THE ART - VOL. 1: THE UNITED STATES
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The first exhibition of the new Academy was held in May, 1826; in 1841, the elder institution expired and its effects were purchased by its successful rival for $400; and the latter, in 1860, acquired the site on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Twenty-third street where its Venetian palace now stands. These were the beginnings of the oldest series of uninterrupted annual art exhibitions in this country, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which was founded in 1805, counting some five less in number, though in its old building, destroyed by fire in 1845, the first annual exhibition was held in 1811. The schools of the latter institution were started in a small way in the autumn of 1807. The "Philadelphia School of Design for Women," was established in 1853, and in the same year a few paintings by "Members of the New York Water Color Society" appeared in the Crystal Palace exhibition in New York. The initial exhibition of the "American Society of Painters in Water Colors," the first permanent organization for the encouragement of this art, was not held, however, until December, 1867. The Philadelphia "Artists' Fund Society" traces its origin back to the "Society of Artists of the United States," organized by members of the Academy and incorporated in 1813 as the "Columbian Society of Artists," Thomas Sully being the first Secretary. In 1854, Mr. Peter Cooper laid the foundation of the "Cooper Institute," in New York, "to be devoted forever to the union of art and science in their application to the useful purposes of life;" in the following year the "Boston Art Club" was organized; the "Brooklyn Art Association" was instituted in 1861 and incorporated in 1864, and in the latter year was founded [5] the "School of Art connected with Yale College." The "San Francisco Art Association" was organized in 1871; the "Washington Art Club" and the "Art Students' League," of New York, in 1875, the latter now the largest and most important art school in the country, and the "Society of American Artists," organized in June, 1877, held its first exhibition in March of the following year. From this period the dates become too numerous for this history; the great movement was fairly under way, and it was left to the artists of the country to demonstrate the existence of a national school worthy of the name, and for which something more is necessary than academies and societies.

WHETHER they have done so yet, or not, may be judged for himself by each visitor to the Art Galleries at Jackson Park according to his own lights. That the school is not racially "national" in the sense that bison and maize are national products, is evident enough. But that some of the American painters and sculptors have manifested a new and individual insight into old themes, and that others have discovered the old, imperishable inspiration in the new, Western themes, and that others still have displayed fine qualities of artistic curiosity, ingenuity and cleverness in their treatment of the bison and maize subjects, are also evident. Among the most distinguished of the latter, the visitor will probably place Winslow Homer, A. B. Frost and Fred B. Remington; and among the sculptors, J. Q. A. Ward and the animal modelers; among those of the second class, Mr. Homer again, George De Forest Brush's Indian and Aztec pictures, Eastman Johnson. The landscape painters do not properly come into consideration here, because their subjects, though geographically new to art, are in reality the same as those of all other schools, if not since Claude of Lorraine at least since 1830. The Americans who have put new wine into the old bottles of Art are not, perhaps, very numerous, but they are among the most distinguished, and here the sculptors, strange to say, make a brave showing. Augustus St. Gaudens, Olin Warner, Philip Martiny, Daniel C. French, and among the animalists, E. C. Potter, who executed the proud horses of Columbus' Quadriga, over the Peristyle. Among the painters are Abbot H. Thayer, Mr. Brush, John La Farge, Thos. C. Dewing, H. Siddons Mowbray and several more. These lists may be lengthened, but they cannot be abbreviated, and, after all, this classifying and cataloguing matters but little. The painters never take the trouble to do it themselves; and though their technical criticism of their fellows is not always pitched on the lofty and serene plain of clear-sighted, dispassionate judgment they are not apt to befog the issues with literary and historical reminiscences.

Two easel paintings by resident artists in the year preceding the opening of the Columbian Exposition were generally accepted as marking one of the very highest levels which American Art had [6] attained. One of these was the large "VIRGIN ENTHRONED," by Mr. Thayer, and the other the small portrait group of his family by Mr. Brush. Both were shown at the exhibition of the Society of American Artists in New York in 1892, and the "Virgin" is at Chicago. This picture has been declared to be "reminiscent of the best qualities of the fourteenth century," and Mr. Brush's, of those of the best of the Dutch masters, but these reminiscences are not very important. Mr. Thayer's Virgin sits serene and sweet, looking at the spectator with pure eyes that see him not, and on either side of her kneel little maids in attitudes of adoration, but who are evidently posing to be painted and nothing more. Nevertheless, so quiet, so spiritual, is this work of art that the spectator feels an impulse to uncover before it, - which is much more than can be said of most paintings of the Virgin. The color is rich, but sombre rather than brilliant, evidently painted with great care and thoughtfulness, with many experiments and erasures and paintings over, the serene result attained arrived at through much tribulation. But the tribulation was the painter's, and not the spectator's. Mr. Thayer's quality as one of the most spiritual-minded of modern artists had been demonstrated before this, notably by his beautiful white winged figure sent to the Paris Exposition of 1889. Like Mr. Brush, he finds the models, or at least the suggestions, for his beautiful, dispassionate figures among the members of his own family. Like Mr. Brush, also, alack! He has the faculty of returning to his chef-d'oeuvre, pulling it down and arranging the materials in a new combination, - a fatal quality, common to the practitioners of all the arts, and which, if it frequently result in the production of another masterpiece still more frequently eventuates only in the cheapening of the one already perfected. This of course is done, chiefly, because of the limitations of the human imagination; but also, sometimes, from a laudable ambition to do better, from the strong necessity felt of doing something, - and from the never-sufficiently-to-be-lamented desire for gain.

