Very little of the work of the extremists among the European “moderns” seems to be good in and for itself; nevertheless it has certainly helped any number of American artists to do work that is original and serious; and this not only in painting but in sculpture. I wish the exhibition had contained some of the work of the late Marcius Symonds; very few people knew or cared for it while he lived; but not since Turner has there been another man on whose canvas glowed so much of that unearthly “light that never was on land or sea.” But the exhibition contained so much of extraordinary merit that it is ungrateful even to mention an omission. To name the pictures one would like to possess—and the bronzes and tanagras and plasters—would mean to make a catalogue of indefinite length. One of the most striking pictures was the “Terminal Yards”—the seeing eye was there, and the cunning hand. I should like to mention all the pictures of the president of the association, Arthur B. Davies. As first-class decorative work of an entirely new type, the very unexpected pictures of Sheriff Bob Chandler have a merit all their own. The “Arizona Desert,” the “Canadian Night,” the group of girls on the roof of a New York tenement-house, the studies in the Bronx Zoo, the “Heracles,” the studies for the Utah monument, the little group called “Gossip,” which has something of the quality of the famous fifteenth idyl of Theocritus, the “Pelf,” with its grim suggestiveness—these and a hundred others are worthy of study, each of them; I am naming at random those which at the moment I happen to recall. I am not speaking of the acknowledged masters, of Whistler, Puvis de Chavannes, Monet; nor of John’s children; nor of Cézanne’s old woman with a rosary; nor of Redon’s marvellous color-pieces—a worthy critic should speak of these. All I am trying to do is to point out why a layman is grateful to those who arranged this exhibition.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.
The illustration near the front of the book is the publisher’s logo.
[Page 219]: “understanded” was printed that way.
[Page 287]: “knight errants” was printed that way.