trenchant notation of observed fact, simplification of drawing, development of plastic form and grandeur of monumental conceptions, executed with vitality and marvelous economy of means, he is a surprising figure. With Courbet we come to the so-called realists who revolted against the elaborate stage setting of the romantic painters, stripping it alike of its second- hand Italian Renaissance allegory and of its lit- erary background. The choice of roadmakers break- 128 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES ing stone on the highway or peasants huddled som- berly in funeral rites, as subject matter for his can- vases, proved to the public of his time that Courbet was coarse and vulgar. He was his own best press agent and was held back by no scruples of false mod- esty in proclaiming his own genius or the stupidity of his contemporaries who did not understand what art was about when not engaged in charming alle- gories or carefully groomed landscapes. But how- ever Gargantuan his vainglory and his noisy decla- mation appeared to the people of his day, his zsthetic doctrines appear quite mild now. His realism that he flaunted like a red flag of anarchy was merely the right to record the thing before him as he saw it him- self, without embellishments, literary or allegorical. He presented nature in the rough, as it were, and the eesthetes shuddered, as they did at his heavy, dull peasants. Yet he has much of the romanticist in him, as many of his subjects attest, and much of the classicist as well. The painting of “Woman with a Parrot” shows his robustness of handling, his abil- ity to create plastic design and organic figures, with mobility of line and an endowment of rich, sensuous physical beauty. Courbet’s landscapes are, perhaps, © his greatest work, for he organizes them as he does his nudes. He gives them a tremendous sense of the rise and fall of earth masses beneath a vastness of luminous sky. The landscapes shown here are in- dicative of his treatment, but they do not reveal the artist at his highest point of achievement, when he expends the fulness of his really great technical FRENCH PAINTING 129 power with a sort of superb prodigality and actually identifies himself with the landscape he loves—ex- cept in the background of “Les Demoiselles de Vil- lage,” a loaned picture. His color is dull and his in- stinct outruns his theories, for he was not a really profound thinker. Yet his influence as a great painter grows rather than lessens. Manet is represented here by a fine group of can- vases. He is often reckoned as one of the first im- pressionists, because of his final interest in lumi- nism, but he is essentially a realist attempting to re- cord his own highly sensitized vision with a tech- nical method of his own. Courbet still used the masses of light and shadow and the tonality of the old masters whose subject matter he rejected. Manet went a step further and brought unity into his canvases without this chiaroscuro, by harmonizing the contrasts of color through their dissolution in light. “Boy with a Sword,” “Woman with a Par- rot” and “The Dead Christ with Angels,” belong to his early period when the influence of Velazquez was strongly felt. The restriction of the palette, the decorative ensemble of the composition, the effect of modeling obtained through this use of broad flat planes of color where the light is carefully — distributed, mark his working out of pictorial theory. As Meier-Graefe puts it, he began to paint “what he saw not what he knew the subject held.” Cour- bet had still retained, if unconsciously, many of the conventions of Romanticism, and the technical equip- ment of the classical painter in composition and 130 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES structure. Manet scrapped all this and divested the subject of everything irrelevant to his vision of the whole, the instantaneous image that he seeks to pre- sent with no adventitious interest. In his painting of textures he excelled. In the “Still Life” here he realized exactly the surfaces and shapes and tactile qualities of the luscious melon, the gleaming linen, the water bottle with its broken lights, the petals of the velvety rose. “The Funeral” marks his second period, when he begins to leave the studio and study the problem of plein air painting that was to absorb so many painters of his group. Monet was one of these painters who pushed the study of luminism still further. He sought to re- cord the fleeting aspects of the outdoor world under the changing lights of different moments of the day. He was never a studio painter and his whole attempt was to render what he saw in nature. He saw among other things that there is color in shadow and that outdoor brilliancy of color might be attained in greater degree by tones in juxtaposition rather than by mixed pigments. He was influenced at first by Boudin, a French painter of sky and sea, and later in England by Constable, Turner and Bonington. But he remained entirely individual, a highly personal painter seizing atmosphere and vibrating effects of light and color. He is represented here by two landscapes and by “Rouen Cathedral,” one of the famous series showing the intricate lacework of the sculpture of the Cathedral facade at different mo- ments of illumination. FRENCH PAINTING 131 He expanded Manet’s theory that the raising of the key of light necessitated raising the shadow, too. The subtlety of Monet’s perceptions led him grad- ually to composing in light. Through a misappre- hension of the title of one of his early canvases this group of luminists were called “Impressionists,” a futile and misleading term. Degas, who frequented the Café Guerbois, where this band of artists met to expound their theories, was an artist of high intellectual power and penetrat- ing observation. In his remarkable synthesis of line he descends directly from Ingres and classic ideals, but in his choice of subject matter and his use of it he is a realist, or a naturalist. He paints dancers of the Opera or Circus, race horses, Parisian women of every class, with an almost cruel acuteness of ob- servation. The Japanese prints that were becoming so popular in Paris in this period influenced Manet, as they later influenced Whistler, but they also had a particular effect upon the technique of Degas— they supplied the means of expressing the idea he was interested in, that is, the flux of movement, the tension of the human body, the resiliency of a mo- mentary pose, the fugitive appearance of the light or the spontaneity of a casual gesture. The old formule of geometric composition would not work here, but the broken-up surfaces of the Ukiyoye prints, which also claimed to represent the flow and ebb of everyday life, exactly fell in with the new ideas of the luminists. They permitted Degas to express the most exquisite balance of physical poise, 132 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES the marvelous dynamic quality of a single move- ment that seems to sum up the whole; the thrust of the ballet girl’s foot giving us the swift intricacy of her pirouettes in a single instantaneous simplicity of impression. The cases that stand in the center of this gallery contain a collection of bronze casts made from the wax models of race horses, bathers, dancers—nudes of many kinds—that Degas modeled in his unre- lenting pursuit of the secrets of physical poise and suspended movement. You see here his minute analysis of muscular reflexes, of exquisite balance of pose, of nervous, vehement action. You realize how this artist, who had apparently such facility in seizing the protean aspects of life and motion, had applied himself with tremendous assiduity to a scien- tific study of the whole subject. The little figure of a ballet girl, a novice in the fatiguing work of the dancing school, is shown here both in frayed skirts and worn bodice and nude. She has been caught in a moment of brief repose. The sculpture is a mar- velous bit of realistic modeling, revealing the exact muscular relaxation of the tired body letting go in a bliss of relief, but with a curious suggestion of mental alertness that will set the feet obediently back into the measure of the dance at a moment’s notice. In the canvas, “An Interior,” the distinction of Degas’s draughtsmanship is evident. He shows himself also an individual and pleasing colorist, in- vesting all his work with a persuasive charm of har- monious color while he appreciates thoroughly the FRENCH PAINTING Lvs decorative possibilities of his arabesques of pattern. Renoir, the great figure of this group, is repre- sented here by a canvas of his early period, “Mme. Charpentier and Her Children.” In this delightful painting one feels how entirely French his genius was, how he stemmed directly from the eighteenth century and Rubens, yet belongs to a new age in which he preserves a continuity of artistic tradition. This painting with its gaiety and sensuous beauty, its flowing rhythms, solidity of form and amazing vi- tality of presentment comes off with such élam that one may forget how knowingly its texture of design is woven or how masterful is the fluent caressing brushwork. The lack of sentimental emphasis is Gallic, too; one sees it in Mary Cassatt’s canvases of mothers and children as a French influence. The physical dependence of these charming little crea- tures, aglow with animal health and spirits, is here realized, but there is no tremendous symbolism of Motherhood as English painters usually suggest. In the fruits and flowers of this canvas there is evi- dence of the artist’s pleasure in textures and sur- faces, yet their beauty is not an afterthought—it is needed to complete the luxurious, charming décor of the room. Renoir was almost self-taught as an artist, starting his career as a china painter. For a time he was in- fluenced by Courbet and Velazquez, but later com- ing in touch with Manet and the luminists he ac- cepted their general theories of light and color. But he departed from the Impressionists in his feeling 134 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES for mass, his love of form, his forceful line, and his usual subject matter, preferring figure painting and only occasionally producing a landscape. His “Mou- lin de La Galette,” of the Louvre, shows how he could out-Herod Herod for he exemplifies their con- tentions of illumination to the wth degree in creat- ing the impression that the radiance of the canvas flows out from it as a source of light. Or, the sun- dappled “Déjeuner des Canotiers,” of the Phillips Memorial Gallery, in which the highest possibilities of plastic, luminous decoration are realized, with nat- uralism of gesture and form woven into the vibrant rhythms of the composition. Since this portrait of “Mme. Charpentier and Her Children” marks the threshold of the painter’s career, it is impossible to illustrate his progress. It is probably sufficient to re- call how far he went in his development of plastic form, in his arbitrary control of light, to model this solidity, and in his power of organization that makes him one of the great figures of French art—sum- ming up in his work the great traditions of the past and adding his own sensibility to beauty and lyrical charm. Another great artist who started out with the Impressionists, but left them for his own road is Cézanne. This artist is represented here by several canvases, Cézanne, though hardly a “primitive” of a school as he anticipated he would be, is at least an “old master’’; it is, therefore, impossible to estimate so important a figure by a few canvases, since his whole life was one of experiment and development. FRENCH PAINTING 135 In the little landscape, “La Colline des Pauvres,” he shows his discovery of the power of different colors to make planes recede or advance, as well as his utter lack of interest in any literal representation of nature through veracity of local coloring. In the “Bathers,” he attempts to render the significance of movement by a sacrifice or distortion, as you will, of form. In both the landscape and the figure group, though not important canvases, you may gain some idea of his plastic unity of structure and his feeling for the uni- versal and essential in his subject matter. He wished to penetrate nature and not merely record a passing sensation. The “Still Life” is one of a class of the subjects which exerted a great influence on would-be followers. It makes less demand upon the under- standing in organization, while endowed with beauty of color and a sort of grandeur and intensity of ap- peal. In his delicate, pearly-toned water-colors it is easiest to realize the dynamic record of emotional reaction and the aim of Cézanne to impose an arbi- trary order on natural forms, through pure color and by organization of the planes of light. Al- though not possessing great technical equipment or profound intelligence, his zsthetic procedure and theories changed the course of modern art so that it is impossible to consider it without him. He is the predominant figure in the modern art world, which is only just beginning to suspect on what elemental truths his theories are really founded. An interesting and important figure represented in this gallery is Puvis de Chavannes, who brought a 136 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES new contribution to mural art. He was a lover of nature, a mystic, something of a philosopher and a thoroughly cultured man. To the accepted theory of harmonizing the space to be decorated with the surrounding architecture, he added the further tenet that the expression should be abstract. From Giotto, or even Ghirlandaio, he learned the art of the neces- sary flatness of wall decoration. He achieves his flatness in part by painting in pale colors close in value and harmonious. The figures he models in gradations of the same tone so that adequate sense of reality is given without any sense of projection. His color, moreover, is kept soft and light for flat- ness and to brighten the effect of the interior. In © the compositions he advances from the somewhat detailed “Beheading of John the Baptist,” carried out with superb line and probity of design, to “The River” and “The Cider” for the Amiens Museum, and finally to the beautiful “Inter Artes et Na- turam” for the Museum of Rouen, where one may realize how carefully he has avoided complexity in composition, or any feeling of third dimension or depth. The quietness and serenity of the effect also depend on the space composition of a few hori- zontal planes in succession giving a simplicity of architectural design and on the willingness to allow spaces to tell as much as figures in the bigness of pattern. This gallery contains a number of lesser painters of the Barbizon group. Several canvases by Dau- bigny are in many cases carried out with a breadth FRENCH PAINTING 137 and freedom that is nearer to modern work than _to his contemporaries. Diaz, an extremely uneven painter, and never an able draughtsman, is particu- larly felicitous in such a theme as “Clearing in the Forest of Fontainebleau,” in which his power as a colorist is apparent, as is his flair for breaking up the light by filtering it through heavy foliage and fleck- ing the turf with its shifting lights. ‘Friedland,’ by Meissonier, appears more of a curiosity to-day than a work of art, so strange is the effect of its - microscopic detail introduced in a composition on such a large scale. Meissonier painted a large number of tiny pictures of the rococo variety with infinitesimal fineness of detail, prosaic accuracy of shining sur- faces and verisimilitude of rich textures. A group of this type of his work will be found in adjacent galleries. His Napoleonic cycle, of which “Fried- land” is a part, indicates how difficult he found it to leave out a single buckle of harness, or a coat button, in his pursuit of photographic veracity, for he ex- actly reversed Manet’s system, always painting everything that he knew existed in a subject whether he could see it there or not. Regnault, one of the pseudo-classicists, obtained the Prix de Rome. In his subject matter, such as his “Horses of Achilles,” he demonstrates the old idea that a work was classic if its subject was a Roman or a Greek. Here in his “Salome” he shows himself a realist, delighting in an orgy of color and leaning on anecdote for his sup- port rather than on esthetic content. A delightful “On the Beach at Trouville” by 138 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES - Boudin and Bastien-Lepage’s “Joan of Arc” repre- sent two widely severed points of view as to subject matter and handling. Bastien-Lepage is not happy in his composition. The big, pretentious canvas falls to pieces in its flimsy structure. The peasant, again borrowed from Millet, and given plenty of homely sentiment, accounts for the wide appeal of this can- vas. Two of Monticelli’s fantasies, “Court Ladies” and “Court of the Princess,” reveal the work of an unusual painter. He employed a highly individual type of impressionism, in which-his orchestration of smoldering colors sweep across the canvas in beating rhythms, like the gipsy music he delighted in. Un- like most luminists Monticelli builds his composi- tions with great firmness of structure and obtains remarkable suggestions of infinite space and mysteri- ous