It is not too much to say that the visitors to the exhibition of the Society of American Artists in 1893 experienced a real shock at seeing again in a large canvas on the walls Mr. Thayer's beautiful Virgin and her two attendants, but this time unthroned, and scurrying in flight, hand in hand, over a windy hill-top among the brambles of which drapery and the tender limbs of the children seemed to suffer. As a painting, this canvas was scarcely, if any, inferior to the first; as a work of art it was inferior only because the stillness, the serene, spiritual influence had been replaced by something also quite admirable but not so high. This hill-top, these hurrying figures, the great blue and white sky behind them, were also illumined by that light that never was; but to paint another masterpiece Mr. Thayer has injured his first. Likewise Mr. Brush, not content with having achieved an [7] immense triumph by having suddenly abandoned a field in which he had distanced all his rivals for another in which, at the first coup, he distanced almost everybody, must needs undertake to do it over again on a larger scale, and do it not so well, certainly no any better. The keen critical enjoyment with which the connoisseur contemplates the original, one of the pictures of the world, is dashed by his uneasy consciousness that somewhere else there is another rendering of the same theme, as good or not as good, but which completely destroys the uniqueness of this treasure. The high artistic qualities of this little picture are as undefinable as these qualities generally are; the mother, dressed in black, sits holding in her lap her plump little blond son, the comely Scandinavian maid stands behind her chair in attendance, the draftsman sits on the floor in front of them and addresses himself to his task of portraiture. The likenesses are undeniable, these sitters are all real, solid, individual, and yet sublimated, ineffable, the better aspect of them presented, probably somewhat as in Rossetti's "...murmuring courts... Where the shapes of sleep convene."

 The owner of the "Virgin Enthroned" is Mr. J. M. Sears of Boston, and that of the "Portrait" is Mr. Potter Palmer of Chicago.

Another one of these dreamers who, at times, is undeniably touched with the live fire from the altar is Mr. J. Alden Weir. More than almost any of his countrymen has Mr. Weir experimented with his technical processes, and in the fifteen years or so that have elapsed since he returned from his studies in Paris his admirers have witnessed some very radical changes in his theory and practice. None of these new departures have been uninteresting, and some of them have been very successful; in one at least, "The Open Book," has he burst through the veil and brought back a little vision, so simple, so beautiful, as to be, past doubt, a bit of inspiration. This picture has been classed among the painter's impressionistic ones, but with no reason beyond a certain devotion to color values and certain peculiarities in the brush work. No Impressionist know to Fame has any such fine visions as this, very few of them could design so refined a figure, and very few can attain to such color harmonies. What there may be in this open book in the lap of this mystical damsel seated out in the open and looking up to the sky, we do not know, and we should be very presuming if we ventured to ask the painter. This picture was first shown at the exhibition of the Society of American Artists in 1891.

[8] Mr. La Farge is an older man and his methods are different. If it could be said that Mr. Weir was an artist first and then a painter, there would be no doubt that Mr. La Farge was first a painter. Things seen and unseen appeal to him because of their color quality; the painter's eye that dissects and appreciates and reconstructs is his. Any by color he does not understand the grays of the modern school but the splendor of the Venetians. It is this characteristic that has given him his high reputation as a decorator; in the magnificent possibilities of stained glass he is amongst his own. "The Visit of Nicodemus to Christ" is a good example of his work; this is not a draftsman's version of the interview, nor a theologian's, nor a devout man's, nor a mystic's except in so far as all rich color is mysterious and impressive. Tonings-down and smotherings of Nature in a fog or a mosquito net, are not the only methods, there is a glory in pigments for your easel pictures and church windows, to be tempered with a due regard for your architecture or your interior when it is a mural painting. But do not let yourself be hampered too much by the rules-of-thumb, even in the latter case, - there is a tradition in the church of Saint Thomas in upper Fifth Avenue in New York city that the aged rector of the sacred edifice wept real tears when he saw the "Renaissance" painting with which Mr. La Farge had adorned his "Gothic" church. It must be said that this painter's theory as to non-originality - if he has such a one - does not obtrude itself much in his work, the photograph or the bas-relief is not particularly apparent. Messrs. Dewing and Mowbray, whose works we will come to consider later have also illuminated the old themes with new lights, but in totally different methods, - it was as if one at the outset found his inspiration in Emerson and the other in the Arabian Nights. Naturally, the latter had the much surer guide, the sage of Concord rather tripped up the painter and had to be abandoned but the tales of Shahrazad have furnished one of her multitude of lovers with fortune. Mr. Dewing has since gotten so far away from literary subjects that his mural decorations of late years have been the simplest of allegories, graceful, serene floating figures that may mean pretty much anything you please, and his most distinguished latest easel pictures are simple studies of other graceful ladies, of the earth, earthy, but gowned like beautiful dreams. Mr. Mowbray has not troubled himself much about the Marids and the Afrits, the islands of Wak-Wak or the terrestrial paradise of Sheddad the son of Ad, [9] but he has reproduced in a series of glowing little canvases the boudoirs and gardens of Rose-in-Bloom and the princess Budoor, their furnishings and the visions that disengage themselves from them, the pastorals, the idyls, the invisible concerts and the evening breezes - sometimes with a fashion of instruments and apparel which Budoor had never foreseen but which, all the same, came from these gracious happenings of the time of Aladdin.

