This is the most characteristic attitude of mind for an artist so alert to the significance of visible things; and it is immensely to his credit as an artist that he almost never permits this keen and throbbing interest in the world about him to trespass upon his logical use of his great instrument.
If organization of line and space, ability to establish in each of his compositions a decorative scheme adequate to support easily all the delightful episodes and figures which he chooses to introduce, is the most important element in Lepère’s artistic equipment, the next in significance is the clarity and precision of his utterance. There is no vapor in his imagination; he is a poet as well as an artist, with a poet’s sensitiveness to definition of form. All that he lacks is the intensity of emotion that sweeps away interest in everything but the personal feeling. We suspect that the world for him will always be “full of a number of things,” and that he will not be able to forget any of them in the exaltation of profound self-absorption. But he has a genius for infusing a rich suggestiveness into all that he observes, and for giving his narrative an epic character.
HERMAN A. WEBSTER
By MARTIN HARDIE
“DID you ever see a barber sharpen his razor? That’s what it wants—the decision and the smacks.” That is one of the many quaint remarks that old John Varley used to hurl at the pupils who came to him for lessons in the complete art of painting in water-color. It is a remark very appropriate to the vast quantity of etchings, mechanically correct, but unimpassioned and uninteresting, which are produced to-day. There are wonderfully few etchers whose work strikes a note of imagination and individuality, and appeals by its force and directness, its decisions and its smacks. One of that small company is Mr. Herman A. Webster.
An artist’s life is written in his work, and the cold facts of his biography are of little real importance. To some extent, however, they act as a commentary upon his productions, and at the worst they serve to satisfy the not unpardonable curiosity which impels all of us to inquire into the age and life-history of any man whose pictures or prints awaken our instant sympathy. So I put here a few outlines of Mr. Webster’s career, merely the mile-stones that mark the route along which he has proceeded. It has been a career of strenuous activity, for the artist who now prints his finely-wrought plates in his studio in the Rue de Furstenberg at Paris (the street of which Whistler made a lithograph in 1894) has graduated at a famous university, traveled round the world, spent two years in commercial life, toiled as general reporter to a big daily paper, worked in a coal-mine, and acted as assistant cashier in a bank. And the tale of his years is only just over thirty, for he was born in 1878. Need I add—for an English reader it would be quite superfluous—that Mr. Webster is an American, with New York as his native city?
Mr. Webster came into the world with an innate love of art. In his school-days, before he had received any instruction in drawing, he made posters, that were perhaps crude but not ineffective, for the school games; and at Yale he was one of the editors and a valued illustrator of the Yale Record. This love of art was fostered by a visit to the 1900 Exposition at Paris, where the genius loci has a stronger spell for the young artist than anywhere else upon earth. Studios and restaurants of the Quartier Latin are fragrant with great memories, still haunted by the mighty spirits of the past: Louvre and Luxembourg are filled with the living realities that abide. Amid the enchantment of this artistic atmosphere, with all its traditions and associations, Mr. Webster lingered for some months, and then set out on a trans-Siberian tour to the Orient, staying long enough in Japan and China for his natural instinct to be quickened by the marvelous art which has exerted so strong an influence on the Western world. On returning home his desire to adopt art as his life-calling was checked by family opposition. Here in England—for I write as one of Mr. Webster’s English admirers—many a boy artist has been thwarted by a foolish antipathy in the home circle to art in the abstract, but for a parent in the New World the conviction must be even more sincere that business is the only lucrative profession, while art is at least something precarious, if not a downward road to poverty and starvation. And so, at his father’s wish, Mr. Webster, in the office of the Chicago Record-Herald and elsewhere, served two years of bondage to commerce. Determination, however, won its way at last, and in February, 1904, he set out to Paris with the family consent to “try it for a year.” That year is still continuing.
Webster. St. Ouen, Rouen
“His chief delight is in the nooks and corners of old-world thoroughfares and culs-de-sac, where deep shadows lurk in the angles of time-worn buildings, and sunlight ripples over crumbling walls, seamy gables, and irregular tiled roofs.” Martin Hardie.