GIRARD COLLEGE
A few Philadelphians collected pictures. One of the show places, more select and exclusive than the Mint and Girard College, for the rare visitor to the town with a soul above dancing and dining, was Mr. Gibson's gallery in Walnut Street, open on stated days to anybody properly introduced, or it may be that only a visiting card with a proper address was necessary for admission. The less I say about the Gallery the better, for I never went to Mr. Gibson's myself, though I knew the house as I passed it for one apart in Philadelphia—one where so un-Philadelphia-like a possession as a picture gallery was allowed to disturb the Philadelphian's first-story arrangement of front and back parlours. The collection can now be visited, without any preliminary formalities, at the Academy of Fine Arts. Mrs. Bloomfield Moore was still living in Philadelphia and she must have begun collecting though, well as I knew the inside of her house in my young days, I hesitate to assert it as a fact—which shows my unpardonable blindness to most things in life worth while. I never, as far as I remember, went anywhere for the express purpose of looking at paintings. I had not even the curiosity which is the next best thing to knowledge and understanding. I have said how meagre are my impressions of the old Academy on Chestnut Street. It is a question to me whether I had ever seen more than the outside of the new Academy at Broad and Cherry Streets before I met J. To go to the exhibitions there had not as yet come within the list of things Philadelphians who were not artists made a point of doing. Altogether, judging from my own recollections, Philadelphians did not bother about art, and did not stop to ask whether there was any to bother about in Philadelphia, or not.
III
Their indifference was their loss. The art, with a highly respectable pedigree, was there for Philadelphia to enjoy and be proud of, if Philadelphia had not been as reticent about it as about all its other accomplishments and possessions. I have a decided suspicion that I have come to a subject about which I might do well to observe the same reticence, not only as a Philadelphian, but as the wife of an artist. For if, as the wife of a Friend, I have learned that only Friends are qualified to write of themselves, as the wife of an artist I have reason to believe it more discreet to leave all talk of art to artists, though discretion in this regard has not been one of the virtues of my working life. But just now, I am talking not so much of art as of my attitude towards art which must have been the attitude of the outsider in Philadelphia, or else it would not have been mine. As for the genealogy of Philadelphia art, it is, like the genealogy of Philadelphia families, in the records of the town for all who will to read.
In the very beginning of things Philadelphia may have had no more pressing need for the artist's studio than for the writer's study. But it was surprising how soon its needs expanded in this direction. English and other European critics deplore the absence of an original—or aboriginal—school of art in America, as if they thought the American artist should unconsciously have lost, on his way across the Atlantic, that inheritance from centuries of civilization and tradition which the modern artist who calls himself Post-Impressionist is deliberately endeavoring to get rid of, and on his arrival have started all over again like a child with a clean slate. Only an American art based on the hieroglyphics and war paint of the Indians would satisfy the critic with this preconceived idea. But the first American artists were not savages, they were not primitives. They did not paint pictures like Indians any more than the first American architects built wigwams like Indians, or the first American Colonials dressed themselves in beads and feathers like Indians. Colonials had come from countries where art was highly developed, and they could no more forget the masters at home than they could forget the literature upon which they and their fathers had been nourished. If years passed before a Philadelphian began to paint pictures, it was because Philadelphians had not time to paint as they had not time to write. The wonder really is that they began so soon—that so soon the artist got to work, and so soon there was a public to care enough for his work to enable him to do it.
In a thousand ways the interest of Philadelphians in art expressed itself. It is written large in the beauty of their houses and in their readiness to introduce ornament where ornament belonged. The vine and cluster of grapes carved on William Penn's front door; the panelling and woodwork in Colonial houses; the decoration of a public building like the State House; the furniture, the silver, the china, we pay small fortunes for when we can find them and have not inherited them; the single finely-proportioned mirror or decorative silhouette on a white wall; the Colonial rooms that have come down to us untouched, perfect in their simplicity, not an ornament too many;—all show which way the wind of art blew.
There was hardly one of the great men from any American town, makers of first the Revolution and then the Union, who did not appreciate the meaning and importance of art and did not leave a written record, if only in a letter, of his appreciation. Few things have struck me more in reading the Correspondence and Memoirs and Diaries of the day. But these men were not only patriots, they were men of intelligence, and they knew the folly of expecting to find in Philadelphia or New York or Boston the same beautiful things that in Paris or London or Italy filled them with delight and admiration, or of seeing in this fact a reason to lower their standard. The critics who are shocked because we have no aboriginal school might do worse than read some of these old documents. I recommend in particular a passage in a letter John Adams wrote to his wife from Paris. It impressed me so when I came upon it, it seemed to me such an admirable explanation of a situation perplexing to critics, that I copied it in my notebook, and I cannot resist quoting it now.
UPSALA, GERMANTOWN
"It is not indeed the fine arts which our country requires," he writes, "the useful, the mechanic arts are those which we have occasion for in a young country as yet simple and not far advanced in luxury, although much too far for her age and character.... The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take place of, indeed to exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."