We have long had such serious figure-painters
as Thayer and Brush, Dewing and Weir. The late Louis Loeb was attempting
figure subjects of a very elaborate sort. To-day every exhibition shows
an increasing number of worthy efforts at figure-painting in either the
naturalistic or the ideal vein. We have pictures with subjects
intelligently chosen and intelligibly treated, pictures with a pattern
and a clear arrangement of line and mass, pictures soundly drawn and
harmoniously colored as well as admirably painted.
The painters of America are no longer followers of foreign masters or
students learning technic and indifferent to anything else. They are a
school producing work differing in character from that of other schools
and at least equal in quality to that of any school existing to-day.
If so much may be taken as proved, the question remains for
consideration: What are the characteristics of the American school of
painting? Its most striking characteristic is one that may be considered
a fault or a virtue according to the point of view and the
prepossessions of the observer. It is a characteristic that has
certainly been a cause of the relatively small success of American work
at recent international exhibitions. The American school is, among the
schools of to-day, singularly old-fashioned.
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