The Portland daily press., 1895-12-20
PORTLAND ARTISTS.
Something About the Paintings Now on
Exhibition.

now open at OUI IL congress SGreeG strikes
us as distinct advance upon any previ-
Gus exhibition made by the artists here
represented. There is less of amateurish-
ness, more of solid and serious work, Not
that the work of Mr.. Fox and his stu
dents has not always been serious enough
Occasionally, indeed, the seriousness of
the purpose, the spirit and aim of the
painter has seemed to blind him-or her
TO the fact that not all can be trusted to
enthusiasm, but that 1.-THE god within,
which is the beautiful meaning of the
word enthusiasm-must be assisted in his
appearance before the world by very much
OF hard, patient work in not very am
bilious details. AS Rufus Choate said
so wittily: I'VE must be careful not to
dilate with the wrong emotion p This
word can be spoken more freely because
no one better than MIR. Fox knows that
In certain sense-though this is not
the whole of it, by any means-genius is
an infinite capacity for taking pains, and
the excellence of his teaching, his knowl-
eige of technique and his acquaintance
knowledged.
But to enter into anything more than
q light and careless enumeration of
these pictures, is to go down quite to the
root of the matter. What is the purpose
of art? Shall a picture teach moral les
son? How far is beauty to be the law of
O pictures life? Is ''beauty, truth, truth,
beauty" as Keats saw it? Or can truth
be very ugly and repalsive or even gro
tesque? How far can details be safely
sacrificed to general impressions? ''To a
certain extent and as far as IL goes"
to use Mrs. Niokleby's favorite qualifca-
tion. Mr. Fox and his school may be
said to be realistic; in another sense i'm
pressionists. In general, they follow the
advice of the American leader of the i'm
pressionists, William NJ. Hunt: "Don't
niggle give broad impressions-tell your
story, anyhow, and make it tell.o An
other noticeable feature in Mr.. Fox's
latest work is his evident return to the
Pre- Raphaelite aruists, in his sometimes
it seems rather wilfuD love of the stiff,
the angular and strictly vertical. The
curve is not for him the line of beauty,
or is it that, because the straight line is
so assuredly the line of duty, be fears
10 present the graceful but more danger.
oas curve? We(think we see here a dis
tinct influence in his work from Cimabue,
Batticelli and the Pre- -Raphaelites, with
copies of whose work. by the way, as if
t. give US an object lesson, the walls of
the studios are adorned.
We think we notice something of this
influence in the paintings Of several
artists here represented, who if not now
exactly his pupils have been at one time
or another inspired by Mr.. Fox's teach
ing and example. Their general attitude
toward art Is serious; occasionally they
httempt-bsfore their wings are quite
strong enough-ratner ambitious subjects
One adnires the courage, one applauds
the earnestness, though occasionally called
upon to mourn the audaoity. Perhaps
their motto would be Lowell's line-and
not a bad one. sureIy-"Not failure. but
said. in the present exhibition, the ideal
seems i'll many cases more clearly reached
or at least made more apparent than
1t has sometimes been-the execution
more nearly fulfilling the evident purpose.
Thus in Miss Helen Browns Old France
there is an evident harmony of color and
thought. AS in Browning's poem of
tAndrea del Sarto, "a common grayness
silvefs everything" so here the landscape
is peaceful as old age" as peaceful, in
deed, as the old woman who is resting,
with the sickle by her side, after the
long, hard days work-which has been
like all sthe days Of her life, poor thing
full OF labor and sorrow. The church
spire dominates the scene, giving the one
touch OF poetry to the old peasants exis-
tence. the one uplifting element in life
of drudgery. There is a subdued light
over the whole picture, not garish but
soft and full of paIhos. Miss Browns
picture of an old church in villag
near Paris is also admirable in its tone
and oolori ag. A neighboring picture of
Miss Carrie j. Eastman, a Character
Study" has many soints of excellence,
though slightly hard III it's realism. An
old peasant woman, from the same re-
gion, we suppose, as that deliDeated by
Miss Brown, is sitting sewing. The lines
of hard, narrow life, full of petty cares
and, it may be, ignoble toll, are on her
unloyely face. 1t is Crabbe Wordsworth,
Mary Wilkins, Zola-all the realists who
naked baroness, that is in the Door
WON an's face. A sort of dull patience,
an animal-like endurance is here even
the coarse wooden shoes tell their story
In another picture "Day unto Day."
ws do not feel that Miss Eastman has
beer SO successful. The hardness is dan
gerously near CT udeness The child who
looks up into the old woman's face is
rather doll-like, even a trifie fierce.
Possibly, as the legend tells us. each
for the otner is the spirit of youth and
the experience of age" the child may
impart something to the old woman, but
there is not quite SO much of forward
looking" in her face as perhaps the artist
wished to paint there. Age is better,
but trifie hard. We found that we were
wondering how and why she holds her
hand in just the way she does.
A little picture by Mrs. Fox, Refec-
tion and Action, seemed to carry on the
thought. Mrs. Fox's work in this exhi-
bition seems very distinct advance
upon her work of past years. She has evil
IDENTIFY learned very much abroad. The
painting of the dress Of the old woman
" ho represents Reflection-a matter per-
haps small in itself-is excellent. She
sits by an evidently open window, but
nothing can be seen from it. Nature is
as much blank to her, as her faded life
is empty and barren. She is always re-
but it may well be that she
has not much to remember. In the op-
posite panel, is a young girl who repre-
sents Action. Through the light draper
les of the window there is suggestion of
houses, and the great outside world which