Recall, too, another small canvas of big significance, “Mourning her Brave.” Standing by her dead in the snow, high up on a mountain ledge, the woman utters her dirge to a leaden sky. What emptiness and desolation of world without and spirit within! A breath of the ceaseless mystery of sorrow throbbing out of the void of time! Then a tenderer feeling pervades “The Sculptor and the King.” Stroke by stroke the sculptor has compelled the marble to respond to his thought, or wooed it, for he has a gentle, dreamy face; a youth only dimly conscious of his desires, and he waits for the king’s verdict, tremulously eager, and withal so glad in his heart at what his hands have found the skill to do; a poetic embodiment not only of the primitive man’s yearning after expression, but of the springtime of every artist’s soul. Then note the king, standing with folded arms, wrapping his doubt of the desirability of such things and, yet, his wonder and admiration of them in the convenient impenetrability of silence. There is a touch of humour in this figure, as of the critic non-plussed and unwilling to commit himself, but much more of serious reference to the early dawnings of a comprehension of the beautiful, as “a thing to be desired to make one wise.”
Those Indian subjects are of a high order of imaginative work. They have a great power of suggestion, stirring directly and forcibly one’s own imagination; and they are informed with an elevation of thought, a deeply penetrating earnestness
From the collection of Miss Henrietta E. Failing.
From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Copyright, 1897, by Foster Brothers.
and a largeness of conception that has been able to grasp the big significances and to feel them in their relation to perennial truth. For they not only suggest the life and environment of the early redman, picturing both with a fulness of comprehension that brings them vividly to our consciousness, but they involve allusions to our own experience. There are periods of sorrow when the world seems very empty and desolate to-day; there still are yearnings after higher things, the flutterings of doubt and hope that precede the beginning of growth of something better; and still a grandeur in the solitude of nature and maybe in that of a man’s own communings with himself. We may or may not have experienced those things, but, at least, we have an intuition of their possibility; and if a picture can recall the past and show it as part of the eternal relation of spirit and matter, we are justified in honouring its author. So these pictures of Brush’s seem to me great, notwithstanding a certain smallness--I will not call it pettiness--in their execution. As I recall the “Mourning her Brave,” it has considerable breadth of method, and, no doubt, others of the Indian series show increase of manual accomplishment. But the painting in “Silence Broken,” still influenced by Gérôme’s, is hard and shiny; and the drawing in “The Sculptor and the King” has a quality of timorous and laboured exactness. It is not in consequence of style, but despite it, that they are impressive.