depth. His figures pass in and out of the surge of a jewel-like color in which the piled-up pigment gives an almost enameled surface. CHAPTER NINE MISCELLANEOUS PAINTINGS ASSING into Gallery 19, we find a collection of European paintings that need not detain us long. The enormous canvas of the “Horse Fair,” by Rosa Bonheur, presents a photographic panorama with prosaic fidelity of notation instead of life. Patriotic rather than esthetic value may be assigned to the work of the Diisseldorf painter, Emanuel Leutze, in his “Washington Crossing the Delaware” (which is Rhine rather than Delaware). One of the many sentimental exploitations of Millet’s peas- ant is Leibl’s “Peasant Girl.” Bécklin’s “Island of the Dead” shows how thoroughly bogged in litera- ture and sentiment German nineteenth-century art became. It is reported that the fine group of tragic cypresses of this scene was observed from the ar- tist’s villa near Florence. Around this focus he built up a purely imaginary landscape heavily laden with emotion and literary content. Fortuny’s “Spanish Lady” shows this dashing painter at a moment of high achievement, with soundness and sobriety as well as virtuosity to his ac- count. The large group of paintings by Anton Mauve introduces a Dutch painter who works much in the manner of the Barbizon school, imbuing the barren, flat country of his canvases with a poetic 139 140 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES sentiment. “Changing Pasture” is the strongest of the group, giving a sense of weight and mass to the lumbering animals and the peasant woman who drives them. The gray sky and gray monotony of world beneath it are charged with moisture that per- meates the whole scene. The figures stand out in all this bareness and flatness with tremendous emphasis, In Gallery 18, we find more sentimentalized peas- ants such as Lhermitte’s “Among the Lowly” or Breton’s “Peasant Girl Knitting.” The Orientalists appear here in rank and file. They are the Ro- manticists who fled from the tyranny of the classic, not to the medieval but to the Orient, with Dela- croix in the lead. Bargue, whose laborious craft ad- mitted only a small output during his lifetime, is represented by two canvases. They show the same passion for surface finish and meticulous elaboration as does the work of Meissonier. Géréme is not so easy to classify, for at times he is a realist, at others a classicist, showing a broad handling and a reverence for the tradition of linear design; but again he is pure Romanticist, as in these canvases where he is as one obsessed in his paintings of coffee houses and mosques, with the piling up of luxurious detail of color and incident, leaving no clarity of impression. Fortuny is seen in his char- acteristic work here, as an Orientalist. His canvases are all glitter and sparkle. He seizes upon the in- tricacy of Eastern décor for the sheer delight that its gorgeousness of color and textures offers to his bril- MISCELLANEOUS PAINTINGS | 141 liant execution. It is, in fact, as little of the East as possible, merely a surface skim, but a dazzling exer- cise in facile painting. There are anecdotal canvases aplenty, such as “The Storm,” invested with literary appeal in the popular mind by association with the figures of Paul and Virginie of Bernadin St. Pierre’s idyllic tale. Or Chaplin’s “Haidée,” the heroine of one of Byron’s poems, showing how all good Romanticists pulled together; Max’s “Last Token,” reeking with sentiment, Boldini’s “Dispatch Bearer,” with its stage set of military backdrop, the sugared insipidity of Bouguereau’s peasant subjects, are others that might be mentioned or kindly omitted. The actual bru- tality of real conflict appears in Detaille’s big can- vases depicting incidents of the Franco-Prussian War. They seem literal, journalistic reporting rather than art. One of Franz von Lenbach’s Munich portraits, sinking into a bituminous penumbra, is also here. ite decorative “Lachrymae” by Sir Frederick Leighton, insipid and frigid, represents the best British infusion of art and literature that turns out to be neither. In Gallery 17, Decamps, another Orientalist, gives a glowing version of the East in his “Night Patrol, Smyrna.” This work possesses the life and warmth which all Fortuny’s complexity of glittering facts never produces. Bonnat’s typical work, portraiture —hard, inflexible and cold in color—is represented in another gallery in the portrait of “John Taylor Johnston,” while here you may see his earlier, 142 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES warmer, more flowing style in two Oriental subjects. Théodore Rousseau’s “Edge of the Woods” escapes to a large degree the insistence of its minute detail. It has rich color and firm structure and succeeds in enveloping the scene in atmosphere despite its elab- orate finish of surface. Fantin-Latour’s “Portrait of a Lady” is a work of serene and flower-like beauty. Its distinction of handling reveals the real classicist conveying a personal note while conforming to tradi- tional standards. The rightness of the arrangement of detail, the cool, low gamut of tones, and the charm and vitality of the characterization mark the artist’s power as a portrait painter. “Ville d’Avray,” by Corot, is one of the spon- taneous versions of this theme, not one of the merely clever repetitions of a popular subject. “The Sleep of Diana” shows him half-way between his early manner and his later one. It has classic solidity and bigness of conception, tempered with a delicate per- ception of a mood of nature in subtle nuances of tone. Here are the browns that will later be greens. The simplicity, serenity and fluency of the painting with its transparent shadows and envelopment of mys-— terious light show him a Romanticist in his approach to nature. The great Romanticist, Delacroix, is represented here by “The Abduction of Rebecca” from Scott’s Ivanhoe. It is realism, but not from contemporary life. Its actuality is of the Middle Ages. The fig- ures have solidity; the whole canvas is imbued with the opulence of Venetian coloring. The artist’s fancy Miwa vA Us BOURNE. ) JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY Metropolitan Museum of Art MISCELLANEOUS PAINTINGS 143 is not fettered by his facts, but becomes spontaneous and impassioned, endowing the subject with vitality, splendor and rushing movement. Delacroix was not only a great experimenter in color, but one of the real founders of modern painting in his use of the broken patches of color that he found in Constable’s work. With them he imparted to his paintings a brilliant vibrancy. He is literary and romantic, but he also possesses taste and discretion so that his work has balance in addition to a magic of coloring and freedom from emotional restraint. In this gallery we find two of the Barbizon group, Jacque and Troyon. They follow directly from the Dutch painters, in their animal subjects. Jacque in his “Sheepfold” floods the interior with a golden glow from the open door, picking out an elaboration of detail—the minutely realized mass of huddling sheep, the chickens, the farm boy and his bundle of hay. This is warmer and more fluent than much of his work. Although this painter loved and knew animals, his obsession to render textures and sur- faces with hard precision robs his work of veracity or spontaneity. His painting has much the character of an engraving. In his etching, in fact, you often feel that he should have held the burin and not the needle for his inflexible rigidity in recording objec- tive fact. Troyon, in “Holland Cattle,” has realized the pictorial value of the flat Dutch landscape as set- ting for his animal paintings. There is breadth and depth in the spatial composition of this landscape, a oneness of the animals and the fertile meadows, that 144 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES gives them alike an elemental simplicity and power. In a decidedly different vein is the work of Alfred Stevens, a Belgian painter, whose “Japanese Robe” is in this gallery. This artist devoted his talents to portraying the elegance of Parisian femininity in the opulence of the Second Empire’s fitful burst of splendor. He is sincere in his feeling and renders his interpretations of boudoir and drawing-room with serious artistic purpose. The Oriental fashion of the time is reflected in this subject: it was one of the many manifestations of exotic invasion in Parisian life. As Guy seized the glitter and sparkle of the feverish activity of enjoyment of the period, Stevens gives the exquisite record of its luxurious interiors, their fashionable ladies surrounded by every blan- dishment and extravagance of modish vanity. It is a charming, yet thoroughly veracious, cross-section of life cut at an unusual angle. Cabanel’s portrait of “Catharine Lorillard Wolfe” shows him a portrait painter immersed in the lus- cious textures of stuffs and delighting in the confec- tions of the modiste. Couture, his artistic ancestor, has here a genre painting, “Day Dreams,” that hardly illustrates his usual curious reassembling of classic precepts and motifs in a new formula suited to the taste of his day, and guaranteed to produce bril- liant if empty paintings, richer in colorful detail than in inspiration. Jongkind, whose “Dutch Fishing Boats” and “Honfleur” are here, exhibited at the famous Salon des Refusés with Manet and Pisarro. His influence in procedure of broken color was fol- MISCELLANEOUS PAINTINGS 145 lowed by the early luminists, although his color key was low and soon superseded in the later men by brilliancy and gaiety. In Gallery 16 we come upon the early Americans, reflecting European schools, particularly the British, in their portrait painting. In the portraits of “Sam- uel Mifflin” and his wife, “Rebecca Edgehill Mif- flin,” Charles Willson Peale shows charm of color and force of characterization. The difficulty of fore- shortening is evident in the portrait of Samuel, giv- ing a one-sidedness to his heavy figure because of the drawing of one leg. But the strength of the en- semble triumphs over this detail. In the distant view of sea and sail there is, perhaps, a suggestion of the occupation that has succeeded so well as to support this portly severity and solidity of bearing. The portrait of his wife and her granddaughter is delightful with its shimmery gray silk overdress and quilted blue underskirt, the profusion of white lace falling over neck and shoulders. Near-by is an es- pecially interesting portrait, that of “Mistress Ann Galloway,” by Gustavus Hesselius, 2 Swede who settled in America in the early years of the eighteenth century and is the earliest known painter in this coun- try. This rather severe lady in her satin amplitude of dress, her Quaker fichu and cap, is given a little spriteliness by the pleasing warmth of the landscape of the background and the deep blue of her chair back (she does not make the concession of leaning against it). It is an interesting document of Ameri- can art, and a thoroughly interesting painting. 146 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES The portrait of “Maria Taylor Byrd,” by Charles Bridges, shows the influence of Kneller. It is exe- cuted with ease and decorative instinct that give im- portance to the background landscape. The model- ing of form with light and shadow and the nice handling of textures, as well as breadth in treatment, make this a good picture as it was probably a good portrait. The portrait of “Mrs. Sylvanus Bourne,” by John Singleton Copley, shows this famous painter in a particularly fine example. His precision of out- line, vivacity of coloring and directness of present- ment make it a fascinating work. One sees this alert, domineering old lady as the direct ancestress of Mrs. Manson Mingott of The Age of Innocence. Itisa harmonious realization of personality and objective fact that makes a handsome painting. The render- ing of the textures of the flesh, the suggestion of reluctant idleness in the folding of the vigorous hands, the sprightliness and vitality of the whole fig- ure, are amazing. If in his later work Copley fre- quently yielded to his advisers in subduing his color and beauty of textures to a more arid uniformity of tone, in this instance there is nothing to be desired in the splendid performance. Another good example of his work is the portrait of “Judge Joseph Sher- burne.” Across the way hangs the well-known Gibbs-Chan- ning-Avery portrait of “George Washington,” by Gilbert Stuart. This echoes Raeburn, as Copley seems to indicate something of Hogarth’s influence. The group of Sully’s work indicates something of MISCELLANEOUS PAINTINGS _ 147 his large output and contemporary popularity. His -suavity, blandness and good color tell heavily in his list of Philadelphia’s society roster. If he idealized everybody as he did Queen Victoria (whom he de- picts in his study for the portrait of the Wallace Collection, as turning a swan-like neck to the ob- server and revealing a dazzling charm of physical beauty), it is not to be wondered at that he was popular. The studies of her coronation jewelry add further historical interest to this picture. In “Mother and Son” the treatment is broader with pleasing arabesques of design. Two Spanish portraits by Stuart reveal his earlier style, before his long sojourn in England. Yet here, in spite of the evident preoccupation in the elaborate dress of the sitters, is great power of characteriza- tion. The echo of Sir Joshua’s grand style is to be found in Allston’s “The Deluge,” the same type of subject that John Martin delighted in. “Hagar and Ishmael” and “Return of the Prodigal Son” show his serious attachment to the historical subjects that Sir Joshua advocated, if not practiced. David wrung dry of inspiration or significance seems to be the ideal of this mediocre academic painting. This gallery also contains works by the painters of the so-called Hudson River school. Landscape was a new departure in American art of the first half of the nineteenth century. It began in a grand, panoramic manner that reflected the romantic mood of the literary moment. Few of its painters were trained in any school and had more regard for metic- 148 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES ulous detail than for composition. Asher B. Durand, whose work is in this gallery and the previous one, is in a way the founder of this movement. He had a sincere delight in nature and an affection for the landscape he painted. He did not introduce the moralizing sentimentality of the later men, and even in his larger and less interesting canvases shows a fidelity to observed nature. Durand gathered around him a group of young artists who went on long trips of exploration and painting in the Catskills. Thomas Cole was one of these followers, and the real discoverer of the beau- ties of the Hudson River. These painters could not resist making a tremendous panorama of nature, put- ting in figures, rivers, mountains, meadows, trees— everything in the category of natural phenomena— as much to demonstrate the bigness and splendor of their country as to make pictures. In their rare small paintings they show the freshness of their in- spiration and real artistic endowments. “The Aigean Sea” by Frederic E. Church, with its spectacular rainbow, ruins, cliffs, islands, sea and foreground figures, indicates how contact with European art en- larged still further the scale of painting, making the grand imperative. Other painters of this school, whose work is in this gallery, are Thomas Doughty, Jasper Cropsey, John Kensett, and John Casilear (whose perfunctory work falls far below the others). It is also interesting to note that the work of Homer Martin, George Inness and Alexander Wyant, in this gallery, reveals that these artists started their MISCELLANEOUS PAINTINGS _— 149 careers profoundly influenced by the Hudson River painters, in subject matter and treatment. Frank Duveneck is one of the painters who turned first to Munich for his artistic training, although later he took his little group of students, the “Duve- neck Boys,” to Venice, Florence and other Italian spots for study and painting trips. His first work shows the Munich bituminous backgrounds, the thick, rich pigment and the tremendous contrasts of unc- tuous blacks and dazzling whites. But he also evolved a style of his own in the use of this tech- nique, so that he is not only prodigiously clever in his vehemence of brushwork, but displays a sensitive- ness of modeling and a penetration of character in his portraiture. In this work, evidently of his Munich period, the half-length seated figure of the old peasant is rendered in almost a monochrome. The emphasis is on realistic detail, yet there is a sin- cerity and a directness that give strength to the work. A number of the canvases here are by mural painters—John La Farge, William Morris Hunt and Elihu Vedder—and cannot in this range ade- quately represent the characteristic work of these men, although La Farge’s “Muse of Painting” is in itself an unusual and effective work carried out in flat low tones which achieve a fine serenity of dec- orative effect. If anyone has any doubt of the character of the Victorian era in these our United States, let him look at Eastman Johnson’s “Family Group,” and he will be fully