"Diana of the Tides," which now covers the end wall of the right-hand gallery of the new National Museum at Washington, is akin to the Boston Library ceiling in its employment of horses symbolically, its light, luminous color, and its subtle play of illumination. This charm of illumination is unfortunately lost in reproduction. Mr. Elliott has made symbolic use of Diana, the Moon Goddess. in a way obvious enough, but hitherto, oddly, untried by artists. It is a way singularly appropriate in a museum of scientific character—a combination of ancient myth and modern science. As the Moon Goddess, Diana controls the four tides, which, in the shape of horses, draw her erect and jubilant figure on a great seashell. They are without guiding reins and harness, to suggest the unseen channels of her sway. If the reader will note an advancing wave, he will see that, just before the crest curls over, the foam is tossed back. Then the wave bows and breaks. So the nearest horse raises his head slightly, the next higher, the third tosses his head back, and the last has bowed his neck. In their motion and grouped attitudes. as they gallop up on the beach, is the rhythm of an oncoming wave. Farther than that Mr. Elliott wisely did not go. "Let them suggest more obviously a wave," he says, "and you have a trick picture. After a while, you wouldn't see anything in it but the trick." The wave motion is repeated on a comber out at sea, and, to the left, against a rock on the shore.
Diana stands behind the horses, against the great, golden moon—a radiant halo. She has just unloosed an arrow from her bow. Her draperies are of indefinite color, the rose and lilac and amber of sunset. Her face, it will be noted, though she stands against the moon, is lighted from in front. In that fact lies the secret of the illumination. For this picture was supposedly painted at that one Byronic hour of the year when
The sun was setting opposite the moon.
Turner, in a small water color, has worked out a similar problem, with the cool copper of the harvest moonlight bathing one side of an old stone tower, the warm rose of sunset the other. In Mr. Elliott's great canvas the mutual lights kill all shadows, and out toward the great yellow disk of the moon the invisible sun floods its lilac and pink, kindling the waves, the draperies of the goddess, the wet flanks of the horses, and suffusing the whole painting with its delicate, bright warmth, which is yet kept too cool for gaudiness by the twilight of the moon.
While this canvas was being unpacked in Washington last winter, Mr. Elliott was exhibiting in Boston his portrait of his mother-in-law, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. It was begun and nearly finished at Newport four or five years ago; but Mr. Elliott has not cared to complete it, for during the interval the "Grand Old Lady" has considerably changed in appearance. She is now more than ninety years old. When the sittings began, Mrs. Howe had just recovered from an illness, and could read or talk only for brief periods. Mostly she sat looking out of her window at a bird which had a nest in a nearby tree. In this attitude, the eyes raised, the face quiet yet alert, the artist has caught her; calm, patient, but with one hand characteristically clenched on the arm of her chair, showing a touch of hidden force and commanding will. She is dressed in light green. The background is an indistinguishable brown. Her eyes have that very delicate light blue of advanced age, wistful yet prophetic. The skin, too, has the rare ivory delicacy of old age, of old age gently dealt with and protected. The light is unobtrusive yet luminous—morning sunshine. The picture is utterly simple; the more so for its touch of incompleteness. The masses are broad, artless. It is tender, reverential, a sweet and solemn glorification of old age, and of the old age of a distinguished spirit.
And at the exhibition in Boston one of the women visitors complained to the artist: "But you know, Mr. Elliott, when Mrs. Howe comes to the Woman's Club, she always looks so bright and animated, and always has something smart to say!"
To which the artist replied: "No doubt, my dear lady. But I was not painting a president of the New England Woman's Club, but the author of `The Battle Hymn of the Republic.' "
Queen Margherita of Italy made a truer comment when she saw the portrait in Mr. Elliott's studio in Rome. "That portrait deserves to go into any collection in the world," she said, "not because it is a good portrait of a distinguished old woman, but because it is a portrait of Old age as it ought to be."
Can it be that a mere Continental Queen is a better judge of art than a member of a Boston Woman's Club? Such thoughts are very disturbing!
Queen Margherita, ever since she first visited Mr. Elliott's studio in Rome ten years ago, has been his warm patron. It was for her he made his well known silver-point portrait of the late King Humbert, which she carries with her on all journeys. It has, indeed the boldness of line inseparable from good silver-point drawing, where a stroke once laid on is indelible and no "working over" is possible. When "Diana of the Tides " was exhibited in Rome in February, 1909, the Queen was one of the first visitors. She was not the first, the Chinese Minister arriving ahead of all others, on the stroke of ten—the opening hour—attended by all his suite, to signify his profound Celestial veneration for the Fine Arts. The Queen, seeing the picture, expressed delight and volunteered to tell her son, King Victor Emmanuel, about it.