Among the sculptors in this group of American artists who have know how to put new wine into old bottles - to the betterment of both - are Messrs. St. Gaudens, Warner, Martiny and French, to name only a few. The third apparently owes some of his inspiration to the first, and his work, as shown at Jackson park, mainly on the Agricultural Building, varies up and down a rather long scale of merit, as, indeed, does that of most men. Mr. St. Gaudens, unfortunately, is not represented in the exterior, decorative sculpture of the Exposition excepting by his lightly-poised figure of Diana on the dome of the Agricultural Building, who sways with the wind and alternately threatens with her gilded shaft all the corners of the world. This lady, as is well known, was originally intended for the graceful Spanish tower of the Madison Square Garden in New York city, and adorned its topmost summit for many months, till the architects, jealous of her beauty and stature, caused her to be dismounted and sent Westward in favor of a similar but less imposing successor. Mr. St. Gaudens was largely consulted in the early days of the Fair by the associated architects in all projects relating to the decoration of the grounds by sculpture and monumental fountains, columns, etc., and in the choice of artists to execute these works, and the highest tributes have been paid to the character of the influence which was thus brought to the aid of this most important embellishing. The city of Chicago - which will certainly have to be reckoned with in all future art chronicles - is fortunate, among other things, in containing, in one of its public parks, that statue of Abraham Lincoln which is, up to date, Mr. St. Gaudens' most important commemorative work and which may remain the most important of his life. Mr. Olin Warner was likewise too full of other affairs to lend his talent directly to the adornment of the Exposition Buildings, but Messrs. Martiny, French, and a third, Mr. Theodore Bauer - whose name should not be omitted from any list of those few modern sculptors who most completely, by a sort of natural instinct, avoid that deadly danger of their profession, the commonplace - have furnished some of their best. All the numerous groups, single figures and caryatids of the Agricultural Building, with the exception of the sculptures [10] of the pediment by Larkin G. Mead and Mr. St. Gaudens's Diana on the dome, are by Philip Martiny, and of these the most worthy of his talent are probably the figures on the upper portions of the exterior piers holding aloft the tablets with the signs of the Zodiac. The cattle groups surmounting the globes of the "horoscope," were courageously borrowed from Carpeaux's famous group because nothing else would be quite so completing and decorative in aspect. On the central piers of the Palace of the Liberal Arts in the Paris Exposition of 1889 were placed similar groups, with the modification that the supporting figures were boys and the globes themselves had the spaces between their metal ribs, or lines of longitude, filled in apparently with crystal, which added to the decorative and cheerful effect. Of Mr. French's work, that with which he is probably the most satisfied is, not the colossal, architectural, modern-archaic statue of the "Republic," but the beautiful, graceful virgins full of life and movement, who lead Mr. Potter's almost equally admirable horses in the chariot group on top of the Peristyle. "The whole composition is exceedingly rich in grouping, joyous and free in movement, and robust in execution," says Mr. F. D. Millet, who is good authority. "No more monumental group has been designed in modern times, and there could be no more fitting climax to the whole of the sumptuous series of statues around the main court."

As to the art creed of those American artists who find inspiration in the new, it cannot probably be better defined than in the words of Mr. Brush, one of the most distinguished of the younger members of this group. "In choosing Indians as subjects for art," he says, "I do not paint from the historian's or the antiquary's point of view; I do not care to represent them in any curious habits which could not be comprehended by us; I am interested in those habits and deeds in which we have feelings in common. Therefore, I hesitate to attempt to add any interest to my pictures by supplying historical facts. If I were required to resort to this in order to bring out the poetry, I would drop the subject at once." This would be a good foundation on which to build that "American School" which is so constantly demanded of us. This painter may be held to have satisfactorily demonstrated that it is the old poety and not the new ethnological theme which interest him; he has passed from his Mandan and Crow subjects of some six or eight years ago, through the medium of domestic portraiture perhaps, to a "Leda" of this year of grace, full of charm [11] and distinction, shown at the exhibition of the Society of American Artists. In the ground-floor galleries of the palace at Jackson Park - in which, presumably, it was the intention of the Commissioners to exhibit the better works of each painter - Mr. Brush is represented, in addition to his large "Mother and Child," by two of his aboriginal subjects which attracted the most attention when they first appeared, the "Indian and the Lily," owned by Mr. C. D. Miller of Jersey City, and "The Sculptor and the King." IN the former, a stalwart brave, his strong Roman profile relieved against his own flowing black hair and attired in a beautiful pair of yellow, embroidered leggins and a white swan swung at his back, lays his bow on the ground and clutching a pendant vine with one hand stoops over, rather stiffly, to pluck a white water lily with the other. The attitude is one which the heralds might call "displayed." but it is not quite as plausible as it is effective. The desire of this morose and unsatisfied warrior for the fragrant flower is one of those for which we have "feelings in common." In the well-known "Sculptor and King" the painter went farther afield and endeavored to restore a bit of the old Aztec civilization of Central and Southern America, - the bas-relief which the artist has just completed, and which the king has come to inspect, begin borrowed from the figure of one of the adoring divinities that stand, one on each side of the curious idols or trees of life on these mysterious monuments from Yucatan. This carving, much larger than life and executed in a polished reddish stone, is placed at one end of a long bare gallery and the two living figures contemplate it from a respectful distance, the sculptor resting one knee on the handle [12] of an immense globular vase and the king with folded arms and a masterful aspect. The monarch wears a fine plume and dress of feathers, long leggins and a great bluish-black cloak over his shoulders; the sculptor, only an apron of pink woven stuff with a worked design. On the floor, to complete this severe composition, lies a gray and black blanket, similar in pattern to those of the Apaches of the present day. The brush work and the precision of design in these works suggest Mr. Brush's master, Gerome, the color is sober, harmonious and true, - there is also always something suggested on the inherent unloveliness and lurking tragedy of savage or semi-civilized life, the gloom of the primeval forest and of the early age. All these qualities, except the smoothness and precision of the brush work, disappear in the painter's latest works. To "The Sculptor and the King," was awarded the first Hallgarten Prize at the National Academy of Design in 1888.