documented. Heavy red curtains, 150 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES the art nouveau of furnishings in the Eastlake fur- niture, a rug with insistent floridity, make a stage set for a group of father, mother, eleven children, grandmother and grandfather, all engaged in do- mestic occupations in the library. The baby’s long dress, in itself, is a revelation of other days and fash- ions. The more one studies this unusual painting, the more it discloses of the flavor of a bygone day. It is a valuable historical record. Two paintings by George Fuller, “Nydia” and “She Was a Witch,” may better be considered when the other galleries are reached where more of his work may be seen. The portrait of “De Witt Clin- ton” by Samuel F. B. Morse should be noted, how- ever, since Morse is better known as the inventor of telegraphy than as an artist; yet this vigorous por- trait shows how much of a painter he was. More- over, Clinton is a figure of great interest—associated with our local history as Mayor of New York City, Governor of New York State and promoter of the Erie Canal. CHAPTER ‘TEN AMERICAN PAINTING N the last gallery we have seen how the begin- nings of American art echoed that of the old world, particularly British portraiture; yet an indi- vidual note is felt in the early work of Inness, Wyant, and Homer Martin. In Gallery 15 the native talent of America asserts itself in the work of Winslow Homer, who is well represented by five paintings. It would be difficult to think of this work having been done by anyone but an American. It strikes its roots down into our soil and is nourished on our tradition of life and experience. Homer’s teaching and training was in lithography. His technical accomplishment in painting sometimes falls short of his tremendous esthetic impulse, but his genius triumphs over this lack of virtuosity. His originality and power at times give an almost brutal character to his handling, yet there is a fine percep- tion of values and subtle relations of tone in his most forthright paintings. He succeeds in finding the essential character of the natural form he is ren- dering and depicts it in his own personal idiom with a magical quality of life. It would be difficult to find traces of foreign influences in his work. In fact he was out of his native country only for a short stay on the English coast where he painted its I5I 152 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES fisherfolk as later he became interested in the fisher- men and seamen of the Maine coast. This visit to England may have given him, as is sometimes as- serted, a different vision of the world, or may have developed more rapidly his penetration and appre- ciation of air and light as factors in landscape. In these four marine paintings the dynamic force of the moving water is felt irresistibly, yet there is always the power of design to give the work its pe- culiar distinction. The fidelity of the record of ob- jective fact is amazing in the weight and bulk of the heaving water and the voluminous mass of the rocks against which it beats. Yet without any romantic sentimentalizing, there is also a suggestion of the tremendous drama of elemental forces which invests such work as this with a profound significance be- yond its momentary aspect. It is this feeling of the dominating power of natural forces that one feels in “The Gulf Stream,” in the next gallery, and this is saved from anecdotal illustration, not only through its zsthetic content, powerful design and melodic rhythms of line, but also through the dramatic con- trast of man’s power pitted against this impersonal, relentless force of nature. The color in this canvas is in a higher key than usual, perhaps because of its tropical subject matter. Homer was not a great colorist, except in his water-colors. There is always something of the quality of his lithographic design of balanced blacks and whites in his oils. Also in the next gallery is the unfinished painting, “Shoot- ing the Rapids,” dynamic in its movement. This jp fo wnasnpy unjyodo.sjajy YHANOH MOISNIM ‘“YALSVAH LYON AMERICAN PAINTING 153 was the artist’s last work, on which he was engaged at the time of his death. His early period of Civil War pictures and Southern scenes is likewise repre- sented in Gallery 12. These paintings serve as a reminder of his services as illustrator on the staff of Harpers Weekly, where his drawings had indiffer- ent reproduction through engraving. His water- colors are a chapter by themselves and will be con- sidered in the collection of water-colors in the Brook- lyn Museum. The arrangement and material of the American galleries are miscellaneous. For this reason it is impossible to trace any continuity of artistic expres- sion or indicate even briefly how one movement was succeeded by another. Consequently, it must be an equally hit-and-miss method of observation that brings us next to one of the best known of American artists, John Singer Sargent, whose “Mme. Gau- treau” (or “Mme. X”’) is in this gallery. Sargent’s work in murals cannot be studied here; his water- colors will be considered in the Brooklyn collection. His portraits in this museum represent the type of work by which he is best known. Not only best, but rightfully best, known for his especial endowment was as a portrait painter, although his desire led him to mural decoration. For this latter work power of constructive design is imperative, a gift he did not possess. One feels his weakness of design even in portrait groups. In one-figure presentment, brought to such perfection by the genius of Velazquez—in his solution of the formidable task of royal portrai- 154 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES ture in ceremonial formality—Sargent attained a marvelous proficiency. In pure painting it would be — difficult to find more beauty or greater brilliancy than his magical record, detached and intellectual, of objective fact. The controversy that even now rages over his artistic achievement arises in great part from the desire to impute to him gifts that he did not possess, rather than to acknowledge the great ones he undoubtedly may lay claim to. His admir- ers insist that in order to appreciate the tremendous technical endowment of this unusual artist one must admit that his work reveals psychological insight, depth and profound reflection. There is something very absolute and convincing in the splendid char- acterizations of his best work, but to many of us they appear not as works of imaginative creation or profundity, but marvelous presentments, decorative in effect and beguiling in their splendor and mun- dane éclat. Nor is it necessary for a star to twinkle in the great constellation of such painters as Rem- brandt, Velazquez, or Hals, to shed a very dazzling light. | In the portrait of “Mme. Gautreau” (sometimes known as “Mme. X”), the work of the artist’s early period is represented, while he was still in Paris and beginning to outshine his master, Carolus Duran. Unfortunately the deterioration of pigment has been proceeding so rapidly in this canvas that the first contour of the drawing for the profile is visible. But the power of the work is obvious. There is none of the later bravura and flash of virtuosity in this AMERICAN PAINTING 155 serious portraiture. In it you may feel that the artist and his subject were decidedly antagonistic, for it is a curious idea of portraying a supposedly beauti- ful woman. Yet that latent hostility may also be entirely fanciful, since the artist has conveyed the patrician elegance, the authority, the aristocratic en- tourage of this proud lady in striking clarity, as well as her grace of swift surprising movements and atti- tudes. The picture aroused violent controversy among the friends and admirers of the sitter, who considered that Sargent had done her beauty a great injustice and made her ridiculous with extravagance of pose. In fact, it was supposed at one time that the unpopularity arising from this performance caused Sargent to leave Paris. The cameo-like pre- cision of her profile and the arresting suggestion of personality are still so vivid that the painting remains one of the artist’s most popular works—one which he, himself, professed to have considered among his best. In Gallery 12 is Sargent’s portrait of the artist, William M. Chase, that is by way of being quite another fashion of performance. Here is a brilliant technical feat, the very pyrotechnics of portraiture. The artist in his black clothes is set against a dark background. He holds brushes, mahlstick and palette, and seems to have whirled swiftly about to face you in a graceful flourish of gesture. A friend of Sargent’s has stated that this dashing portrait was finished in less than an hour, a fact which reveals the artist’s ability to seize an instantaneous, vital im- 156 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES pression of his sitter, and his phenomenal surety and facility in carrying out this acute observation. The big canvas of “The Wyndham Sisters,” by Sargent, which hangs here, has been recently ac- quired. It is a valuable record of an epoch now vanished forever. The leisure, the formal ele- gance, the carefully preserved convenances of the pre-war world bred such exquisite and ornamental ladies, who are far removed—surely more than the quarter-century of time’s lapsing—from the ener- getic, robust types of society leaders of to-day. In the effort to gain spontaneity and ease of presentation the composition had to go by the board so that the group breaks apart, with the enormous space of wall rather empty and dull, for all the pretty symbolism of a family portrait by Watts breaking its monotony. The virtuosity of the work is amazing. The cascade of gleaming white breaking into a spectrum’s colors in its folds and ripplings, the delicate, aristocratic heads held so proudly on their long necks, stand out vitally against the stuffs and decorations of the room and all the luxury of furnishings. It is superbly presented for all its lack of solidity. While it is papery and thin, yet it is astonishingly vivid as a portrayal of types and an epoch. Also in Gallery 12 is “The Hermit,” an impres- sionistic landscape in which, under flecking sunlight falling through foliage, is seated the nude figure of an emaciated old man. The whole canvas is alive with vehement stabs of direction, slashes of the brush that concentrate on the foreground figure of AMERICAN PAINTING 157 this old man with a sort of passion of intensity. It is an unusual type of work for the artist, possessing the spontaneity and directness of a water-color that wrings out the very marrow of the scene with dras- tic economy of statement. Returning to Gallery 15, there is a “Tyrolese Interior,” showing how the travel notes of this gifted painter become solid and substantial with much of the authority of his more formal canvases. Because of lack of sequence in the arrangement of the American paintings in these galleries, they must be taken in a sort of sauve gui peut method—as one reaches them. In the landscapes one finds the real _American note, a blend of downright realism and romance that make a decided individual flavor. The interpretation of nature in personal idiom is evident, an obviously subjective expression of mood with an equally evident objective veracity. Rockwell Kent’s “Winter,” an early work but one which in many ways he has never surpassed, is stark realism in its bleak forthrightness of statement, yet there is a sense of mystery in its cold green sea and sinister sky. Its flat arabesque of pattern is highly decorative. This artist, never a great colorist, is highly felicitous in his pen and ink work and wood-block engravings— most of them illustrations for his own books—which reveal his originality of design and the sinuous rhythm of his line. The sparkling “Isle of Shoals” by Childe Hassam is impressionistic in handling; personal in the glowing color of its palette and the beautiful pattern of light. This landscape is 158 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES only one of the many forms of creative expression of this artist. Water-colors, etchings and figure paintings also attest his fecundity of invention and sensitive Vision. Cecilia Beaux’s “Girl in White” is an arresting portrait—its white textures of filmy dress on the white sofa covering breaking into prismatic color and the reflections of all these rainbow whites in the mirror with splashes of color in the décor of the room and the warm tints of flesh making a pleasing harmony. Gifford Beal’s colorful “Mayfair” and “Albany Boat” show use of contemporary material in a highly decorative effect with crisp touches that give life to the scenes. Theodore Robinson’s “Giverny” is the work of one of the first Americans to follow the lead of the French impressionists. It is also the work of a man who for all his subtleties of light and color dissolving in light had a precise statement of fact that gives strength to his compo- sitions. Ernest Lawson’s “Winter” is a canvas in which one realizes how little facts contribute to the real work of art, for the uncompromising bleakness of the scene is commonplace enough. Yet to the sensitive vision of the artist relations of line, of mass and color give this landscape the quality of a mood of nature, seized with sound craftsmanship and a poetic play of opalescent color over the ice-choked stream and snowy hillside. Jonas Lie is represented here by “The Conquer- ors,” a view of the engineering work on the Panama Canal. The artist is a Norwegian by birth, but in MADAME X. JOHN S. SARGENT Metropolitan Museum of Art AMERICAN PAINTING 159 his work and life has long been associated with America. He chooses contemporary life as his ma- terial, with the two themes of mountain and sea as his principal subjects. Here he is explicit in his depiction of naturalistic detail, using sweeping rhythms and swift thrusts of direction to express this mighty struggle of man and nature. His color too is interpretative of the visual impression of this gigantic scene. Charles W. Hawthorne is the winner of many honors—prizes, awards, etc., from a long roster of exhibitions. He is at his best in the type of subject used in “The Trousseau,” in which the delicate charm of adolescence is exquisitely portrayed. The beauty of the color, the simplicity and dignity of the conception, make this canvas memorable. It rises above the anecdotal to the dramatic in its synthesis of mood, with none of the theatrical décor of much of the later work, where an artificial handling of high lights and old-master backgrounds makes the effect less sincere. Of an earlier day is “The Green Bodice” by J. Alden Weir, a painter of extremely uneven output, yet always aristocratic and distinctive. Here the individual character of his color scheme is especially harmonious in its decorative effect. It also illustrates his exquisite types of womanhood. In landscapes, still lifes or figure paintings, this artist expressed himself with no triteness of formula or leaning on conventions of painting. His sensitiveness, his cul- tural background, his personal idiom of expression 160 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES make his work, however slight of interest, while in his best performance there is significance and a re- markable quality of poetic interpretation. A friend and fellow artist of Weir, John H. Twachtman, is represented by a single canvas, “The Water Fall.” This conveys but little idea of his genius for render- ing luminous effects of atmosphere or the evanes- cence of a tremulous mood of nature with exquisitely delicate refraction of color planes. Here, in a sub- ject which Twachtman often painted, the effect is tonal, emphasizing the balance of color masses and design. There is little naturalism, yet the painting conveys an impression of an intimate approach to nature with appreciation of general, rather than par- ticular, relations. He seems immeasurably nearer to the work of the modern artist than were his con- temporaries, probably because of his interest in de- sign which he imposed on natural forms, yet with no insensitive arbitrariness, for he seemed able to pene- trate to the fundamental character of his subject matter and preserve its essentials, however abstract his design. Here were two impressionists, Weir and Twachtman, greatly influenced by French masters, modifying their procedure to suit their own tempera- ments until they found the means to express their own personal reactions to natural beauty. The cultural background of Arthur B. Davies is evident. Davies, in his various phases of romanticist, classicist and cubist, seeks symbolic expression for his imagination. It may be medizval legend, classic myth or purely personal evocation of romance that AMERICAN PAINTING 161 he clothes with a wistful quality of beauty with the impression that form, rhythm and color have been especially called forth by the particular demand of subject matter. Always decorative, with a special flair for rhythmic balance and charm of surface, the later work of this artist has shown more preoccupa- tion with form and solidity. His power as a draughtsman is especially apparent in his sanguines and charcoal drawings that have a fine precision of contour and endowment of life. He is represented here by four