From the collection of Miss Henrietta E. Failing.
THE SCULPTOR AND THE KING.
By George de Forest Brush.
From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Copyright, 1897, by Foster Brothers.
MOTHER AND CHILD.
By George de Forest Brush.
and a largeness of conception that has been able to grasp the big significances and to feel them in their relation to perennial truth. For they not only suggest the life and environment of the early redman, picturing both with a fulness of comprehension that brings them vividly to our consciousness, but they involve allusions to our own experience. There are periods of sorrow when the world seems very empty and desolate to-day; there still are yearnings after higher things, the flutterings of doubt and hope that precede the beginning of growth of something better; and still a grandeur in the solitude of nature and maybe in that of a man’s own communings with himself. We may or may not have experienced those things, but, at least, we have an intuition of their possibility; and if a picture can recall the past and show it as part of the eternal relation of spirit and matter, we are justified in honouring its author. So these pictures of Brush’s seem to me great, notwithstanding a certain smallness—I will not call it pettiness—in their execution. As I recall the “Mourning her Brave,” it has considerable breadth of method, and, no doubt, others of the Indian series show increase of manual accomplishment. But the painting in “Silence Broken,” still influenced by Gérôme’s, is hard and shiny; and the drawing in “The Sculptor and the King” has a quality of timorous and laboured exactness. It is not in consequence of style, but despite it, that they are impressive.