CHARLES MAR QUDANT BURNS ARTIST and TEACHER By JOSEPH PENNELL PHILADELPHIA MCMXXII II ZZ P CHARLES MAR QUDANT BURNS ARTIST and TEACHER CHARLES MAR QUDANT BURNS ARTIST and TEACHER By JOSEPH PENNELL PHILADELPHIA MCMXXII Ja.d 12. V- i. CHARLES M. BURNS From the painting by Wayman Adams CHARLES M. BURNS ARTIST and TEACHER NO ARTIST of international reputation — or even national notoriety for that matter — born in Philadelphia has ever been able to live there, or, if he leaves it for a time and re turns, the bourgeois by whom the place is entirely overrun, drive him out again. From the time of Benjamin West until the present this has happened. Burns, almost the only architect we have had in modern times, is a proof of it, and though to-day there are one or two architects left in the city, they either have to go away to get enough work to live on, or else get commissions from out side the city, though every foreigner from abroad or even New York is welcomed — and this is the case in all the arts. Philadelphia is more able to appreciate the wrong thing than any city in the world, and its inhabitants to-day and its organs of opinions — or notions — are all directed by for eigners or by nonentities. So that the city's esti mate of its greatness is only bounded by the ignorance of its inhabitants, fostered by the impudence of its directors. When Charles Marqu- dant Burns died the other day, this was com pletely and amply proven — but why discuss Phil adelphia? — let it reek in its smugocracy. I want to say something of Burns. But it is curious, for Burns was born "one of us" and did not buy his way in, as most eminent Philadelphians do to-day, that he was ignored. But that is of no account outside Philadelphia. I first encountered Burns, or he first encoun tered me, one night in the late seventies on the evening when the School of Industrial Art opened on Broad Street near Race, and he, as teacher of "free hand" drawing, was in the place. We were a scrubby lot, most of us, I think. I certainly had, anyway, been turned down, rejected, when I tried for admission to the Academy of Fine Arts, which was a practical art school then, under the man agement of an unappreciated artist, Eakins, who really never was appreciated by Philadelphians, though he was patronized by them, till New York taught the thoughtless town that he was an in teresting painter. Now the Academy is a finan cial proposition, then it was free. That night there gathered a room full of budding artists in Burns' class. There was Henry McCarter, and Howard Stratton; those are the only ones whose names I remember who have come off as artists — or teachers — or didn't come off. Which ? But the room was full. How Burns got there I do not know, but there he was, and he began at once to sort us out. We went straight at drawing technically and he taught us how to see things, to do things, besides criticizing what we did. And those criticisms, how we got it! I remember one. "I did that standing up, Profes sor," said I. "Why didn't you do it standing on your head? It might have been better," said he. And I think it was McCarter who told him he had begun a full length figure by drawing in the head. "Why didn't you begin in the middle and go both ways? I know a man who can do that." If he found you could accept that sort of thing, and you really tried, his interest in you was endless and tireless. But if you did not, the heavy black eyebrows and bristling black mus tache, with the flaming red necktie underneath, passed you by — and that was worse than anything. But if he liked you, he would do anything — even ask you to his office — which was a craft shop. And I remember once when I was there he had de signed and bitten a brass sconce or something and he had left the plate which he had grounded filled with acid on the floor over night to bite, and when he came back in the morning it was bitten completely through, and the floor, too, and he was waiting to see if the acid was making a design on the ceiling underneath. But there were other nights at the school when we had mechanical — I suppose industrial — and geometrical drawing, taught by a Swiss whose name I have forgotten, but I heard he did not forget me — and there were lectures in ornament. I think that was all. We stood it for a year, and I, at any rate, passed the examinations, which means nothing. But when, next year, I found we were to take up trigonometry, or algebra, or some other art as well, I started a strike — and we had no Harding in Burns. I don't think there was any head to the school. But we found he was — or I did — and I was told that either he or I must leave the school, and as he said he wanted to stay on, he had arranged that I should be transferred to the Academy Schools. That was the way he did things. Now, in the catalogue of the Pennsyl vania School of Industrial Art, I am — or was— described as a graduate. At that time I was said to have been expelled. After that I used to see Burns and hear from him, but I soon left Philadelphia, coming back after my first warm reception when I thought I could make — what my successors think they can — an art center of the city. But they can't. Even I could not. And for years we saw each other when