canvases. The importance of Robert Henri to the develop- ment of American art, or his real achievement as a painter, can hardly be judged by the canvas shown here. It belongs to his later, facile work, when sheer dexterity of technique and power of swift char- acterization unite in a formula of figure painting that lacks the power and originality of his earlier work. So much water has flowed under the bridges since Henri’s appearance on the art horizon that it is im- possible, perhaps, for the contemporary modern to realize what a tremendous force for freedom and individual expression Henri has been, both in his own work and in his teaching. He adapted Manet’s prin- ciple of design by mass rather than line, and his creed of the freedom of the painter to choose his own sub- ject matter. Instead of the careful academic draw- ing of the composition, later given its proper local tints, he draws with the brush directly and boldly, reaching great beauty of surfaces and harmony of tones, especially in his early figure paintings, where 162 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES black and white with flesh tones are the foundations of the beautiful color schemes so brilliantly carried out. As a teacher, it would be difficult to estimate the influence he has exerted on a large group of present-day painters who are in the forefront of the art world. | In the next gallery, 13, we find a figure painting, “Portrait of a Young Woman,” by Abbott Thayer, which is as distinctly American as the landscape work we have been looking at, yet is highly individual. There is something more of the goddess than the mortal about this superb creature, who springs from classic models as her origin yet is entirely natural and unpedantic in her presentation. The heavy im- pasto of the work, the careful distribution of mass and the serenity and dignity of the conception are characteristic of Thayer’s figure painting. He shows himself a modern, for all his classical research, in his entire elimination of the non-essential in his synthe- sis of impression. “The Ring” by John W. Alexan- der is the work of a painter who is perhaps better known as a mural decorator than as a portrait painter. He is also represented in Gallery 16 by “Walt Whit- man,” in Gallery 15 by “Study in Black and Green.” His is all impressionistic work, in which form is dis- solved in light and a dramatic intensity given by a flood of beating radiance. The “Good Gray Poet” appears rather unsubstantial in his actual form, since all the light is concentrated on his head and hands making them seem unrelated to anything else. Here in “The Ring” the distribution of light is more even and the design highly decorative. AMERICAN PAINTING 163 George Inness’s “Peace and Plenty” of this gal- lery is an early work somewhat in the panoramic manner of the Hudson River school, with an Ital- lanate touch of grandeur. We have also his “Spring Blossoms,” of a much later period when he had, as it were, gone through impressionism and come out into the full maturity of his own personal expression. “Karly Morning, Venice,”? by Gedney Bunce is the work of a man who practically devoted himself to Venetian scenes. His gifts as a colorist and his graceful draughtsmanship give substance to the charm of his work. In this gallery are works by the so-called tonalists and romanticists, sometimes one and the same person. Ralph Blakelock is usually reckoned as a “romanti- cist” by persons who must have labels. His tragic life seems echoed in the mystery and eerie sugges- tion of his canvases, where light and shadow are orchestrated into weird melody. Impressionism was a natural expression for this artist’s mystic attitude toward life, but his low gamut of tone and highly enameled surfaces, with their filigree of foliage against a strange brilliancy of light, are totally unlike other forms of luminosity. ‘Pipe Dance,” one of his Indian subjects, is not equal to his best achieve- ment, perhaps, yet it has a decided character of indi- vidual expression in its highly curious symbolism of natural forms and emotional power. Horatio Walker is another American painter who expresses personal reaction to natural beauty, usually dealing with peasant subjects. In “The Sheepfold” his naturalism and careful detail are offset by the 1644 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES poetic character of his treatment. In the later “Har- rower” this realism gives way to broader effects with a consequent gain in the envelopment of atmosphere with more concentration on the main elements of design. George Fuller’s “Quadroon” is the work of a painter who seems in a class by himself, scarcely in- fluenced by other painters and leaving no direct ar- tistic progeny. He was ahead of his time in his atti- tude towards painting, for he was absorbed in the problems of light and atmosphere. When he was scientifically probing the variations of color in light and shadow, his fellow artists were still concerned with precision of contour and sharp definition of form. In France at this same time Monet was studying his problems of light and atmospheric ef- fects in connection with the chromatic variations per- ceptible to his highly sensitized vision. The two men arrived at different conclusions—Monet adopt- ing a high-keyed palette, whose brilliant colors were placed side by side with no alleviation of shadow, while Fuller struck a note much further down the - scale, deeper color and an ambience of dusky, golden light. The three paintings already seen, “Nydia,” “And She Was a Witch” and “The Quadroon,” illustrate his characteristic ideal figure painting. In Gallery 12 the portrait of his son, “Head of a Boy,” indi- cates another, and less important phase of his work. The three first canvases are purely ideal, the imag- inings, doubtless, of those years when, called from a AMERICAN PAINTING 165 circle of friends and a promising career in art, he was obliged to return to Deerfield, Massachusetts, to take up the management and responsibility of the family farm. These fifteen years, during which he was hardly able to paint at all because of the pressure of work and cares, were not, apparently, lost years, but fallow ones in which his mind stored up mate- rial for later expansion and his artistic gift slowly matured. These paintings show him a mystic and a romanticist, finding in his own intensely individual technique the means to give body and substance to his dreams. Yet he was an untiring experimenter with technical processes, now using a heavy under- painting, now glazes, piling up pigment and break- ing the thick impasto to gain vibration. Painting out detail that seemed irrelevant or too insistent for the unified impression of his pattern of light, or modify- ing the first drawing, he sought in every way to gain control .of his medium. Because of his occasional unfortunate use of bitumen to give greater richness of tone, much of the color of his canvases is dull, and none has any real freshness of tone. Yet in their faded dimness you may realize the haunting beauty of a mysterious world evoked by the artist and filled with elusive creatures of his fancy steeped in a ra- diance of amber light that invests them with a strange eerie quality. Also in Gallery 13 are “Dirge of the Three Queens” and “King Lear” by Edwin A. Abbey, both illustrator and mural decorator, whose Grail series in the Boston Public Library and illustrations for 166 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES Shakespeare are especially well known. This room also contains a number of canvases by Wyant, show- ing how far he developed from his early panoramic style. “Forenoon in the Adirondacks” and “Mo- hawk Valley,” early works, are still much like Ken- sett, but his “Broad Silent Valley” is maturer work, executed with surety and firmness of brushwork that gives precision to much of the detail yet does not impair the impression of unity. The subjective quality of his work is also felt here: it is the romantic mood of the Barbizon school, infusing nature with the sentiment of the artist, but always, in Wyant’s case, it is a fine modulation of the same delicate melody, with little variation of phrasing. Six canvases by James McNeill Whistler in Gal- lery 12 bring this provocative artist’s work to con- sideration. A painting, “Harmony in Yellow and Gold; Connie Gilchrist,” in Gallery 15, is less rep- resentative, since it is this painter’s only attempt to portray movement. Moreover, its delicate nuances of tone are much dimmed by fading of the pigment. Whistler absorbed many influences, Velazquez, the Japanese, Manet,—to point out the most obvious,— and Turner, also, in his etherealized dissolutions of solidity in light, but he did absorb them and find the delicate instrument suited for the expression of his sensitive perception and power of subtle suggestion. Whistler’s striking personality, his eccentricities of life and manner, his delight in “the gentle art of making enemies,” his caustic wit, his brilliant “Ten O’Clock’s,” in which he expounded his zsthetic ARRANGEMENT IN FLESH COLOR AND BLACK—THEODORE DURET. JAMES A. MCNEILL WHISTLER Metropolitan Museum of Art AMERICAN PAINTING 167 theories, made him an astonishing figure against the rather dim personalities of his contemporary English academic art world. Outside the academic pale, it was the moment of the precious and the exotic with the zsthete and the sunflower and the rare combination of dandyism and Bohemia rolled into one. Whistler was more ele- gant than them all. He was elegant in his work—in its reticence, its avoidance of the obvious and its deli- cate scale of harmonies. Since there was nothing more abstract, more removed from objective content than music, he brought musical analogies into his work, seeking the same cumulative effect of impres- sion in his “Nocturnes,” “Symphonies” and “Ar- rangements” as one might receive from a musical composition’s orderly unfolding. “Cremorne Gar- dens,” here, is one of these nocturnes. Unfortu- nately it, too, has dimmed, even from its tenuous first tones, so that its fastidious refinement of color notes blending into a charming melody hardly more than tinkles now. ‘Cremorne Gardens, No. 2” has fared better and still reveals the pattern developed by the spotting of light and dark masses, little stabs _ of accent in the colored lamps and rockets; but the singleness of impression is nowhere broken by any emphatic detail or insistent tone. The Japanese influence is felt in the apparent de- centralization of the design with its impression of casual arrangement and lack of focal balance. It is not possible to consider Whistler’s prints, although they open up an interesting field and reveal, at least 168 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES in the early “Thames” series, the influence of Cour- bet (with whom he worked for a time), as few of his paintings do. A coast scene in Brittany, executed in this period of association with Courbet (shown a few years ago at the Kraushaar Galleries) does indi- cate how Whistler refined and whittled down Cour- bet’s naturalism to his own suaver expression. One of the Whistler canvases here is a portrait of “Théodore Duret,” art critic of Paris, who was a friend and admirer of the artist. The painting is called, “Arrangement in Flesh Color and Black,” emphasizing Whistler’s preoccupation with color harmonies rather than the sitter in his portraiture. Duret, in his work on Whistler, tells of the inci- dent which led to the painting of this portrait. The two friends had been discussing the ridiculous dis- crepancies so often occurring in modern portraits that represented in antique dress a subject with none of the physical or mental habit of real antiquity. Whistler suddenly exclaimed that he wondered that no one had attempted a portrait of a man in modern evening clothes which were especially appropriate to the allure and social life of moderns. The two friends agreed that Duret was to pose for such a portrait, with Whistler’s stipulation that the sitter bring with him a pink domino as though he were on his way to a fancy ball. Here we have the portrait, the black clothes against a faintly pinkish background of hangings, the deeper pink of the domino, the de- cisive note of red in a fan held in the left hand, and the warmth of the flesh tints giving the notes of color to the arrangement. It might seem that noth- AMERICAN PAINTING 169 ing was more formidable to the artist than the cor- rect stiffness of modern evening dress, but this portrait triumphs over the difficulty, breaking the monotony of the vertical lines by the flow of the pink domino held over Duret’s arm and enveloping the whole canvas in a faint flush of pearly atmos- phere that softens the hardness of contours and gives a fluency to the starkness of the presentment. The pattern of line, color and mass makes this a really great achievement, to which the artist has not at- tempted to add any note of symbolism, as in the por- trait of his mother. It is intrinsically a fine portrait and needed no symbolism to strengthen its interest. In one of Whistler’s many diatribes against the ac- cepted standards of his artistic world, he attacked the practice of always harking back to Velazquez in por- traiture and comparing everything to his methods. Yet in this portrait of Duret one sees a great deal of the painter’s debt to Velazquez—particularly in the leaning on composition and color for the real interest of the painting, and in the freedom of handling. Near by hangs a portrait of Whistler himself, by William Chase. How much you feel him the dandy and poseur in this presentment! The white lock standing out from the mop of black hair is accen- tuated, as is his affected pose on a fragile cane. He seems determined here, as in life, to play a part. It is surprising that so delicate and charming a talent owed so much of its vogue to the artist’s assertive self-advertising and audacious assurance. A type far removed both as artist and man, 170 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES Thomas Eakins, has here a group of canvases which illustrate his unfolding powers. He is a masterful figure standing quite alone, since he seems to have been responsible for no definite school or following, although a great teacher. He had training in paint- ing and sculpture in France and some study in Spain, yet when he finds himself after his first early paint- ings, he is completely American in his individual work, taking contemporary material as subject mat- ter and giving it the significance of its own time and place. He was a realist, regarding objective truth and structural veracity as first essentials of his work, yet through them arriving at a marvelous synthesis of humanity. His austerity and detached intellec- tual viewpoint seemed to give him a power of pene- tration into the truth of his subject matter, whether the character of his sitter or the more universal rela- tions between man and his surroundings that his sit- ter seemed to imply. In the “Chess Players,” much of his master, Géréme, and undoubtedly something of Meissonier, is evident. In “Pushing for Rail,” a water-color, the greater fluency of the medium relieves the mi- nuteness of detail, yet it is still meticulous work. In “The Writing Master” (his father), he attains breadth and richness of color, making detail serve to reveal the mood of absorption of the man. The painting of the efficient old hands so finely realized, is mastery of his medium. “The Thinker,” in its aloofness, its concentration, its simplicity and breadth of handling, has a monumental effect. It sums up AMERICAN PAINTING 171 a type of the American man for all time, with its intensity of severe factual statement paralleled by its endowment of austerity and emotional remote- ness. The “Portrait of a Lady,” with quite a dif- ferent approach, has this same power of epitome, the summing up of physical and mental characteris- tics in a single powerful impression. The setting has much charm of revealing detail, yet the portrait is remarkably broad and vital. Many of the other paintings here show the diversity of the artist’s in- terests, but in all of them the power and truth of an original artist find varying expression, making him one of the greatest figures of American art. A small canvas by Albert Ryder, “‘Toilers of the Sea,” gives some idea of the peculiar endowment and style of this artist, whose painting seems to be the inevitable expression of his mystic, poetic imagina- tion. A larger group of his work in the Brooklyn Museum will further illustrate his individuality of theme and execution. Robert L. Newman, represented by three canvases, is an artist who deserves to be better known. His romantic themes are clothed in a glowing color that gives an enameled richness of surfaces. His figures are those of dreams rather than of any known world, they have the vividness of dream figures and are en- veloped in a radiance of atmospheric glow that lends the character of mystery to their evocation. Draw- ing, brushwork, composition, may all be considered negligible, yet through the gift of color and its use to express poetic vision this work makes impression. 