The sun. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1833-1916, 1906-12-16
A Recent Consignment to Hades.

A Recent Consignment to Hades.
Perhaps the first aesthetic fruits Of
the bad gray poet, WALT WHITMAN, are
beginning to sprout among us; the Bard
of Camden and the Cosmos prophesied
in swirling numbers that America must
grow from her own rich and fertile soil
a crop of poets, painters, musicians,
philosophers, wonderful women and
fierce old men. European prosody may
go hang. Aristocracy is doomed. Art
will be democratic, and the price Of po-
likeness will be considerably reduced. 1t
seemed like peering at the millennium,
all these preachments Of WALT; but the
current has apparently set in for his
port. Mr.. FREDERICK S. CHURCH, a
full fauna and fora and pretty girls in
strawberry pink and cerulean tints, re-
Gently retained from an excursion to
Europe. Furthermore, he expressed his
opinion of that negligible part of the
globe. The American painter did more
than damn Europe. He exclaimed: "To
hell with Europe" and said that the re-
| COulttlllS pm Ndo INV AlIoy Dub WI
FREDERIC R~EMINGToN's.
The late JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL once
wrote Of "a certain condescension in for
eigners.' He alluded, of course, to the
lofty, even priggish attitude assumed by
the English-no other az can look so
toploftical and superior-tOward Amer
leans. But that was nearly half a CEN
t,,-y n-N rT1a LA1k 10, e,aAa loo, 81 ow-1-
shifted to the other leg. Mr.. CHURCH
suddenly pulls it up al far as it can go,
roaring in his perfectly amiable fashion
his fellow artists epigram. 1t is too late
now to inquire into the genesis Of Mr..
REMINGToN's discomfort with Europe.
Possibly he had read MARX TWAIN; or,
and this is an exciting theory, he had
actually devoured JAMES DE MILES
THE Dodge Club Abroad" Be this as it
may, our present concern Is with the
most recent utterer of the heresy aesthetic.
What is the psychology of the speech?
1t could not have been envy Of the "old
masters" Mr.. CHURCH's style is quite
unlike theirs. Perhaps it was cerebral
fatigue. Or mayhap his feet were
tlICu. VIC ItNc CIlCOulltrICu, dflu III VIC
Louvre, perfectly decent members of
American society, men who painted as a
| profession; yet they cursed art, cursed
the Louvre, cursed Paris and wished
themselves home. The next day they adj
, mitted calmly that physical exhaustion,
induced by the sight Of so many ~canvases,
had been the cause of their outbreak.
| TIKI. 4, q HIT 81. khnaa follr ruho ~, oH.AaI
each year to admire -old masters, honest,
well meaning, half baked folk who must
have been shocked at the sturdy display
Of Mr.. CHURCH's native Americanism."
| They would call it chduuinisme.
As a sort of offensive and defensive
leading motive to his published interview
Mr.. CHURCH said: Il may be crazy, but
/ amt no fool Now, we decline to
consider Mr.. CHURCH as crazy. He is
a humorist; any observer of his artistic
methods must have noted this fact. He
Is a painter of anecdotes. That is why
he admired Warwick Castle, where the
portraits were of persons who had
visited" the castle. He is a mar of
sentimental tendencies. The visitations
of the,subjects of VAN DYCK, VELAsoUEz
and HoLBEIN appealed to him more
strongly than their painted images. Mr..
CHURCH should have been a historian.
He had the blind staggers, " to employ
another equine simile, when he saw the
bad Rubenses at the Louvre. But a false
Rubens doesn't make a picture gallery.
There is always the Salon Carrie to lihger
in for ten or fifteen minutes and enjoy
the marked inferiority Of the Da Vincis,
the Rembrandts, the Raphaels- poor
old deluded RAPHAEL!--and several other
minor paint heroes Of medieval repute.
Mr.. CHURCH says rather p~laintively,
in regard to the odd masters: Why
our people buy them l can't understand"
But they don't buy them. They buy
pictures that some disinterested dealer
declares are odd masters" And usually
they are not. This statement should
comfort our local artist. Nor can he
be gainsaid when he cries aloud over
the beauties Of American landscape art.
We have, needless to state, a school Of
landscape painters here Of which We are
proud. We buy their pictures. We
hang them in our galleries. We vaunt
their merits. Mr.. CHURCH does not
belong to this modern plein air school.
which learned its first lessons from
CoRoT, MILLET, CLAUDE MONET, PIssARo,
SIsLEY. What did the Western painter
he halls from Grand Rapids, Mich.
born 1S42)-say when he strayed into
the Caillebotte gallery at the Luxem-
bourg! Surely MANET's Olympic" that
ironic cartoon Of modern life and love,
must have thrown our genial compa-
triot into spasms Of righteousness.
But what has F. s. CHURCH to do with
modern irony modern drawing or mod