Mr. Parker is not by any means limited to this style. Indeed, it is in another and quite different character that he is best known in this country. As a portrait painter his work has for a number of years been gaining steadily in popularity. Many prominent people have sat for him, including President Harry Pratt Judson, Judge Peter S. Grosscup, Martin Ryerson, Mrs. Leonard Wood, and Mrs. N. W. Harris.
This portrait style of Mr. Parker’s is very different from his Giverny style. He developed it much earlier in his career, but still uses it on occasion. The difference is one of psychological viewpoint rather than of technic. A portrait, he feels, should be a livable presentation of the subject. It is not a picture to be looked at casually and passed by, but a work to be lived with intimately for long spaces of time. The exceptions are, of course, those portraits of well-known men and women which are to hang in public places. Generally speaking, he paints his portraits in color schemes that will wear well, in a rather low key, with neutral backgrounds. These likenesses are solid, dignified, and simple. To catch the individuality of the sitter is of more importance to him than to paint a striking canvas. That his portraits are successful technically is proved by the fact that he has taken a number of prizes with them, both here and abroad.
Lawton Parker was born at Fairfield, Michigan, in 1868, but spent his early youth in Kearney, Nebraska. When he took up seriously the study of painting he moved to Chicago, which has since remained his pied-à-terre in this country. He studied and taught at the Art Institute there. Later he went to New York, where, in 1897, he took the “Paris Prize” founded by John Armstrong Chaloner: a five years’ scholarship abroad. In Paris he studied under Gerome, Whistler, and Jean Paul Laurens. In 1899 he took the “Prix d’atelier” at the Beaux Arts. In 1900 he received honorable mention at the Old Salon with a nude; in 1902 a third medal, on a portrait. Four years ago he missed by three votes a second medal, which was fortunate for him, since the first cannot be awarded a painter who has received a second.
He has also received medals from the Chicago Society of Artists, the St. Louis Exposition, and the International Exhibition in Munich in 1905.
All lovers of art in this country, as well as the painters themselves, should thank Mr. Parker for having opened the way in Paris for so unprecedented an honor.
It is rhythm that makes music, that makes poetry, that makes pictures; what we are all after is rhythm, and the whole of the young man’s life is going to a tune as he walks home, to the same tune as the stars are going over his head. All things are singing together.—George Moore in Memoirs of My Dead Self.
New York Letter
George Soule
Pavlowa and her Russian dancers have just finished their tour here in a high tide of enthusiasm,—and financial success, which is worth mentioning because it means other tours next year. There is a whisper that we shall see a ballet still more important which hasn’t hitherto been coaxed west of London and Paris. Only a little of the new art-form now being developed by Fokine, Diaghilev, Bakst, Rimski-Korsakoff, and the rest of the great Russian romanticists of the stage, has come to us. But the important fact is that America, as always behind Europe in seeing new ideas that are not mechanical, is at last waking up to the dance as an art on equal terms with the greatest.
It is curious, but not comforting, to know that in this case the original inspiration came from Illinois. My authority is Troy Kinney, who is, without question, our best-informed critic of dancing outside of the performers and choregraphers themselves. Mr. Kinney tells me that after Isadora Duncan failed to arouse much interest in America she went to Europe, leaving a trail of heated discussion there. When she reached St. Petersburg the head of the imperial academy, Fokine, saw the vision of a renaissance of the dance from its classic sterility. He gathered about him the group of dancers whose names are now known around the world, and persuaded them to desert the imperial academy, which clung to the formalism of the old French and Italian ballet. Artists and musicians were attracted to the movement. This proceeding was quite as daring as it would have been for the superintendent of the United States Naval Academy to desert with part of his faculty and the best of the middies. But Diaghilev espoused their cause and persuaded the government not to punish them, but to let them work out their ideas and then make themselves useful politically by showing western Europe that Russia was not as barbarous as was generally supposed. They are now fully recognized in St. Petersburg and Fokine is again head of the academy.