172 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES George Luks is a painter of great unevenness of output, at his best a dynamic force tempered by a fine sensibility, yet quite as often dashing off a canvas slovenly in technique and void of inspiration. “The Old Duchess” shows his power of characteriza- tion. The vicious, old face, the very pose with its affectation of elegance, the aroma of decadence with which the canvas is imbued, reveal his subtlety. His best work is drawn from the material at hand in everyday life, street scenes, East Side children, beg- gars, waifs, the docks or the brawn and vehemence of wrestlers. There is something sensuous and rich, something sentimental and delicate alike in his virile painting with its drastic directness, its raciness, its rich and subtle color. “Style is the man,” indeed, for the artist finds his own means to express his per- sonal conceptions, taking a thick raw slice of life at one moment for material, and again an idyllic inter- pretation of childhood or girlish charm, as in this “Pawnbroker’s Daughter,” or the well-known “Lit- tle Milliner.” Walter Gay’s interiors, such as the “Green Salon” with its exquisite woodwork, its beautiful propor- tions and restraint of décor, seem to sum up the period of Louis XV elegance in a perfection of dec- orative ensemble. It is more than a perfunctory de- scription of interior decoration; it actually conveys a feeling of the moment that produced its refinement of luxury. Such an interior as “Boston Athanzeum,” by Charles Bittinger, shows the opposite method of hard, insistent detail, a hermetically sealed room as AMERICAN PAINTING 173 safe from atmosphere as a vacuum bell, everything recorded in a neat and perfectly uninspiring manner. George Bellows, whose recent death seemed to cut short a career just at its point of full expression, is represented so inadequately by an early canvas, “Up the Hudson,” that it is difficult to convey any sense of his remarkable, vital work, in which were blended a robust realism and a profoundly scientific approach to the problems of painting. He is thoroughly a product of America, not only because he never left its shores but because his racial traits crop out in all his work, and his subjects are drawn from the things at hand, especially from many varying angles of city life. His lithographs and drawings, as well as his paintings, all reveal his alertness of mind, his artistic probity, his sensitive vision. “Morning Light,” an early and thoroughly un- representative work of one of our foremost American painters, Eugene Speicher, needs no comment for the reason it hardly gives a hint of his great artistic endowment.* Frederick Frieseke, an American im- pressionist living in Paris, is represented by “The Toilet,” a gracious, harmonious, if not a particularly vital work. In contrast with this diaphanous vision of blues, pinks and glowing flesh tones is the rather hard realism of Walter Ufer’s “His Wealth,” the Indian subject which Mr. Ufer usually chooses. He is an able painter, presenting his theme vividly with * Since this book went to press a superb example of Mr. Speicher’s work, a portrait, “Polly,” has been acquired by the museum, 174 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES effective composition. His color is hard, and as yet white men do not really paint the Red Man—it is his trappings and picturesque setting that they seize upon. Perhaps he is too picturesque and is able to hide behind this apparat and elude them. It is the old story of the French “Orientalists,” who seized on the surface of Oriental life, its exotic color and strangeness, and with few exceptions never pene- trated further. Augustus Vincent Tack’s “House of Matthew” in- dicates the character of his work as a mural painter, developing religious themes with an abstract sym- bolism that has more conviction than the most faith- ful realism. His finely built rhythmical structure and his Venetian color fused into cool harmonies of blues, lavender, dull red, soft rose and ivory give a highly personal character to his decorative work. He has drawn on many sources, Eastern and West- ern, yet remains thoroughly original in his assimila- tion of them for his particular needs. Mary Cassatt’s work is shown in this gallery by a group of canvases and pastels. ‘This artist, whose life and work are associated with France, naturally shows the artistic influences that were dominant in Paris when she made it her home after her shifting career from one art center to another in Europe. Manet’s practice and precept, of course (he was her master), and that of Degas are felt decidedly in her early work; yet even here is the sturdy personal accent, the hand of the original creative craftsman, the individual gift for pure painting, that became THE THINKER. THOMAS EAKINS Metropolitan Museum of Art ~ ~— AMERICAN PAINTING 175 more and more apparent in her development. Her choice of subjects—motherhood, the adolescent charm of girlhood, gracious ladies in the intimacy of tea hour or boudoir causerie—may appear to indicate a sentimental attitude toward her work, but nothing is further from the frank naturalism of her treat- ment. She displays an explicitness of factual state- ment, soundness, impeccable taste, and a detached serenity in her handling of this intimate material. In. her painting, especially in her fluent pastels, the casual impression may be of charm and facility, but accuracy of structure and careful anatomical defini- tion underlie all her work. In the large body of drawings and prints that Miss Cassatt executed, one sees her relentless pursuit of craftsmanship and veracity of naturalistic statement. That she was finally to include charm and ingratiating color is further achievement, but the precision of statement fed to be won. Ihe “Lady at the Tea Table,” a canvas of the eighties, is reputed to be the portrait of a member of her family, who did not consider it art for a long time after its execution. It illustrates the authority and distinction of Miss Cassatt’s work. The solidity of the form, the delightful pattern of color and the sympathetic interpretation of character accentuated by the setting give the dignity of the con- ception direct appeal. The refinement of handling, fluent execution, clarity and charm of color of her pastel work appear in a number of paintings here of mothers and babies or single figures of children in deliciously quaint costumes. Especially hats! Did 176 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES anyone ever know of such surprising, varied and fascinating headgear as that with which Miss Cassatt endows her fillettes and jeunes filles! Homer Martin’s “Harp of the Winds; a View of the Seine,” indicates the influence of his five years in France, the contact with the Barbizon school, Corot in particular, and with the newer practices of the Impressionists, in a looser, freer method of work, broader brushing and a simplifying of detail towards a realization of unity of harmonious im- pression. Compared with his “White Mountain” period, in the canvas of Gallery 16, the immense change in his work may be appreciated. The per- sonal gravity and melancholy note of his work is felt in both periods, however wide the variation of man- ner and theme. William M. Chase is represented in this gallery by still life, interior and figure paintings. This list- ing in itself reveals something of the versatility of the artist and his wide range of interest. He de- lighted in subjects that gave him opportunity for brilliant execution, the gleaming surfaces of brass and silver, the textures of studio stuffs, or the silvery scales of fish, as well as the color and shapes of cloud and dune on Shinnecock hills. His study in Munich and Paris made him an apostle of a more sophisti- cated art, which laid the emphasis on good painting. His dashing performance and big brushstrokes made tremendous impression. He abandoned the browns and murky blacks of Munich for the richer color and more luminous painting of the French masters AMERICAN PAINTING 177 he admired. Chase’s long career as a teacher had deep influence on American art. His pupils devel- oped technical dexterity with individual freedom of expression. “The Hall at Shinnecock” is the sort of subject that he handled most felicitously. The pure, sparkling color, the nice filling of space, the finish of surface, give this painting decorative value, while the relation of the figure to the décor lends a touch of charming intimacy. The vigor and élan of Chase’s work did not flag with all his years of teach- ing, lecturing and steady application to his painting. He continued to delight in the exercise of his craft, and to be inspired by an increasingly wide variety of objects to a virtuosity of brilliant objective painting. A “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife” by Alfred Q. Collins, is the work of a man who should be far better known. A recent memorial exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum was for most of the visitors a revelation of a talent which has had scant recogni- tion. This serene, beautiful work shows how far ahead of his day the artist was, both in his approach to his work and in his endowment of taste. It is one of the great paintings of this American collec- tion. While our newly arrived millionaires, secure in their walnut and plush fastnesses, acquired sweet insipidities by Bouguereau and Cabanel, this artist was probing the scientific aspects of form and paint- ing such enduring, distinguished works as the ex- ample in this museum. Guy Péne Du Bois, who must be reckoned not only artist, but critic, teacher and propounder of 178 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES sound zsthetic theories, is made known here by one of his satirical paintings, “The Doll and the Mon- ster.” It is a rather cynical form of satire that presses no moral and starts no propaganda, the Gallic rather than the American in its amused indifference. Painting is no negligible matter, however, for the plastic form of the two figures, the sound drawing and the clarity of color give distinction to this small canvas. John Sloan is another satirist of our contemporary life and manners, although his vehemence and emo- tional interest are a contrast to the detachedness of Mr. Du Bois. His animated records of penetrating observation with their sweeping rhythms and good color make a valuable contribution to many phases of New York life. This “Dust Storm, Fifth Ave- nue,” painted a little more than twenty years ago, is as authentic as the city records; it preserves for us a psychological moment, a moment of our history, the face of other customs and manners, suspending the flood of oblivion from sweeping over this spot and hour. In his etchings of a later period, his easy, humorous notation of urban life with sympathetic understanding, as well as satire, carries on the record to the present moment. As president of the Inde- pendent Society of Artists he has been untiring in his efforts to gain opportunity for the artist to exhibit his work whatever his school or creed. a eee ee Te CHAPTER ELEVEN ALTMAN COLLECTION LTHOUGH we mounted the staircase and proceeded directly to the picture galleries on entering the museum, the wings at left and right in- dicated the enormous territory left unexplored, as the inviting sign posts labeled “American Wing” teased one’s imagination while wandering through the various rooms of paintings. —The museum’s mag- nificent collection of arms and armor in the right wing is worth a long exploration, as are the galleries of Egyptian and Oriental art, the Pierpont Morgan Wing of European sculpture and decorative arts, or, as the schoolboy essay reads, “other things too nu- merous to mention.” But having started a tour of picture galleries, it must be concluded in undeviating singleness of pur- pose, or, once seduced from the path of original di- rection, the tour might be a permanent sojourn among varied fascinations. In reaching the last col- lection, the Altman, housed in Wing K, it is neces- sary to pass through the galleries of Classical Art, so that one may give them a furtive glance and appre- ciate how their arrangement leads from the most primitive forms of Greek art with highly Oriental character to the perfected expression of the later 179 180 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES periods. Especially does one come to realize even in this casual and flitting survey how rich is the mu- ~seum?s collection of Athenian vases, both black- figured and red-figured—the purely decorative character of the former or the more finished art of the drawing in the latter, leaving the beholder to seek his individual preference. A Roman Court is arranged in the picturesque setting of a Roman peri- style around a marble fountain, set in green with graveled walks. Its paths are lined with sculpture and the warmth of its red-based columns brings animation to the aloofness and remoteness of an- tiquity. There is opportunity here for rest and re- flection before turning one’s steps to the last stage of exploration. On the floor above this Roman court, in Gallery K 30, the Altman collection begins. This room contains decorated Chinese porcelain as the next gallery the monochrome, or single color, porcelains. Pass them, if you can, in this particular voyaging, and entering Gallery K 32 find the early paintings of the collection, Spanish, Flemish and Italian. The portrait of “Ulrich Fugger,” by Hans Maler zu Schwarz, is the work of a little known Austrian painter of the early sixteenth century. But the banker of Augsburg, so handsomely presented in his formal, sober elegance, is a member of a powerful family, sprung from a humble weaver and ramify- ing into princes and counts in later days. This Ulrich and his family, like the well-known Jacques Coeur of France, were lenders and losers to monarchs, ALTMAN COLLECTION 181 helping out the coffers of both the Emperor Maxi- milian and Charles the Fifth. Other Northern paintings include the “Betrothal of St. Catherine,” by Memling, a subject that must have appealed to him for he painted it at least three times. This version, an early work, reveals his deli- cacy and refinement of handling as well as his delight in color—in the reds, greens, purples and golds, with the white of St. Catherine’s bodice set against the rich, deep blue of the angel’s garment. The figures are placed in a landscape, green, cool and luminous, that strikes a note of serenity for the gen- tle group. The drawing is firm and fluent with vig- orous record of gesture that gives vivacity to the graceful, rather intimate sentiment of the piece. The two portraits of “Thomas Portinari’”? and his wife, by Memling, vivacious in their contrasts of white, black and rich red, and their firmness of con- tours, are also remarkable for the striking charac- terization, the penetration of one racial psychology by another race. A great work of another type is his “Portrait of an Old Man,” thrust rather awkwardly into its frame, but vivid and authoritative. You feel the painter vastly more in sympathy with this kindly, humorous man than with the diplomatic Thomas Portinari or of his wife as a donor (for this panel was to go with the big altar-piece by Hugo van der Goes, given by the Portinari family). A canvas by Albrecht Diirer, “Madonna and Child with St. Anne,” demonstrates how much more readily this artist’s gifts were expressed through the 182 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES medium of engraving or etching than by painting. This work has something more of the character of a drawing in color than the handling appropriate to this medium. Moreover, the unique quality of Diirer’s remarkable line is not to be appreciated in his painting as in his prints. The “Portrait of a Man,” by Dirk Bouts, lacks the jewel-like color of much of his work, but im- presses one with a luminous unity of effect, as well as sobriety in its simple, powerful presentment. Sir Anthony Van Dyck is represented in this col- lection by two splendid portraits—one of “Lucas van Uffel,” of Antwerp, the work of the period just preceding his departure for England, and the other of the “Marchesa Durazzo,” executed during his stay in Genoa. In this portraiture, carried out be- fore his popularity as court painter made excessive demands on his time and strength, the dignity and nobility of the work are easily realized. ‘The state- liness and insolent assurance of the Marchesa, the gravity and authority of van Uffel, are vividly por- — trayed. There are breadth, freedom and richness of color that make these canvases great examples of portrait painting. The portrait of “Margaret Wyatt, Lady Lee,” by Holbein, is a superb example of his art, more sub- dued to design than the “Lady Guildford” already viewed. The subtlety of this design may not be appreciated until it is studied and the relevance of even the slightest detail to its full development realized. You feel that the man who painted this + Re ees: ALTMAN COLLECTION 183 portrait had no thought-out pattern in mind into which he merely fitted observed phenomena that felicitously suited his preconceived design, as did many of the early Florentine painters in their scien- tific temper, but that out of this fidelity of record of objective fact the design was evolved with an irrev- ocable necessity. It is difficult to feel drawn to this rather shrewish lady with her oblique look follow- ing you around