The literary digest . Cortissoz frankly acknowledges thatthey were in general nothing of the sort, with only one ortwo members of the school rising to anything like extraordinaryeminence. But he grants them all to have been sincere, andthey were accompUshed men who respected their art and leftupon it the stamp of dignity that would alone be sufficientto commend our admiration. There is, then, no need for us tofall back upon the deprecating words of Touchstone and say,an ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own. They have, too,Mr. Cortissoz avers, the virtue of reflecting with truth andsomething Uk
The literary digest . Cortissoz frankly acknowledges thatthey were in general nothing of the sort, with only one ortwo members of the school rising to anything like extraordinaryeminence. But he grants them all to have been sincere, andthey were accompUshed men who respected their art and leftupon it the stamp of dignity that would alone be sufficientto commend our admiration. There is, then, no need for us tofall back upon the deprecating words of Touchstone and say,an ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own. They have, too,Mr. Cortissoz avers, the virtue of reflecting with truth andsomething Uke elevation the spirit of their time. And— This latter point is one to be considered with some care. Weknow from the schools of France and England that the eighteenthcentury was favorable, in those countries at all events, todecorative and pictorial ideals of art. The gift of the painter,to be light and charming, to adorn life as well as to serve as itsmirror, was not simply permitted to exercise itself in Paris and. NOT AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRENCHWOMAN. Though Mr. Cortissoz declares this portrait of Elizabeth Byles Brown by Copley, an early American painter, might have come straight out of eighteenth-century France. London—it was encouraged so to function. With us conditionswere different. The American artist was expected to be not somuch a maker of pictures as a painter of portraits; he was asocial necessity rather than a source of luxury, of fixing of his status, which ought only to have profitablyintensified the discipline imposed upon him, clipt the wings of his inspiration The handicap of our pio-neers, which sharply distin-guishes most of them fromthose masters abroad at whomwe have glanced, was a certainnarrowing seriousness. Theyhad plenty of conscience, andso painted good lacked, technically, theimpulse, ihejoie de vivre, whichcomes to the artist when he ispainting simply to please him-self. If at the foundation ofour school there ha
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