 WINSLOW HOMER is worthily represented by fourteen canvases, half of them from the gallery of a collector of New York, and ranging from his latest vigorous studies of wave and rock on the wintry coast of Scarboro to one or two examples of his early period, - as the negroes "Dressing for the Carnival," painted in 1877. In the latter, the Virginia family, of a wonderful blackness, have come out and stood in a row in the sun to array the head of the house in flaming yellow and vermilion for some great occasion, - and the result is something to make the spectator blink. The Adirondack subjects, the "Camp Fire," "Two Guides" and "Hound and Hunter," represent three different aspects of the life of the wilderness rendered directly and without any preoccupations, - the stillness and blackness of the nocturnal forests (haunted however by nothing more mysterious or awful than a possible bear), the bigness and windiness and color of the mountain top, and the case in which the purely human interest asserts itself and the landscape discreetly retires into a subordinate position. All these are rendered simply and directly and yet by an artist, and not by a mere camper-out who knows how to paint. Mr. Brush's hunting scenes are marked by another touch, a sort of classic form, the antique tragedy again when an Indian shoots a moose. And when one reflects on the almost complete omission of the artistic in the hunting scenes of all schools, from Snyders down, the American school seems to be entitled to another honor.

Mr. Homer's sea pieces, are perhaps, more sophisticated. Here, even when he sets out, apparently, only to make a study of the ultramarines and turquoises and emeralds of a single wintry wave [13] breaking on a slaty ledge of rock there is a suspicion of picture-making, and some of his open sea themes, "The Fog Warning" and "Lost on the Grand Banks," are complete works of art, - theme, design, color and human interest, all being present. A little general, human knowledge is here, as elsewhere, necessary, but when that is given there is something curiously ominous in the menacing tongues of fog that the lone fisherman in his dory sees shooting up on the horizon, and something very tragic in the two caught in this misty embrace and peering anxiously over their gunwale into the hopeless obscurity. "Eight Bells," "Herring Fishing," etc., bring us back to less disturbing themes, and we have leisure to appreciate the painter's rendering of the saltness and color and freshness of the sea. All these are very different from Mr. Homer's early war pictures, or New England farm scenes, or studies of tropical landscapes, and yet all are marked by that robustness and un-grossness of painter's talent which makes his works conspicuous among those which have caused the wonder of the foreign visitors at the American display.

Two of the best of the many works of art which MR. EASTMAN JOHNSON has evolved out of New England are shown here, - the "Cranberry Harvest," of 1880, and the "Nantucket School of Philosophy," painted seven years later. Both of these are well known, the former and the "Funding Bill" being what might be called Mr. Johnson's show pictures. Few more satisfactory paintings record the (apparent) charm of rural labor than this pleasant rendering of the Nantucket population turned out en masse in the cranberry bog to glean that toothsome harvest. Everybody is here, the stout matron who finds the lowly labor but ill adapted to her habit of body, the old grandfather in his respectable battered high hat who has brought a kitchen chair along to ease his aged back but who works industriously, all the same, even the baby in the unwilling arms of its biggish brother. The youthful members of the community go down on hands and knees by platoons, there is a wonderful variety of stoopings, and the mellow afternoon sunlight glorifies calico gowns and old straw hats and the fruitful valley lying between the low hills. In the "School of Philosophy" we see four or five of these grandfathers transferred to winter quarters around the village shoemaker's stove, that worthy member of the community on his bench and hard at work. The others smoke and expound, or perhaps they only smoke, - which may be the truest philosophy. The distant corners of the council chamber vanish in the dusky obscurity; a sentiment of wisdom and gravity - not unmixed with a touch of sarcasm - settles down over the scene. Nothing can be more discreet; and few genre pictures more acceptable.

[14] The "Cranberry Harvest" is from the collection of Mr. Auguste Richard, of New York, and the "School of Philosophy," from that of Mr. E. D. Adams, also of New York. Among the three or four portraits which Mr. Johnson also exhibits one is that well-known, life-size "Portraits of Two Gentlemen" painted in 1881, and another is one of the latest nocturnal studies of his own portly and handsome figure with which this painter amuses himself and his friends from time to time. This presentation stands squarely on its feet, hands on hips, and looks challengingly at the passer-by.