the gallery, but it is equally difficult to miss seeing that it is a marvelous portrait. The Italian schools are well represented. The “Portrait of a Young Man,” curiously supposed to be a self-portrait at one time, is by Antonello da Messina, with whose name we have already become familiar as sponsor for the introduction into Italy of the technique of oil painting practiced in the Neth- erlands. The first impression of this portrait of a youth is of amazing vitality and rich warm color. Looking at it longer, one realizes that there is great care in rendering of detail, but this meticulous nicety is subtly related to the big masses of the composition so that the effect is of breadth and unity. Francia, whose portrait of the boy, “Federigo Gonzaga,” is here, we have met before. It is a graceful portrait, which is said to have greatly pleased the boy’s mother, Isabella d’Este. The charming landscape background adds much interest to the painting. The “Holy Family,” by Mantegna, is a late work and well illustrates the sculptural character of his painting. It is almost as much in the round as a bas-relief. He was a son-in-law of 184. NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES Jacopo Bellini, by whom he was much influenced in composition, as he was also by the sculptor Donatello. Everything in this painting appears to be cut out of stone with all the intricacies of contour and convo- lutions of fruit and leaves and variations of form carefully accounted for in the decorative composi- tion. The dignity and austere beauty of the figures of the Virgin, Mary Magdalen and St. Joseph, give to this formal arrangement a significance and power that the almost rigid formalism of its pattern would seem to preclude. It lacks the brilliant drawing of Mantegna’s earlier work, yet illustrates his style admirably. The engravings of Mantegna really bring us to a closer appreciation of his remarkable power of line. The profile portrait by Cosimo Tura, which on Bernhard Berenson’s authority is that of Borso d’Este, first Duke of Ferrara and Mantua, shows a youth with a red cap over a shock of light hair, his black doublet fitting closely at the neck. The spirited effect of the silhouette portrait is real- ized here. In much of Tura’s work the sculptural quality of his gnarled peasants and his delight in learned detail and curious color schemes give to his work a peculiar character that is not found in this conventional one. Montagna, whose beautiful “Ma- donna and Child” was noted in a previous gallery, is — represented here by “A Lady of Rank as St. Justina of Padua,” following a fashion of representing fine ladies in the guise of saints to add piquancy to their portraiture. This is a lively young woman decked with many pearls and other jewels, holding the palm ALTMAN COLLECTION 185 leaf of sainthood and with the dagger of St. Justina negligently stuck in her breast. It is, however, a rather uninspired and conventional work. Giorgione, a rare artist to come by since but one really documented picture by him is known, is repre- sented here by “Portrait of a Man.” This painter’s brief career is so little known and so adumbrated with mystery that an emotional interest in the man is add- ed to the natural interest in the artist who was so great an innovator. He turned from the formal type of Venetian art with its ceremonial note to idyllic themes, either from the classic poets or even from contemporary life. Instead of factual statements he attempted to render the mood and poetic content of the objective world. His paintings are lyrical and tender, with sensuous color and a beautiful blending of figures and landscape into an intimate harmony. The serenity, the reticence, the wistful, romantic un- dertone of his work, seem to break the continuity of Venetian tradition. In the technique of his work, he was also an innovator, an experimenter, restless and eager. He was a pupil of Giovanni Bellini and in his early work continued Bellini’s practice of reén- forcing tempera painting with oil, but in an incred- ibly short time he abandoned this method and used the medium of oil as it continued to be used, not only by his contemporary, Titian, but by succeeding painters down to the nineteenth-century break with tradition in Impressionism. He exerted so powerful an influence upon his age and its painters that it is difficult to be sure of his work, for many artists 186 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES painted in his manner, using his themes, his glowing color and his stateliness of design. The list of works attributed to him grows smaller with investigation. “The Last Communion of St. Jerome,” by Botti- celli, is one of a number of small paintings of masses that Botticelli carried out. It is strange that he should happen to be represented in the museum by two works of religious character (the other “Three Miracles of St. Zenobius”), for so much of his work was idyllic, decorative and expressive of ideal beauty. In his later days, like so many of his fellow-citizens, he was affected by the fiery crusade of Savonarola, and abandoning his poetic vein of idealistic work, he became mystical, full of brooding melancholy and severely religious. It will be recalled that he found comfort for his devotional frame of mind in illus- trating Dante’s Inferno. In this painting St. Jerome is shown in his cell supported by two kneeling monks as he receives the last communion from a priest. The work shows something of medizval exaltation and mysticism. The artist’s genius for linear design is felt even in such a small composition, with its beauty of vaulting lines that are so subtly interre- lated in their movement and directions that they give life to the groups and decorative grace to the whole work. The color. scheme, with its notes of rose and deep blue against a paler blue sky silvering into gray, heightens the ornamental effect without lessening the serious devoutness of the theme. The tondo by Sebastiano Mainardi, “Virgin and Child with Angels,” is the work of a minor artist, the ALTMAN COLLECTION 137 brother of Domenico Ghirlandaio, with whom he worked. The lovely chapel of Santa Fina, in the Collegiata at San Gimignano, the birthplace of this artist, is one of the best examples of their collabora- tion. In this painting there is a serenity and gra- ciousness in the adoring Virgin and angels and a beauty of color that make it a delightful work. There is the same flair for decoration in this fine space filling as we find in Ghirlandaio, but there are also a tenderness and gentle grace. | The “Virgin and Child with Saint Joseph,” by Filippino Lippi, shows him using the languid, grace- ful type of womanhood of his master Botticelli, who in turn had been influenced by the idealistic types of his master Fra Filippo Lippi, Filippino Lippi’s father. Both these influences are found in his work until he yielded to an attempt for greater realism and dramatic action. This latter style is shown in the “Descent from the Cross” of his school, in Gal- lery 35. Fra Angelico’s “The Crucifixion” and the “Madonna and Child” attributed to Verrocchio are other items of this gallery. Gallery K 35 holds a collection of Dutch paint- ings, including thirteen by Rembrandt. We see here more examples of Hals in expansive mood, such as ““Yonker Ramp and His Sweetheart” or the “Merry Company.” Here is Maes in a better example than those already seen, for in these small genre ‘pieces with their warm lighting he is far nearer his master Rembrandt than in his large, formal portraiture. Here also is a luminous de Hooch, with its conflict 188 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES of outdoor light entering through the window and the interior light with its shadowy depths resolv- ing into harmony of subdued coloring. Terborch is another of these painters of cabinet pictures whom we have already met. Here is his “Lady Playing the Theorbo,” an instrument, by the way, that is not so formidable as it sounds. ‘This is a vivacious, sparkling piece with its Dutch lady in her blue velvet jacket edged with ermine rather coquettishly picking the strings while a gentleman regards her. These are people of fashion and rank, and Terborch gives them that character in their air of good breeding. It is the instant of suspended animation, perhaps the tinkling notes came for a moment to a full stop as the lady and gentleman with the ticking watch be- tween them took a breath’s respite from their con- centration. The modeling and color are of great refinement and contribute as much to the mood of the scene as does the design with its curving arms of the player, the line of the high mantel-piece and the rectangle of the usual wall map. Here is a self-portrait by Gerard Dou, a pupil of Rembrandt, who succeeds better here in this type of work than in his genre paintings. Cuyp, whose work has also been seen and discussed, has one landscape here and there is a landscape by Ruisdael which gives a far better idea of his achievement than the canvases already noted in Gallery 26. Here the browns and deep, dark greens ‘give way to local color, the blond- ness of ripened wheat with the sunlight upon it and a great expanse of open, vibrant sky. It has the ALTMAN COLLECTION 189 same note of melancholy as the other landscapes we have seen, but there is greater breadth and some- thing of liveliness in the play of light. Other Dutch paintings include Meindert Hob- bema’s rather stolid “Entrance to a Village.” A beau- tiful small painting by Gerard David called “Christ Taking Leave of His Mother,” almost like a minia- ture in its delicacy, shows him thoroughly Flemish, but striving to impart some of the elegance of Ital- ian painting as well as its breadth and balanced mass. “A Girl Asleep” by Vermeer is a deeper color scheme than his other paintings we have seen, the red bodice of the girl and the reds in the figured rug on the table making a different gamut than the cool blues and yellows of the canvases already noted. But the beauty of light and atmosphere that fills the room, the strength of the design with the marvel of the texture of surfaces, are here to delight and as- tonish us. | Velazquez is represented by two paintings, a por- trait of “Philip IV of Spain,” and “Christ and the Pilgrims of Emmaus.” The portrait, executed when Velazquez was in his early twenties may not or may be a portrait of Philip, but it is evidently not directly from the living model. This is the period preceding his visit to Italy and his study of Italian masters. It does not possess the vividness of later portraits, but its execution is so smooth and its handling so solid and masterly that it gains a certain animation. ‘This early portrait indicates the artist’s remarkable solution of the problem of the state, 190 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES ceremonial portrait. His feeling for the exact limi- tations of the frame give a delicate balance of masses and contours while, even at this early period, he was able to impart a swift unity of impression by his elimination of all detail irrelevant to his de- sign. The broad chain that crosses the monarch’s chest, the glove in his hand, the saucer-like ruff, are seized on and utilized for their value to his pattern. Compared to the marvelous “Philip IV when Young” of the National Gallery, it is pale and supine, but it has the effect of simultaneity which the greater painting reaches despite its multitudinous richness of detail in costume. The directness, the realism, the masterly spacing and concentration on essentials, with the power of rendering bodily poise and tension, make this an impressive work. The exquisite perception of values that distinguishes this painter’s work and the authority and vigor of his brushwork are apparent even here in an early work with little of the mastery to which he later attained. The work of Velazquez has suffered so much both from being cleaned and from not being cleaned, that many subtle relations of tone are probably lost in some of his canvases, which now have in portions a dull monotonous effect of uniform tone. “The Pilgrims of Emmaus” is evidently painted from perfunctory models, perhaps in anticipation of a later canvas, of which it was to be a part. While there is no attempt, evidently, to realize the tremen- dous inner significance of the scene, the vigor of the brushwork, the solidity of the modeling of the ALTMAN COLLECTION I9I forms and the careful relations of planes and values in the rich reds and blues give interest to this early work. We have already seen many examples of Rembrandt’s work beginning with the superb “Por- trait of a Man” and “Hendrickje Stoffels” of the Marquand Gallery, and passing on to other por- traits of men, as well as “Flora,” “The Noble Slav,” “The Sybil,” “The Philosopher.” Now this large group of both early and mature work completes the museum’s fine collection. The “Portrait of a Young Woman” is the earliest work, and “Old Woman in an Arm-chair” also belongs to the early period. In both cases we have the letter of the law in signature and dates. The characterization and pose are fine in both portraits but much less of a performance as portraiture than his mature work. The self-portrait, at the age of fifty-four, shows Rembrandt a worn, broken man, prematurely aged, wrinkled and shabby, for all the preposterous jauntiness of the velvet studio cap. The facts of his life seem always too painful to dwell upon. He was apparently never able to cope with the world on its terms, for at every step in spite of prodigies of in- cessant work, he was harassed, haunted by poverty, misery and misfortune. Yet he continued to work relentlessly and with no letting up of his magical power that has made him the etcher of all time and one of the great painters of the world. From such paintings as “The Noble Slav” or the “T ady with a Pink”—taken at random from many —one realizes the fact that Rembrandt consum- 192 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES mated a long artistic search of many generations in his absolute perfection of focusing light and diffus- ing its effects from the darkest to the most luminous radiance. Never was this accomplished, as it is easy to see, by violence of brilliant whites and lustrous blacks but by such subtle, gradual, hardly perceptible degrees that the whole canvas is glowing with a luminous atmosphere while this gamut of chromatic brilliance, so delicate in its intervals, rises from warm shadows to radiance in which form is modeled, but not by line. He adopted this method, probably, so that he could work by night under artificial light as well as by day, but it also has its own gravity of effect and majesty of impression. It reduced Rembrandt’s palette to a few simple notes of color, but with these he was able to concentrate on design and reveal the tremendous significance of his perception of man to the world about him. Rembrandt is often called a “realist” because 3 painted gnarled old women or commonplace figures from everyday life. Yet can anything be more un- real than such a figure as “Old Woman Cutting Her Nails”? She is seated in a radiance that was cer- tainly never on land or sea. She is purely a symbol of the artist’s imagination given some concrete form, bodied forth to convey universal meaning. It is no old woman, but all old age, decrepitude, or physical decay. Its piled-up pigment, its hollows and crags of paint, give the effect of mass that sculpture pro- duces. It is an impressive work with a fundamental appeal that places it far out of ordinary realism. ALTMAN COLLECTION 193 Dr. John C. van Dyke, of Princeton, a Rembrandt scholar, impugned the validity of many attributions of the museum’s collection of Rembrandts. It did not make a profound upheaval of the art world, although his strictures were so severe that he left us in the whole world only a comparatively few works by this great master. Among other can- vases attacked was this of “Old Woman Cutting Her Nails,” yet as Dr. W. R. Valentiner points out, Rem- brandt’s own preliminary drawings for the painting are not only in existence but are well known. In other cases of his attacks upon the attribution of Rembrandt to museum paintings, Dr. van Dyke’s arguments imply great unfamiliarity with the works of the authorities on this artist. Dr. Val- entiner’s analysis of Dr. van Dyke’s whole thesis brought to bear a scholarly opinion upon a super- ficial judgment. The power to hold a large group of figures into a single vividness of impression, the individual use of chiaroscuro out of which an emotional power seems to emerge from the transparent shadows and. mystery, the tremendous power of design and con- centration upon it, are some of the angles of the work of this great painter who suffered neglect in his lifetime and practical oblivion immediately after his death. His work is so varied and on a scale of such universal significance that only a long and careful study of it can bring real knowledge of its character. te 0: OTHER NOTABLE COLLECTIONS ik Par Part Two: OTHER NOTABLE COLLECTIONS CHAPTER TWELVE HISPANIC MUSEUM N the Museum of the Hispanic Society where the record of Spain’s contact with the new world is preserved in a large and varied collection of ceramics, textiles, carvings, books and furnishings, Spanish tradition is also indicated by the