In art as in music I am one who is very easily satisfied. All I ask of a picture is that it shall look like something, and all I expect of music is that it shall sound like something.
In this attitude I feel confident that I am one of a group of about seventy million people in this country, more or less, but only a few of us, a very heroic few of us, have the nerve to come right out and take a firm position and publicly express our true sentiments on these important subjects. Some are under the dominion of strong-minded wives. Some hesitate to reveal their true artistic leanings for fear of being called low-browed vulgarians. Some are plastic posers and so pretend to be something they are not to win the approval of the ultra-intellectuals. There are only a handful of us who are ready and willing to go on record as saying where we stand.
"WE LOOKED IN VAIN FOR THE KIND OF PICTURES THAT MOTHER USED TO MAKE AND FATHER USED TO BUY"
It is because of this cowardice on the part of the great silent majority that every year sees us backed farther and farther into a corner. We walk through miles and miles of galleries, or else we are led through them by our wives and our friends, and we look in vain for the kind of pictures that mother used to make and father used to buy. What do we find? Once in a while we behold a picture of something that we can recognize without a chart, and it looms before our gladdened vision like a rock-and-rye in a weary land. But that is not apt to happen often—not in a 1912-model gallery. In such an establishment one is likely to meet only Old Masters and Young Messers. If it's an Old Master we probably behold a Flemish saint or a German saint or an Italian saint—depending on whether the artist was Flemish or German or Italian—depicted as being shot full of arrows and enjoying same to the uttermost. If it is a Young Messer the canvas probably presents to us a view of a poached egg apparently bursting into a Welsh rarebit. At least that is what it looks like to us—a golden buck, forty cents at any good restaurant—in the act of undergoing spontaneous combustion. But we are informed that this is an impressionistic interpretation of a sunset at sea, and we are expected to stand before it and carry on regardless.
But I for one must positively decline to carry on. This sort of thing does not appeal to me. I don't want to have to consult the official catalogue in order to ascertain for sure whether this year's prize picture is a quick lunch or an Italian gloaming. I'm very peculiar that way. I like to be able to tell what a picture aims to represent just by looking at it. I presume this is the result of my early training. I date back to the Rutherford B. Hayes School of Interior Decorating. In a considerable degree I am still wedded to my early ideals. I distinctly recall the time when upon the walls of every wealthy home of America there hung, among other things, two staple oil paintings—a still-life for the dining room, showing a dead fish on a plate, and a pastoral for the parlor, showing a collection of cows drinking out of a purling brook. A dead fish with a glazed eye and a cold clammy fin was not a thing you would care to have around the house for any considerable period of time, except in a picture, and the same was true of cows. People who could not abide the idea of a cow in the kitchen gladly welcomed one into the parlor when painted in connection with the above purling brook and several shade trees.
Those who could not afford oil paintings went in for steel engravings and chromos—good reliable brands, such as the steel engraving of Henry Clay's Farewell to the American Senate and the Teaching Baby to Waltz art chromo. War pictures were also very popular back in that period. If it were a Northern household you could be pretty sure of seeing a work entitled Gettysburg, showing three Union soldiers, two plain and one colored, in the act of repulsing Pickett's charge. If it were a Southern household there would be one that had been sold on subscription by a strictly non-partisan publishing house in Charleston, South Carolina, and guaranteed to be historically correct in all particulars, representing Robert E. Lee chasing U. S. Grant up a palmetto tree, while in the background were a large number of deceased Northern invaders neatly racked up like cordwood.