 Among the ingenious renderers of the aboriginal, bison and maize subjects - to follow our original summary classification - of those few whom we have named these galleries, rather curiously, offer but very few examples. Mr. J. Q. A. Ward does not appear among the sculptors, and the best of the animal groups here suggest Barye and Cain rather than any fresh, truly American, inspiration. In the large North Court where the marbles and bronzes and plasters of the United States most do congregate there are at least two life-size buffalo hunting groups and one grizzly bear one, but of these large pieces much the best and most sculptural is Mr. C. E. DALLIN's bronze "Signal of Peace," an all but naked Indian sitting peacefully unadorned pony, the latter standing quietly on his four legs, and the natural forms of the two animals in their most natural positions affording the sculptor a theme which the Greeks would have appreciated. Mr. PAUL BARTLETT'S life-sized study of the nude, the plaster statue of a "Ghost Dancer," dancing vigorously with his whole body, is interesting technically, but Mr. CARL ROHL-SMITH's portrait, head of "Kicking Bear," chief of the Sioux, also interesting as a study of the model and the type, is somewhat more acceptable as a conventional piece of sculpture. Mr. "Mato Wanartaka," it may be observed, appears to be by no means a fine-looking warrior, even as a red man. Mr. KEMEYS has a number of his spirited animal groups, mostly small bronzes, jaguars, bulls, panthers, deer, and even a boa constrictor, most of these animals engaged in giving a very plausible demonstration of the Darwinian principle of selection by the survival of the strongest according to the naive and direct way in which the animals understand this great truth. His largest group, however, is restful and peaceful enough, an American panther and her cubs in the privacy of their domestic life and very much like pussies of a larger growth. Messrs. PROCTOR and POTTER exhibit their work out-of-doors. OLIN L. WARNER's bronze medallions of certain Indian heads seem to have been selected from rather uninteresting savages. Of the painters of this group, Messrs. FROST and REMINGTON, two of the most distinguished, appear only among the illustrators, and certain canvases by other artists who have revealed the true national twang in their works we will discover later in our exploration of these galleries.[15]

These are all, practically, resident painters and sculptors, who content themselves with the usual, occasional, tourists' trip abroad, but there are very distinguished artists exhibiting in the American galleries who live in America very little, or not at all, or only by interludes. Mr. MILLET, for example, the illustrious Chief of the Designing Department, has a picture in the section of Great Britain, with an English address, "Broadway, Worcestershire," and is said to have been on the steamship wharf at Jersey City on the point of sailing with his family for Europe when he received the telegram of the Director's requesting his services at Chicago. So as the family sailed Eastward he journeyed Westward with a fine subordinating of pleasure to duty. The eccentric Mr. WHISTLER has elected to exhibit in the American section altogether - possibly remembering the unpleasantness which is said to have attended his transferral from one nation to the other at the Paris Exposition of 1889; and Mr. SARGENT, who is practically a man without a country but none the less lucky and exalted, displays a brilliant array of his portraits. Painters as far apart in everything a Mr. VEDDER in Rome, Messrs. WEEKS and HARRISON in Paris, and Mr. ABBEY in London, all send home loyally [16] their most important works to help swell the chorus that proclaims the greatness of American art.

Among the most interesting and important of these picked canvases is Mr. Sargent's portrait of Miss Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, owned by Henry Irving and first exhibited at the New Gallery in Regent street in the Spring of 1889. It was not there hung, as at Chicago, as a "centre," but it blazed out even more vehemently among the pale and respectable English pictures. The British matron paused a moment before it, said "Oh! I don't like that!" and passed on. The painter undertook to epitomize the tragedy of "Macbeth" in the portrait of an actress; he gave her an attitude - holding the crown of Scotland poised over her head with both hands - which she nowhere assumes in the play, and he took the sober and harmonious tones of her costume and her braided hair and pushed them up in the scale to a pitch of barbaric splendor and color. The face is very pale and with all the actress' tricks of "make-up" and expression accentuated by the courageous painter, the attitude is fierce and proud, the likeness is evident, - it is a portrait and a drama, both at once. Of more conventional sitters there are seven of Mr. Sargent's presentations, all of them marked by his well-known characteristics, the sort of keying-up of attitude and expression and color, the strong individuality, the unmistakable life in the face and figure. In one lent by Mr. Augustus St. Gaudens, the mother reads quietly, a little in the shadow, while her small son standing by her knee, looks at you; another is lent by Mr. Dunham of New York, the three-quarter length of a handsome lady in white with her hands suddenly clasped in her lap; the half length of a charming young girl, with very black hair and eyes, is owned by Mr. E. F. Shepard of New York; the portrait of Mrs. Inches is very proud and spirited, her purple velvet dress skillfully and summarily painted. In addition to all these Mr. Sargent sends the only study of the nude he has exhibited, the full-length, life-size, figure of a slender Egyptian girl, standing with her back to the visitor but obligingly twisting herself round on her supple waist to braid the long locks of her black hair and show him her pretty Oriental profile. Near this picture, which the chaste commissioners have banished to a screen in the upper galleries, hangs another life-sized painting of unashamed nudity by Mr. BRIDGMANN, startlingly white in itself and rendered still whiter by the contrast with the smooth olive tints of the Egyptienne. It is worthy of remark that Mr. Sargent's portrait of Lady Agnew in this year's Royal Academy is accepted as complete in its serenity and refinement as his portraits usually are in cleverness and dash.