many treasures from Spain. The beautiful Spanish books alone make a pilgrimage to the museum worth while, but since our quest happens to be paintings these must be our sole concern. On the first floor there is a group of Spanish primitives, altar-pieces and predelle. As it was stated earlier, Spanish art started out gayly enough, although later it became austere and ascetic. Here it is possible to see this early elaboration of gilding, gold embossing, and the lively character of the color and handling. The boldness of the work, the directness and racial flavor of the types repre- sented, indicate tendencies of Spanish art that be- came submerged in Flemish and Italian influences. On the upper floor the Spanish paintings are ar- ranged around an open gallery. The canvases are hung too high to be appreciated properly in natural 197 198 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES progress around the walls, while gazing at them from the opposite side of the gallery gives false values and unexpected high lights that are equally disturbing. If only they might be hung at the level of the eye! Moreover, the lack of a catalogue is a feature of no slight disturbance in visiting this collection, as numbers, not subjects or names of painters, are attached to the frames. A catalogue may be had temporarily, no amount of persuasion permits one to be bought, but this catalogue is in- cluded with a number of brochures on individual artists in a loose leather folder which proves to be the most inconvenient arrangement ever devised. It is better to lay down the whole burden and enjoy the paintings, which in most cases are characteristic enough to be recognized, if their subject is not known. Fortunately the group of canvases by El Greco, Goya and Velazquez are hung at ends of the gallery and may be fully enjoyed. The “Holy Family” by El Greco belongs to his Toledo period, but it is not as compact as the group in the Dreicer Collection of the Metropolitan Museum, nor is its color as unearthly and dematerialized. Rather there is warmth in this canvas, the crimson and yellows that form so large a proportion of the color scheme are accentuated and not chilled by the dark blue- green mantle of the Virgin which in turn has a yellow border, while a transparent white mantilla lies on her warm brown hair. It is not the mystic symbolism of the group that impresses one so much as its humanity and tenderness, a delicate poetic pres- SANTO DOMINGO DE GUZMAN. EL GRECO Hispamc Society of America “a HISPANIC MUSEUM 199 entation of the theme rather than an expression of profound religious symbolism. Realistic treatment in the handling adds to this impression. Quite in contrast to the serene beauty and aristocratic types of this canvas is “St. Jerome,” an emaciated figure, with exaggerated bodily gesture to render the ecstasy of his asceticism. The cold gray sky gives the note of harshness to this aged recluse with lean, yellow body, consumed by such a fanatical fire of devotion that it has burned out all material substance. “St. James, the Greater,” looming up against the hills of Toledo, is a different type of saint. He is majestic and imposing; leaning upon his staff with his attenuated hands he has a dramatic intensity and force. He is a symbol in concrete expression, en- dowed with a mystical, supernatural power that each detail of linear design and color emphasizes. ‘Santo Domingo” is a harsher, more ascetic type, the cold tones of gray and muddy white accentuating the folds of black in cowl and robe that barely leave the face free. The whole figure is outlined in ex- agegerated size against a lurid sky with patches of broken clouds and a weird, wan light. The saint seems on this height to be rapt in contemplation as though shuddering at the world from which he has escaped. The “Pieta,” which is supposed to owe its composition to Michael Angelo’s well-known work, has a dramatic play of light from clouds and sky that give the figures a supernatural quality. Again in this canvas you feel how much color is the psychological keynote of El Greco’s expression of mood in each ey / 200 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES / conception. The vitality of these figures, the strange vigor and movement of these long brush strokes creating such unexpected and finely related rhythms, the subtlety of the composition that for all its dy- namic power leaves so unified an impression, de- light us in this work. It is because both the soul and the substance of the theme are here that it attains such significance while it is executed with a sureness that effectively relates each element of the design. The “Portrait of Caspar de Guzman, Count-Duke of Olivares,” an early work by Velazquez, is one of those ceremonial portraits to which he was able to give authority of rank and power while preserving the personal qualities of mind and characteristics of poise and gesture that make his portraits such amaz- ing performances. The impression of pomp and dignity of this black-robed figure is increased by his display of orders—the badge of his office (a riding whip, as Master of Horse) so negligently included, with delicate notes of white at neck and sleeves to relieve the somberness of costume and setting. There is a penetrating psychology, brilliant handling and realistic detail, as well as fine relation of spacing in the placing of the figure and the décor, that make this a striking summing up of the man in a har- monious composition. But how vital it is, too! For all the trappings and formal setness of court eti- quette, there are life and vigor in this majestic per- sonage. The “Portrait of a Little Girl,” a life-sized head and shoulders of a child of perhaps nine years old HISPANIC MUSEUM 201 of pure Spanish type, is an exquisite work. The big dark eyes, the soft black hair, the mat skin with its delicate almost imperceptible flush of warmth, are set against a cool background with delicate but firm modeling of childish contours in the structure of the face and the definition of the head. The cool, silvery tone of the whole canvas gives it added charm. The “Portrait of a Cardinal” is a lively presentment of a rather worldly Prince of the Church, who regards you with amusement. _ Goya’s “Don Manuel Lapena, Marquis of Bon- dad Real” stands out in sharply accentuated sil- houette against a grayish sky; the backdrop of a parade ground with tiny soldiers in the distance lends more notes of red to the color scheme, which includes a bright red vest, a red cockade, a dark blue coat and black cocked hat. The meticulous elabora- tion of detail is not in Goya’s vein, but the effect is to emphasize the woodenness of the officer that it ornaments. We may never know whether the Mar- quis, whose reputation for cruelty has come down to us together with his portrait, was just such a figure- head of stupid military autocracy as Goya represents him, but it is a tremendous ironical arraignment as well as an original handling of a portrait with the verve and resourcefulness so characteristic of the painter. The “Portrait of the Duchess of Alba,” in the costume of a Maja, is quite possibly not the Duchess, but the type is similar. She points with her exquisite hand to the name written in the sand at her feet, “Goya,” but her face is imperturbable. 202 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES The landscape background is exquisitely painted and imparts the animation of its hues to the black-robed figure. The sketch for “May 3, 1808,” is part of the artist’s own vivid recollection of the horrors of the invasions of Murat’s troops and the grim hope- lessness of the defense. The little group of des- perate Spaniards waiting their turn for death, with their comrades already dead at their feet and one figure flinging up his hands in a death agony, the few realistic details so intensely presented result in a thousand times more cumulative horror than Dela- croix’s famous. “Massacre of Scio” with its stage-set of color and exotic detail. Among the other paintings are two by an early painter Luis de Morales, an individual and austere artist whose subjects were usually of sufferings and persecutions with every dreadful detail of physical anguish heaped up. This “Virgin and Child,” per- haps indicating Italian influence, is gracious and ten- der, while “Holy Family,” with its piercing shaft of light, reveals his mystic, ascetic temperament. Zurbaran is represented here by a number of can- vases. “Monk Reading” is a theme that he often developed, the white wool folds of the Carthusian robes affording interesting problems of light and textures. This figure is carried out with easier, sim- pler treatment than the other similar figures repre- sented here. The folds of the robe, however, seem to be crumpled a little rather than to fall in lines, resulting from the posture. But in general the handling is solid and substantial, while the radia- HISPANIC MUSEUM 203 tion of light from the face gives an illumination to the whole work. A number of “Saints” in the guise of fashionable young ladies of Seville, much like his “Virgin of Seville” in the Metropolitan Mu- seum, are rather smart and colorful, if not remark- able for craftsmanship. They form a valuable com- mentary on the elegant costumes of the time. An early painter already noted at the Metropol- itan Museum, Coello, is represented here by a por- trait of “Rudulph II.” Ribera’s “St. Paul” shows him able to achieve a monumental design and fine modeling. His good draughtsmanship and vigor of handling give the work great impressiveness. This artist’s work and life belong to Italy, at least’ to Naples and Rome, rather than Spain, which accounts for the character of much of his work, particularly its sculpturesque quality. In an occasional gleam of emotional in- tensity, he reveals his Spanish origin. It was due to Ribera that the work of the later Italians, especially Carvaggio, became known in Spain. Downstairs, aside from his single canvases, there is a room devoted to a pageant of the provinces of Spain, which Joaquin Sorolla completed shortly be- fore his death in 1923. Sorolla, who led the artists of Spain out of their dark studios to the light and brilliancy of pleim air painting, marks an epoch in Spanish art, yet he, himself, did not possess a power of rendering values, for all his sun and color, nor was he strong in composition. But in such a pageant as this array of national costume and customs, he is 204 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES at his best. This room becomes a procession that stretches from the warmth and sun of Andalusia to Galicia with its mountain streams and chestnut groves, through Navarre and Catalonia, hemmed in by the Pyrenees, across the plains and vineyards of — Aragon to Valencia, lying on the blue Mediter- ranean. It is a vivid pageant full of color and life, the proud dignity of the peasant, the picturesque costumes of the bullfighters, the mysteriously robed monks, who bear a swaying canopy over the saint in some street procession, turquoise skies and emer- ald seas, buttressed mountains and dusty, white, sun- bleached roads, where golden oranges fill panniers to bursting; horses, cattle, donkeys, pigs, broad hats and swirling capes—these are some of the impres- sions of this enormous procession on the walls. But it is more than a mere colorful riot of pictur- esque costume and décor, it is an open book of the real Spain that only the Spaniard knows, where every man is a caballero and there is no greater aris- tocrat than the peasant. Although Spain has with- stood modern standardization better than most countries of Europe, yet there must come changes. Indeed, they have come in such centers as Madrid, where the desire “to be like other people” brings self-consciousness and loss of many charming old conventions, so that this preservation of the life, the movement, the character of Spain in its true national gesture is an achievement to be grateful for. The fact that the individual panels have little formal composition or bear few of the hall marks HISPANIC MUSEUM 205 of mural decoration proper, perhaps, endues them with this tremendous impression of a flowing cur- rent of life and color. It might be the provinces of Spain passing in review around the walls in a vast breath of the open and a stir of air and freshness, for there is only one panel depicting an interior scene and that is the dance typical of old Spain and pre- served in conservative Seville. Most of the panels are carried out in a high key, with brilliant flashes of color or the radiance of white garments that have soaked up the sunlight to give it back in a sort of dazzling splendor. There are rich greens of foliage, paler green of the sea, metallic glitter of water under the grilling sun or the sapphire line of its far-away depths against a sky but little paler in its vibrant hue. The groups of men and beasts, the figures on horseback, on foot, in the market, fishing, dancing, picnicking or stirring up the fiesta with their drums, are animated and vigorous. Sorolla, of course, has always painted cattle, either great broad-backed creatures of the plains herded by picturesque mounted men, oxen which are made to drag up the fishing boats, or proud bulls of the ring with their brandishing horns and threatening mien. These are here, as well as all the other animals that crowd into the péle-méle of many panels, painted with veracity of observation and a vigorous handling that give solidity to their broad heaving backs and their pow- erful necks. The whole vision of this world of mountains, streets, sea and plains, with its men and 206 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES women, children and animals, is a naturalistic one, where everything seems to be recorded as one might put it down in a note-book with no artifice of ar- rangement or subtlety of relations. The first Sorolla exhibition at the Hispanic Mu- seum gave an astonishing sense of the vigor of this artist, but this exhibition brings to us a revelation of the proud, hardy race in which the artist has sub- merged himself to render the message of its innate strength of character as well as its inborn love of beauty and its emotional fervor. A collection of ten santos or paintings, made pre- sumably by the Spanish settlers of New Mexico, should not be overlooked. They are among the most provocative of the museum’s exhibits. They are crude paintings of religious subjects executed by men who were not artists, or even in any sense familiar with the craftsmanship of drawing or paint- ing. The need for symbols of their faith in a land of ever-present terror and danger was so strong a compulsion that it overcame any sense of inade- quate technical equipment. The symbolism of the church, though crude, is easily understood. Since the conquistadores needed moral support as well as the arm of force in their projects of conquest and adventure they created these religious panels. The sadistic note of Spanish religious temperament, in which there is a strange ecstatic joy in the anguish of the martyr and the sufferings that lead to sainthood, is felt here in a sort of ominous undertone. The hostile wilderness, hardships and struggles with an VALENCIA, JOAQUIN SOROLLA Y BASTIDA Hispanic Society of America HISPANIC MUSEUM 207 alien race did not tend to make the Spanish explorer and adventurer more gentle. These harsh, uncouth emblems symbolize not only the need for spiritual background, but something of the men who fash- ioned their gods in the likeness of their natures. The Barnard Cloisters An important collection of Gothic art, “The Cloisters,” should not be missed, although it does not come under the province of the present art wan- derings. This collection of medieval art was gath- ered by the sculptor George Grey Barnard, for his own enjoyment and for the instruction and delight of his students in New York. When he began his slow, patient assembling, there was practically no chance to see original Romanesque and Gothic sculp- ture here. Later, museums began to acquire collec- tions of this work. In time the idea of a museum to hold a collection representative of European sculpture from the twelfth through the fifteenth century came to Mr. Barnard. It is difficult to visu- alize the perseverance and courage that made such a collection by one man possible. It is now the prop- erty of the Metropolitan Museum, through a gift of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. It is not a museum in the ordinary sense, but a real shrine of medieval art formed by a collection numbering about seven hun- dred examples, mostly French in origin and of the Romanesque and Gothic periods. A small building housing some of the treasures is set in wide grounds 208 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES in which flagged walks and sculptured columns give a sense of casual informality and restful charm. An air of seclusion and tranquillity pervades the place. In the turbulent, seething life of the city it seems impossible that there should be such a shelter from all-pervading noise and movement, such an oasis from the unloveliness of apartment houses and monotonous streets. CHAPTER THIRTEEN BROOKLYN MUSEUM INCE the subway dips obligingly under the river, the Brooklyn Museum is not difficult of access for anyone. As in the case