The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-04-09
OF AMERICANS IN PARIS
Roland Strong in Harper's Weekly.

Roland Strong in Harper's Weekly.
 "IE smart set of Paris owes much of
 it's lively modernity to the Ameri-
 4 can woman. She has taught her
 French sister the value of self-reliance
 Brought up almost invariably in a convent
 the aristocratic French girl acquired no
 real knowledge of the world until after
 her marriage. cruel measure of self
 effacement was imposed upon her. Her sole business was to look pretty, and to
 dress to perfection. and she would have
 been little better than 8 lay figure if her
 natural French girl of llveliness had not
 made her, as a rule, a delightful and
 witty talker. Today she plays tennis and
 golf, shoots, fishes and hunts, belongs,
 after her marriage, to woman's club, and her ema ncipation is almost entirely due to the precept and example of her
 American women friends. Withal she
 has lost nothing of her pristine charm
 On the contrary, the American woman
 has taught her to walk. and initiated
 her into mysteries of hygiene. which
 were a closed book to her before, thus
 enabling her to enhance and preserve
 her natural beauty. If her conversation
 was always brilliant and gay, it is now
 rendered the more entertaining by her
 increased stock of knowledge and ideas,
 and the widening of her worldly horizon.
 It is as an intellectual and artistic
 center that Paris most appeals to the
 American colony The great majority
 of the Americans who reside here for
 of ar
 artistic preoccupation of one kind or an-
 other Even if they had none when
 they arrived, there is that in the atmos-
 phere of Paris which forces some such
 interest upon them sooner or later.
 Only the veriest dolt could remain in
 sensible to the es.hetical magnetism of
 a city of which it has been truly said that it daily trembles and quakes with ideas, so volcanic is the core of it's men tality It is fair to assert that in the artistic domain the Americans have given as much as they have received In the world of paint the American -colony
 has for years past played conspicuous role. It issjn the main due to the Amer ican example, backed by the dollars of American picture buyers, interested in new artistic formulas, that the rising generation of French painters has brok- en loose from the trammels of the old French academic school whose hard and fast doctrines were rapidly proving fatal to all individual development. Among foreign painters. recognized by the Frenchmen themselves as being of
 the first class, who reside permanently in Paris, by far the largest contingent is piled by the Americans. The American art students, men and women, form an important element of the colony in point of view of numbers. They have their clubs, whose artistic enter tainments count among the most bril- liant and amusing in Paris; they have their special art shows. where the state
 not unfrequently makes purchases, and they have introduced baseball into the public playground of the old Luxem- bourg palace gardens.
 These are features which distinguish the American colony in Paris from that of London or of any European capital. | The art colony has its offshoots in the French provinces. At Giverny, in Nor mandy, at Crecy, a medieval town in the
 Erie country, where the famous Erie cheese comes from, at Pont-Aven in Brittany, at Auvers where Corot paint ed his masterpieces, at Nesles-la-Vallee, on the Oise there. are American art colo | nies. whose members livet the simplest of. simple lives in provincial inns. on the l dining room walls of which pictorial souvenirs of their sojourn are frequently fo he seen. Some of these have aroused the cupidinty of passing picture dealers, | but there is no instance on record .of any of them having been sold. In the nature even of a French innkeeper there I is a respectful sympathy for the artist, and an instinctive sense of etiquette in matters concerning art which would make such a transaction impossible. The Paris Ecole des Beaux Arts in all its de-