he came to Europe and we wrote when he didn't, and he always wanted some of my prints which I never thought good enough to give him, till about 1900 when we were both in Venice and I began to get to know him better and to find what a kind, dear thing he was, and that every one liked him there and knew more of his work than I did. But there was always a mystery about him. I believe it was the fact that he felt his own town knew nothing of him. And then I came back to Philadelphia, came back full of the love of my beautiful birthplace, full of a desire to preserve it — to improve it — and found that neither improvements nor I were wanted, and it was not long before I found out Burns' mystery. I now am sure it came from the same disappointment that I felt. I soon found too Burns almost the only man whom I could get on with. But he had done something in the mean while. There was the Convent school at Corn- walls that every one passes in the train, not yet hidden by billboards, the beautiful front covered with creepers, green in summer, glittering in the fall, showing all the work in the winter. And when one day I went there with him and McLure Hamilton, I found what his trips to Europe meant. He had got the real feeling of the Chapel at Beaune, set in a Spanish frame. He had not cribbed from photos and worked from measured studies — as almost all American geniuses do — but he had studied and absorbed what he saw and then produced a great work of art that no one scarce knows. Certainly no one in Philadel- phia given over to French notions and turned from the Quaker City to a bad imitation of a French provincial town, when all that had to be done by Philadelphia architects was to follow Philadelphia tradition — but that is anathema to the machine-made Beaux Arts prigs who, when transplanted, lose everything but jobs, and in their hands my city has disappeared. But noth ing in Europe — yet it is American — is more per fect than that Chapel, even that group of build ings Burns was not allowed to finish. They were handed over to the outsiders who were in every thing, who grabbed everything, who have wrecked our city. And another day I went with him and Hamilton, after a visit to Dr. Nolan — ill and dying — to see Burns' church at Eighteenth and Dia mond, a cathedral in little. Here again, though he carried out the problem better than any one else could have done it, it ended in despair and defeat : a street cutting off what should have been the crowning glory — the tower. Another of Philadelphia's strokes of artlessness. I never saw the church out Chestnut Street. But though he has gone, that stands, and may stand a few years more till its turn comes to be restored, as every thing else in Philadelphia is restored to make a job, to pay an architect-builders' holiday. I know there is much more of his work about. One church near the Falls I did not like. But it was not of his work that he would talk, either in Philadelphia or New York where he was at that time, with myself almost the only Phila- delphian permitted to become a member of the Century. And the talks we had there and on the roof of the Art Club, when the members had all gone to sleep and only their snores and the yelps of the bullfrog disturbed us. Or at the Sketch Club when the shadows of the lights made pat terns on the white walls in the summer nights in the garden. And always then he was doing something for some one, giving little dinners, or bringing greetings to those who had returned, or seeing the sick, but always giving pleasure doing good to some one else, and, as he would say, "keep ing out of the limelight." Till, finally, the curs and cowards of the town — who never understood him, who objected to his clothes, to his friends, to him in every way, for he was an artist almost alone in the Art Club and not a standardized, ster ilized interloper — sneaking behind his back, drove him out, and that broke his heart. He had friends, many, and places where he was still welcomed, and was the heart and soul of every meeting. But in the meeting place he had been one of those to create, he was not appreciated and as soon as the outsiders got up enough courage — on forbid den drinks during the war — they drove him out: the man who had fought with Farragut, as he believed was right to save the Union, when the fathers of some of the people who accused him of not being 100 per cent American were in the Confederacy or doing nothing for the country he defended. And none of those artist members who remained, or any other of his friends in the Club, as he thought them, had the courage to defend him. Of the Institute of Architects and the T- Square Club, he was not even made a member until I was. Nor is his portrait, though painted over and over again, in the Gallery of Pennsyl vania Artists in the Academy of the Fine Arts. But then, I do not think that Benjamin West's is there either, certainly Abbey's is not. Well, this is what one gets for devotion to Philadelphia, But Burns' work will live, even though Philadelphia only knew him as the funny little old man who was always walking about, upsetting the traffic and his friends' nerves, in stead of taking his place as a great Philadelphian. artist. £016 LZLOO 2006