of the Metropolitan Museum, it is impossible to visit all the large col- lections, now so well arranged in the greater space afforded through the recent opening up of a new wing, since this vagrant pilgrimage is to paintings only. The Brooklyn Museum was the first institution to recognize the value of water-color as a medium and to buy water-colors, so that it was the first to acquire examples of the work of Winslow Homer and Sar- gent. In connection with these two superb groups, there is a collection of later water-colors by con- temporary men. The water-colors by Homer rep- resent the maturity of his genius. They began to be produced quite early in the period of his visit to Newcastle-on-Tyne in the eighties, but the important works here were carried out much later principally in trips to Bermuda and the Bahamas. In “Two Flamingoes,” “The Turtle Pond,” “Coming Storm” or “Florida Jungle” you can appreciate how this swift, spontaneous work is the harmonious balance of the thing to be said with the means of saying it. 209 210 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES The elusive magic of the color is due in a large meas- ure to the white paper that lies under these thin washes or gleams through irregularly when they are broken, giving brilliancy to the whole picture. The menace of the “Coming Storm” blotting out the world with its inky rain cloud splashed over the heavens; the doe drinking fearfully in the forest pool with its lily pads and depths of green shadows; the sapphire and emerald seas of the tropics; the pale pink flamingoes against gray-green depths of moss-hung oaks with a pool catching a ray of light like a jewel in sunlight—all these and kindred themes affirm the sensitized vision, the facility of draughtsmanship and the gift of color that could take account of personal reactions to nature with a direct simplicity of handling and nobility of concep- tion that make this group difficult to leave. The numerous water-colors by Sargent show how intently he concentrated on the essentials of the sub- ject before him, striving in rapid execution and a sort of dazzling virtuosity of performance to snatch out its very substance. It is not difficult to realize what a relief it was to a portrait painter of rather ceremonious sitters, to turn to this medium where spontaneity and rapidity were prime virtues. There is a wide range of performance along the three walls that display his work. The figure painting “In Switzerland,” with its remarkable foreshortening, the architectural precision and rather conventional handling of “Santa Maria della Salute,” the lace web of spars and masts in “Rigging” against the nN ae rr. SAREE Ss “> THE SHELL HEAPS, FLORIDA. WINSLOW HOMER Brooklyn Museum BROOKLYN MUSEUM 211 _ domes and minarets of a city, the rose and turquoise of “Hills of Galilee,” the colorful “Melon Boats” radiating out towards the spectator, “White Ships” with the lapping reflections of harbor color pattern- ing their hulls, are some of this large collection. A specially fluent fusing of color is in “Mountain Fire” where, under twirling clouds of blue smoke of vary- ing density and differing depths of grayish blue, pierced only by a few licking flames, the great mass of the mountain is dimly apprehended. In the next gallery later water-colors are ar- ranged. Here one is impressed, perhaps, with an attitude toward the medium that marks its use by recent practitioners. It is a clear realization of both the limitations and the possibilities of water- color, however separated are the points of view or technique. Water-color is not made to do duty as a sort of inferior oil painting as it has so fre- quently been forced to; it becomes the swift con- centrated means of a particular form of artistic crea- tion that takes its place quite seriously and unaffect- edly beside any other. One feels that this group of younger artists have in common a reliance on clear washes in building up form rather than dependence on line, as well as an elimination of non-essentials in their concentration on the end in view. The blank white spaces of paper emerging from broken washes, as in the work of Homer, are also made to count in much of the work. Another interesting feature is the disregard for naturalistic appearances and a sub- jective emphasis. 212 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES In the very first gallery some paintings by F. Hopkinson Smith in gouache seem heavy in their body color in contrast to the sparkling “Spanish Market” by Robert Blum or the crisp, sharp con- tours of “Fuji” by Dudley Mygatt, a young artist who did not live to fulfil his promise. Childe Has- sam’s brilliant sea and sky and rose-colored cliffs in “The Gorge” or Arthur B. Davies’s fluent, but opaque color on rough absorbent paper in “Quai d’Orléans” are both impressionistic, but far sepa- rated in technique or effect. Owen Merton’s “Ber- muda” color planes in good design, or Carl Broem- mel’s “Royal Palms” with its swish of leaves and swirl of air, the crisp, brilliant “Ramapo Hills” by Gifford Beal, with the drip and despondency of Charles Burchfield’s “February Thaw,” indicate how much many of these artists depend for their scheme of coloration on the particular subject, and on their personal conception of its pictorial character. Else the numerous paintable subjects that make appeal to © many of these painters would be monotonous instead of surprisingly fresh and stimulating. Herman Palmer’s “Leopards” is beautiful decora- tion, but it is also the essential bodily gesture of these lithe, powerful creatures so indolent and graceful in their insolent power. Preston Dickenson’s “Street in Quebec,” an extended vista of roofs and buildings and plunging white, steep street, Bradley Tomlin’s “Doorway at Vizelle,” and Stan Wood’s “Cypress” with its writhing roots and strange suggestion of im- mense vitality and age, are highly personal expres- Sen a ee eT BROOKLYN MUSEUM 213 sions, each tinged by individual qualities of vision and creative expression. Edward Hopper’s strange Victorian survival of a house with mansard roof and a gleaming spotless- ness of paint and neatness is also endowed with beauty in its pattern of light and a sense of human habitation which flows in and out of this primness. Winthrop Turney makes a ravishing color scheme of a bottle standing on a table with light filtering through its pink glass surfaces. Robert Hallowell’s “Afternoon Lights, Collioure” with its suffusion of light and serenity and Hayley Lever’s “English Farmhouse” sheltered under its spreading tree are more than picturesque records of pleasing impres- sions; they have something of the artist’s own reac- tion to this wealth of color and line, of old-world charm of long habit that molds places with an in- effaceable stamp. George O. Hart’s “Old French Market” with its massive figures and racy notion of life, in exquisite nuances of tone, Sandor Bernath’s “Surf,” Lars Hoftrup’s “The Glen,’ Herbert Tschudy’s bril- liant color in “Sunlight Mesa”—all are widely varied, yet they indicate the modern freedom of in- dividual technique suited to the subject matter and the desire to create design by a few simple, factual statements that shall reveal the essentials of the scene as well as that permanent quality in the rela- tion of man to nature, or to life itself, that does not change, however much its outward manifestation may vary. 214. NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES Moreover, because water-color permits of such swift spontaneous work, there is in much of the work here, hardly more than a sketch of a passing mood of nature, so slight, so tremulous that only the highly sensitized vision will perceive its exquisite charm, as only intelligent, ordered control will give any meas- ure of its significance. This intimate, personal qual- ity of the medium endows it with a lyrical character that is inescapable. There are many other paintings that the visitor will enjoy—the flower pieces by Isabel Whitney; Charles Demuth’s exquisite color and beauty of surfaces in “Peaches”; a curious black outlined painting with pale washes over its decisive contours, by Walt Kuhn; a group of works by Paul Daughtery; Emerson Heitland’s decorative “Jun- gle” with its stark palm tree. The choice of subject alone must be noted, for many persons still consider that there is something sweet and delicate about an aquarelle, although the power and vigor of the mar- velous water-colors by Homer may have dispelled this idea. The range of subject matter is wide, rather unpromising often, but always something that has in its line or color or its interesting relation of planes stimulated the artist’s esthetic emotion. This variety of themes makes impression and demonstrates how the artist seeks composition and color adequate for this stimulus regardless of any supposed lack of charm. Whether the work sometimes lapses in exe- cution, as it undoubtedly does, at least, it is candid and direct and for that reason makes appeal. In an adjoining gallery there is a grouping of con- wnasn py udiyoorg SMOTTAL ADXOUD LUV GUNYS . , =~ = - ‘ 7 F - % # - Ys 2 s ~ BROOKLYN MUSEUM 215 temporary American works and American paintings of an earlier day. It is difficult to be properly spe- cific in this museum, for no catalogue was available when visiting it and none has been compiled since 1904, although one is in process of compilation; so the visitor must be his own cicerone to a great extent. There is much to repay him. Another regrettable fact is that some of the main galleries, containing fine primitives, some excellent French and English paintings and other worth-while works, are fre- quently used for temporary exhibitions, so that to refer the sightseer to definite works which might or might not be visible on the occasion of his advent seems rather hazardous. The galleries near the water-color rooms hold, it would appear, a permanent group of paintings. Many of these works are by contemporary men, many of them quite young and coming, to be sure, but happily not arrived. This policy of considering art as something living and functioning, rather than dead and to be preserved, and to be encouraged in the lifetime of the artist, is a particular feature of the museum and its director, Mr. William Fox. To this enlightened point of view is due much of the stimulus of the water-color collection and these paintings. Rockwell Kent’s “Down to the Sea,” with its silhouetted pattern of figures against a tremendous austerity of sea and sky, indicates how this artist avails himself of his individual resources of technique to interpret his dramatic conceptions. John Sloan’s 216 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES “Flaymarket” has a reticence and authority lacking in much of his recent work. Van Deering Perrine’s “Road to the River” is the work of an artist who feels light as a source of energy and seeks to depict this quality in his productions. Technically he falls behind his conceptions, but there is interest and stimulus in these high-keyed works swept with light in their piled-up pigment. In the figures of chil- dren, such as this, the artist is particularly successful. Another contemporary artist who applies paint with a knife and fairly carves out his landscapes is Birger Sandzen, a Western painter. Mr. Sandzen, however, has arrived quite logically at his particular procedure; it suits his themes and is a felicitous, per- sonal expression. ‘Creek at Moonrise” is carried out in so individual an idiom that its exact content could be conveyed in no other way. “Sand Cart,” by George Bellows, indicates with its struggling horses and vigorous men the interest of the painter in contemporary scenes and in bulk and brawn and _ muscular exertion. It also reveals his intense inter- est in theoretic procedure that brought scientific check to first impulse. John R. Frazier, a young artist, is represented by a figure canvas, “Foot Bath,” that takes its place quite creditably with accepted work of better-known men. The indication of suspended pose in the figure is admirably suggested. Allen Tucker’s landscape, - “Intervale,” is the work of an original and highly gifted artist, who has found the symbols he needs to interpret his zsthetic reactions. His highly sensi- BROOKLYN MUSEUM 217 tized vision is expressed in a logic of design that makes his work convincing. But with this power to choose the elements of natural form needed for arbitrary design, there is richness of rhythm and color that endow his work with vitality. Walter Griffin’s “Old House in Brittany” has its swept-up pigment, rich and resonant in color re- solved into a chromatic orchestration of great har- mony. Gifford Beal’s “Fisherman” is in a different vein from his canvases observed in the Metropolitan ' Museum, where beautiful filling of space and gay color produced decorative work. Here is the Amer- ican tradition of both realism and romance in his “Fisherman.” The light in its seductive pattern and the color lend the romance to the sturdy figure. The canvas might be still more effective with a touch of sobriety. Robert Spencer’s “White Tenements” is the work of a poetic painter, who builds dream houses, yet endows them with a curious sense of human life and living. The cool serenity of his color, the rich textures of the old buildings, the pat- tern of mellow light, are all beguiling. A group of paintings by Arthur B. Davies shows him also a poet and dreamer, as well as a restless experimenter with many forms and techniques. His esthetic caprices still find him subjectively the same whether he uses medieval or classic themes, the palette of Venetian painters or the cool, impalpable tones of his pastels and water-colors. It is always a modern looking out a little curiously and yearn- ingly at past life and art and expressing his own 218 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES reaction to them. Both rhythm and color are modu- lated to suit the mood of the particular moment so that there is great variety and interest in his work. Among the older men whose work we find here, the group by Ryder reveals more of his artistic ap- proach than single canvases can do. Ryder is often compared to Blake because each was a mystic wrapped in contemplation of hidden things. But here one may easily realize how far removed was this American mystic, who transformed the objective world around him through the power of his sub- jective vision, from the English artist who fled the actual world and found in Hebrew mythology the symbols that fitly expressed his awesome imaginings. The serenity and golden color of some of these small pastoral canvases contrasted with the sinister skies and menacing waves of his strange sea scenes also indicate clearly how much color and treatment were conditioned with Ryder by his theme. There is something simple in his magic, a strain of home- liness in his fantasy that forms an unusual combina- tion. Robert L. Newman, another mystic and poet, is well represented here in his two canvases, “Ma- donna” and “Christ Walking upon the Water,” in which the deep spiritual content of the works, the gem-like brilliancy of color and the poignancy of his personal attitude of mystic and dreamer all make deep impression. We must likewise note Twachtman’s beautiful tapestry of “Meadow Flowers”; Weir’s “Union Square”—in reality a part of a larger composition, BROOKLYN MUSEUM 219 but fully illustrating his characteristic painting of women with a sort of exquisite homage tacitly con- veyed; two canvases by Theodore Robinson, plein gir paintings pleasingly mingling impressionism with a robust realism in beautiful patterns of light and color. Thomas Dewing’s canvas, with its figure in a yellow dress, is suffused with a golden radiance. It has an exquisite reticence and fragility that be- long to his best work and give it a peculiar dis- tinction. Thomas Eakins’s “Lady with a Fan” seems to dominate the gallery in which it hangs. Having given so much consideration to this artist in an earlier chapter, it is hardly possible to add any- thing. But it is difficult to pass casually this superb portrait so thoroughly individual and original in its approach and execution. “Springtime,” by Blake- lock, so free from enameled surfaces and dark brown shadows, attracts one immediately. The filigree of foliage is not chiseled out on layers of pigment and varnished again and again; rather it is delicate and vital and the whole canvas seems alive and warm. This informal survey should not content the ad- venturer who has reached this museum, but its larger galleries of paintings should be seen, if they are available at the time of arrival, for they contain some important canvases of different schools, both foreign and American, that will nicely supplement the work already viewed. CHAPTER FOURTEEN VARIOUS COLLECTIONS The New York Public Library N the picture galleries of the New York Public Library, at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, there is a large permanent group of paint- ings including contributions from different sources, as well as the collections from the Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Also, changing print exhibi- tions of great interest are arranged from time to time by Mr. Frank Weitenkampf, Director of the de- partment of prints. In the first gallery we come upon