The many-sided Mr. MILLET is worthy a monograph by a skillful essayist. The contrast between his artistic temperament and his business abilities - with his literary talent thrown in as a disturbing factor - with which we have all been familiar for a number of years has taken on a new developments at Jackson Park. Those believers in reasonable limitations who found it difficult to construct a man excelling at once as war correspondent, "hustler," skillful story teller and still more skillful painter of charming genre, full of subtlety, humor and mellowness, reconciled themselves to the situation by not liking Mr. Millet's classical subjects very much. Here at least, they said, he shows that he has [17] boundaries like other people, - the Roman or Greek girl "Lacing her Sandal" in the Art Gallery is a fair sample of the just good, not by any means inspired, painting of this sort of thing that he does. But this equanimity is now destroyed by the contemplation of the very distinguished decorative classic paintings, truly handsome and decorative, which we find under the domes of the Manufactures Building and the Casino, - paintings executed, too, at the last moment, in a desperate hurry, between New York and Chicago, in the intervals of "bossing" workmen and hurrying contractors. A fine chance to do a big, serene classic allegory, that shall hang together, harmonize with its fellow, with the architecture, and be better than many of the others! Another of these new considerations emphasized by the exigencies of the Fair, is rather a development of the old contrast - which presents itself as more bizarre than ever to the connoisseur, lounging comfortably on his elbows on the hand rail in front of the admirable "At the Inn," inspired by Shenstone's lines: - "Freedom I love and form I hate, And choose by lodging at an inn."

Across the gallery is the equally satisfactory "Antony Van Corlaer, Trumpeter ;" upstairs is the not-quite-so-good "Rook and Pigeon;" in England, purchased at the Royal Academy by the Chantrey Fund, is the delightful "Between Two Fires," all of them similar in theme and period and all of them, you would say, painted by a fine critic, a scholar of a painter, a philosopher who appreciates leisure, quiet, old books, old wine, old themes, and who hates hurry, noise and common men. Fancy a reader of Shenstone entering, con amore, into an impromptu fight of his own begetting between his Chicago workmen and the "Columbian Guard," and cheerfully accepting the bloody nose which he won in the fray! Before such versatility the mere scholar can only gasp in admiration.[18]

The aforesaid connoisseur, if he be a painter, contemplating the "At the Inn," finds himself wondering how any painter can bring himself to the point of giving up the pure enjoyment of painting such pictures as these even for the glory of assisting the Chicago Fair. The enjoyment, not only of the studious ease of civilization and the true painter's pleasure in his craftsmanship - probably of any, but also the artist's joy of creation, of making something where nothing was before, something definite, concrete, animate, very likely beautiful, that will be accepted by your fellow men an industrious addition to their stock of luxurious and enlightened possessions and ensure your name from being forgotten or omitted till the end of civilization. The architect's creations, of course, are bigger and more important in a material way, but a building is far from being the personal representative of its author that a painting or a statue is, there is a very large part of it that is other men's - both in design and execution. As to the poet or the romancer, it is true that he has more liberty but, after all, his productions are only words, words - thin, unsubstantial, meaning something to this man - if he will read them - and nothing to that one; and the sculptor's creations are fatally hampered by the limitations of his art and by the poverty of his material. More than any other artist can the painter "let himself go" and still have something tangible as well as beautiful, to show for it, - according to the painter's firm belief. To leave these fields of the intellect and the imagination both for the comparatively barren on of the intellect alone; instead of creating, yourself, like the gods, to supervise and arrange and bid other men to paint and to carve! It is in the fine old period [19] of wigs, cocked hats and sword that Mr. Millet's representative comes to take his ease at his inn. He is a handsome young gentleman, "wearing his own hair," as the romances of the times would say, and he sits in the cheerful inn room at a modest little feast so well painted that it inspires the healthful spectator with emotions of hunger as any well presented picture of a meal should do. His hat, sword and gloves are deposited in the window seat beside him, on the table before him the cold chicken waits invitingly while with his chin in his hand he contemplates the comfortable maid-servant bringing the jug of ale carefully with both hands and a snowy napkin. Nothing can be more satisfactory. This picture won the $2000 prize at the competition at the American Art Association in 1886 and was allotted to the Union League Club of New York..

Mr. ALEXANDER HARRISON is represented in on of the corners of one of the entrance galleries of the American section by three of his large canvases, the well-known "ARCADIA," one of his careful and beautiful studies of long lines of summer waves breaking on the beach, and a new "Bather" - the same scene and nearly the same evening hour but enlivened by the presence of five or six young women, some of whom splash each other in the knee-deep water while tow sit on the sand and look on. The distant reach of pale and opalescent waters is rendered with great skill and much charm of color; the bathers are well designed and vigorously painted with strong hatchings and courageous accents, but they are somehow a trifle disappointing in their flesh tones and a good deal like each other. It is however unsafe to criticize these details when the painter has studied his very difficult subject and the critic has not. Mr. Harrison's "Misty Morning" is very pleasant to the eye with its pale green tones, and he also sends a twilight study lent by the St. Louis Museum of the Fine Arts. The "Arcadia" it will be remembered, was hailed at first appearance in the Salon of some years ago as one of the most brilliant examples of rendering of open air and sunshine that the modern school had seen, and a facsimile typogravure of this triumph of painting will be presented to the readers of this work.

