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