She's thine unto the end.
Thank God for one dead friend,
Whose mother-face no miles of road or sea
Or earthly bonds can hold apart from me—
First friend in life and death.
Visit To An Artist's Studio.
I do not know if, outside his own small circle of patrons and acquaintances, any one has heard of the artist Van Muyden. Yet hidden talent is none the less a divine gift because few know it; it gives a more pathetic interest to a life to know that it is a life harassed with care, vexed by non-appreciation, hampered with poverty. Perhaps Van Muyden is only obscure because he would not lower his art to suit the dealers' terms or the public taste. When I visited his studio, he was settled in a small house in the suburbs of Geneva, Switzerland. His own appearance was striking: the supple form, not very tall, but very spare; the large eyes that seemed to dart through you and search your soul, the high forehead, wrinkled and bald, told of a man with an intellect higher than that of his fellow-men, an ideal enthroned beyond the region of which they know the bearings, and of the cares with which they can sympathize. He was a man past the prime of life, eager and enthusiastic—eccentric, perhaps, as the world's estimate goes; but who is not?—I mean amongst those whose characteristics are worth studying at all. He wore over his vest and trowsers an old brown dressing-gown, suggestive of the appearance one is used to connect with mediæval scholars and seers. His forte is not landscape-painting, and, indeed, he seemed lost at Geneva, despite the southern beauty of its environs, for Van Muyden's predilections were evidently for the representation of the human kind. But then, if it was man that he loved to copy, it was not broad-cloth man, sleek, respectable, decorous, well-off, but man as you find him in Italy or Spain—picturesque as his scanty surroundings; an unconscious artist, a born model; man imbued with the spirit of the sun-god; man carolling and trilling without effort, believing himself born to sing like the birds; man in himself a study, a picture, a statue, a marvel.
Van Muyden explained his theories very freely, and they were well worth listening to.
“In the north, you see,” he said, “an artist is forced, if he wishes to be truthful, to copy a thousand pitiful details of upholstery. Such pictures are called genre; and this realistic, mathematical accuracy, utterly destructive of the picturesque, is lauded to the skies; but, good God! could not a Chinese do as well with his wonderful imitative faculty, altogether apart from the feeling of art? The North makes up for the picturesque by the comfortable; what a compensation for the artist! But modern art has more [pg 274] to contend with than vitiated taste or the loss of that free and natural life which in simpler times was more conducive to artistic inspiration; we have to struggle on without a school or a standard of taste. We no longer have those centres where the traditions of art were religiously kept; those high-priests who gathered round them numerous and docile disciples, as of old the Athenian philosophers in the groves of Academe. Even in Italy, in Rome itself, no such centre can be found. A young artist has to make his own solitary way, pursue his ideal alone, keep up his enthusiasm by his own unaided exertions, and probably find neither patron nor master to care for his works or guide his attempts.”