On the same wall with the "Bathers" hangs CARL MARR's important canvas of the "Summer Afternoon," lent by Mrs. Hearst of Washington, and opposite is his immense "Flagellants, the [20] largest and most important historical composition in the American section and one of the largest and most important in the Exposition. Of this the photogravure will give an excellent transcript, and of the "Summer Afternoon" M. Leon Lambert's etching strives with much success to reproduce the charm and truthfulness of color and warmth, the sense of security behind this grateful leafy screen and of the blazing light outside that can only break through in golden spots which fleck indiscriminately the ground, the active fowl, the small dispenser of crumbs and his mother, and the feasters and sewers beyond. There are no better renderings of this favorite and most difficult of painter's problems in these galleries, and to the high technical skill is added that touch of sympathy and imagination which is necessary to complete the painting's artistic value. In comparison with this glowing brush work the "Flagellants" seems somewhat cold and gloomy - as suits the gloomy mediaeval subject, but there is much good painting in this immense, crowded and well-arranged and balanced composition. The painter bestowed upon it more than three years of labor, and it was shown with much effect at the Munich Exhibition of 1889 where it was awarded a gold medal, begin hung in a room entered through a dimly lighted antechamber and directly opposite the entrance, so that the first impression was almost that of looking out a window on the crowded and tormented cathedral street. The foremost of the advancing multitude of figures are life-size and the difficult perspective is well managed; against the throng of half naked and white-draped fanatics the two dark figures of the leaders are effectively contrasted and the banners and crucifix give accents of warner tones. The outbreaks of these strange religious fanatics were not confined to any one country of Europe and occurred at various intervals from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, but the painter's scene seems to take place in the streets of an Italian city and about the period of the thirteenth century. Traversing the country in large numbers these enthusiasts proclaimed everywhere that the wrath of God was excited against the manifold corruptions of the age and that the only hope of appeasing Him and averting the judgments to follow lay in self confession [21] and abasement and self-inflicted scourgings. Their doctrines and practices were vehemently repudiated by the Church which suppressed them wherever possible and executed their leaders.

A central position in one of the long walls of one of the lower galleries has been given to Mr. BRIDGMAN's large painting of Pharoh's "Passage of the Red Sea," etched for this publication by M. Adolphe Lalauze. This is his largest contribution, the white "Day Dreamer" upstairs being considerably smaller, but many of the visitors probably prefer one of his three or four smaller reproductions of the privacy of domestic life in the East, the dusky sultana and slaves and common mothers, their long tressed little daughters and head shaven little sons absorbed in their daily avocations or idlenesses. One of the most picturesque of these luxurious interiors - in which, the artist would have us believe, the cheaper manufactured wares of Western Europ have not yet penetrated as the travelers assure us - is shown in the "A Hot Day at Mustapha" - omitted in the Chicago catalogue. The "Red Sea" depicts the mad race of the Egyptian chariots for the shore before the returning wave overwhelms them, and the stress and terror of the flight, in which even the horses share, is very well presented. The monarch is distinguished by his central position, by [22] something proud and defiant in his aspect, and by the red harness and trappings of his charioteer and his white horses. In the extreme distance beyond him are seen the low cliffs of the shore, their top illumined by the warm rays of the setting sun.

Another American Orientalist, Mr. EDWIN LORD WEEKS, makes a brave display at the ends of two adjoining galleries, and his large Spanish subject, the "Three Beggars of Cordova," is hung elsewhere. Of the latter, a reproduction will be found on page 17, and of the large "Souvenir of the Ganges" an etching by M. Manchon is given. These two pictures are among the four which the painter considers his very best, the other two being the "Pearl Mosque at Agra" and the "Restaurant at Lahore," neither of them show at Chicago. The Ganges painting, generally know as the "Last Voyage," was one of the first of this painter's successes and procured him an Honorable Mention at the Paris Salon of 1885, and a first-class medal at the Exposition of 1889. Towards the holy city of Benares, rising in terraces on the farther shore of the river, two Hindu fakirs hasten in pious pilgrimage, but the elder of the two overcome by age and fatigue draws near the end of all his earthly travels and the doubt is great if he can reach the sacred strand to die. Of the three Spanish beggars sunning themselves no description is necessary, "story there is none;" the picture received the gold medal of the Philadelphia Art Club and was purchased for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1891.

The most purely Parisian of the American painters is probably Mr. JULES L. STEWART, whose celebrated "Hunt Ball," etched for this publication by Champollion, remains one of the most successful pictures of that difficult subject, a modern, evening entertainment. Not only has the painter contrived to make his dancers look like gentle folks - which M. Jean Beraud, for instance, never does - and to give a great variety of character and individuality to his presentable young men, but he has also made something of a composition out of his spotty and shifting crowd by suddenly striking down through their orderless congregation the long open space made by the simultaneous rush of the dancers, "dancing in tune." In none of his subsequent pictures has the painter been quite so successful as in this, and several of his best are here, - the yachting party, "On the deck of the Namouna;" the large baptism scene; the handsome panoramic view of Venice across the lagoon, owned by Mr. James Gordon Bennett, and two charming portraits of young Parisian ladies, one of which was exposed at Paris in 1889. Another full length portrait is shown among the pastels. The "Hunt Ball" is owned by the Essex Club of Newark, N. J.

None of these absentees are less concerned about the local flavor than Mr. WHISTLER, and the important exhibit which me makes in the American galleries adds an individual note, although the paintings are not those in which he makes his widest departures from the conventional.[23] There is a large and apparently hasty sketch of a boy standing with this legs apart which does not interest the public, but there is also an equally summary marine, called "A Harmony in Blue and Silver" which is so excellent in color that it almost justifies its absurd title. The full length portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell, looking back at you over her shoulder as she turns away, which generally appears in any state exhibition of the painter's works, is here, and, at a little distance away, another canvas, similar in size and motif, "The Fur Jacket," equally refined and distinguished in its color scheme, a sort of "harmony" of olive browns. Mr. Alexander Reid, of Glasgow, is the happy possessor of this latter, of "The Lady with the Yellow Buskin" and of "The Princess of the Land of Porcelain," also here catalogued, and the last named is probably the most important work of the group. In the rendering of this Chinese or Japanese lady, standing idly with a screen behind her, the ingenious and searching painter has apparently set out to make a beautiful color arrangement that shall all the time conserve something of the somewhat hard and disagreeable coldness and quality of porcelain without being hard or disagreeable, - and a very interesting study he has made of it. There is also a good "Nocturne," located with more or less reason, at Valparaiso, a portrait, and about sixty etchings.

