Mrs. Marianne Stokes is made of sterner stuff. She has worked of late in that most stern and stubborn medium, tempera, and small things of hers in various exhibitions attract one always with the desire to know more of her most attractive work. Miss Eleanor Brickdale works, or plays, always with an idea. And the idea she is not satisfied to leave until it has taken on for other eyes a most cunning and beautiful bodily shape, in line, in form, in colour--above all in line. She is probably, without knowing it, as good an antithesis as may be found of the Impressionist, so-called. The Impressionist is the incarnation of the abstract in terms of paint, the Symbolist uses the material to convey definite abstractions in thought. It is, by contrast with music, the motive of symphony as compared to the motive of Oratorio or opera, and the apposite methods may be equally well, or badly, used or abused. Abuse may lead the militant Impressionist to an impasse of assertive agnosticism as pedantic in its way as the lucubrations of the most literary pedant in paint. On the other side of the lantern you may have Watts, and the painted canvases of a Whistler. So be it.
Art is a long lane with many turnings, and down each there may be found a little house with a fireside and human hearts thereby.
[Illustration: SILHOUETTE BY NELLY BODENHEIM]
[Illustration: SCHOOL OF BRITISH WATER-COLOUR, 1900. YOUTH AND THE LADY. REPRODUCED FROM THE ORIGINAL WATER-COLOUR, BY KIND PERMISSION OF CHARLES DOWDESWELL, ESQ., THE OWNER OF THE PICTURE AND ITS COPYRIGHT. Miss Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, Painter]
Women Painters in the United States of America
During the 19th century, in the United States of America, there came slowly into existence a new school of painting--new often in temper rather than in manner, for its followers usually came to Europe for their methods. Race, climate, religion, commerce, social life, influence art, and the painters of the United States reveal in their work all the characteristics for which their country has long been famous: vivacity, invention, constant enterprise, a democratic enthusiasm, a love of truth (truth often united with romance or else with sensationalism), and last, but not least, a rare felicity in transforming borrowed knowledge into something quite original. It is not often that a civilisation embodies itself in the genius of one man, giving an epitome of all its dominant qualities; but in Mr. John S. Sargent, R.A., we recognise a painter of tremendous gifts who does for the United States what the manly, swaggering Rubens did for Flanders, symbolising a people and a civilisation.