Among the painters summoned to Jackson Park to contribute to the mural decorations of some of the more important buildings was Mr. VEDDER of Rome, but the contrast between the two cities was too great and the artist abandoned his commission and recrossed the seas to the Forum and the Pincio. Even there, he finds, like Mr. Ruskin, the soul-destroying march of modern improvement gradually abolishing all those memories which alone make life endurable in old countries, and the absence of which makes it not endurable in new ones. It is in accordance with these great truths that we find the most valuable and characteristic part of the painter's exhibit in the Fine Art Galleries those pictures which he executed long ago and with which we are all familiar. It is much to be regretted that "The Lost Mind," probably the most subtle and learned artistic rendering of impalpable things that he ever executed, is not here, but in its place are the "Roc's Egg," the "Fisherman and the Genie" and the fine "Lair of the Sea Serpent." The latter, - a very good bit of imagining - rather curiously, does not [24] gain much in impressiveness by its color, as the "Lost Mind" does. The two scenes from the Arabian Nights, small canvases, will seem to many visitors to be better painted and better conceived than some of the painter's later work. The two large heads of "Samson" and "Delilah" are framed in appropriate carved borders of shears, locks of hair, etc.; the "Morning" shows a half-length figure of a young girl by a window through which the early light comes; the "Cup of Love" is an allegory represented by three figures, the meaning of which is not very clear; the "Soul in Bondage" is represented by a nude female figure, winged, and loosely bound, a butterfly on her hand and a curious sky behind her. The well-known "Young Marsyas," goat-legged and fluting to his rabbits is also here; a study of a "Venitian Model;" and another of three heads, of a young girl, an old man, and an angel with a halo, - all of them discontented. In the "Sea Serpent" the sense of formidable bulk and strangeness is admirably given, - the immense beast lies sleeping on the sand hills of a lonely headland, the deserted sea stretching away to the sky; and in the little picture in which the imprudent companions of Es Sindibad of the Sea break open the Roc's egg the two distant specks of flying birds on the horizon are evidently of the size of cathedrals.

 These paintings, in which one of the elder American artists justifies the claim of the national school to produce at least occasional works of thoughtfulness and imaginative power, were hung in the last days of the first month of the Exposition opposite to, and about the same time as, Mr. ABBEY's great painting intended for the decoration of the Boston Public Library. Perhaps it may be taken as an indication of the poverty of the national school that this great mural painting was given to an artist who had won his reputation exclusively as an illustrator, - though he has executed two or three smaller decorations that are certainly decorative and harmonious in color. But in this presentation of Sir Galahad at the court of King Arthur - perhaps owing to the hegith at which it is hung - there seems to be a certain lack of coherence in the color composition, there is a spot of red on one side, which is the good knight, and another spot of red on the other side, which is the king, and in the centre of the composition, a hole. This is, really, a curious white veiled figure that is about to lead Galahad to the throne. All the long background of the parallelogram is filled with knights and angels in parallel rows, [25] the knights holding up their cross-handled swords and the gold halos of the angels making a long, golden arc that traverses the entire length of the canvas. There are many very good bits of design and color in this immense composition, and it will probably remain more interesting in the details than in the ensemble, despite the artist's clever and courageous attempt to tie it together with his golden arc. In the department of American illustrations, Mr. Abbey is represented by fourteen of his drawings for Shakespeare, to be studied and enjoyed at leisure, and in this section the display of the United States, in size and importance and artistic value, is worthy of our renown as book illustrators.

The works of art in the United States section reach a total of over 2500, the paintings alone numbering 1365, and it is as evidently impossible for us to do justice even to the most worthy in this picked collection as it is for the most industrious visitor to see them all. Of those selected for reproduction in this work several will have to remain unnoticed for lack of space, these selections having been made with a view of giving a certain idea of the width of the field covered by these painters and sculptors.

But the most important work of art in the American section may justly be considered to be the arrangement of the mise-en-scene of the Exposition itself, and in this connection an artist whose name should certainly not be omitted from any record was Mr. John W. Root, whose untimely death, only four or five weeks after his appointment as consulting architect, was peculiarly unfortunate. Mr. Root with Mr. Burnham had been closely connected with the development of the lofty and massive architectural features of Chicago's business quarter, and their selection as directors of the general laying out of the Exposition followed in the natural course of events. During the long preliminary discussions of the Architectural Board it was Mr. Root who drafted all the plans with his own hands as fast as they were formulated, and the general scheme of location of buildings and waterways as it now exists was that prepared by him in connection with Messrs. Olmstead and Codman, the consulting landscape architects. In the bringing about of that remarkable and effective coordination of professional labor, so rare in thei history of architecture, Mr. Root's services were invaluable, and so [26] well was his preliminary work done, and so inspiriting was his own example and influence, that this initiative force remained with his associated and left an enduring mark on all those arrangements of the general plan which have been considered the most valuable. On the front of the Fine Arts Building, looking south, have been placed two memorial bronze tablets commemorating the services of those two eminent young men who may be considered as the martyrs of the Exposition, Messrs. Root and Codman.