Studies in pictures; an introduction to the famous galleries . composition is huddled by astrange desire to paint all the gods of all time inone picture; but how magnificent is the drawing andpainting of the single figiires—the beautifid Astarte,for instance! The Misses Hunter, which you sawat the St. Louis Exposition, is a portrait group; butthere again Mr. Sargent strove for beautiful effectsin grouping, drawing, coloring, lighting. Almost allhis portraits arc so planned and so executed. And all painters at the present day, as in the past,are striving in their pictures to paint beauties that
Studies in pictures; an introduction to the famous galleries . composition is huddled by astrange desire to paint all the gods of all time inone picture; but how magnificent is the drawing andpainting of the single figiires—the beautifid Astarte,for instance! The Misses Hunter, which you sawat the St. Louis Exposition, is a portrait group; butthere again Mr. Sargent strove for beautiful effectsin grouping, drawing, coloring, lighting. Almost allhis portraits arc so planned and so executed. And all painters at the present day, as in the past,are striving in their pictures to paint beauties thatcan be seen. Even the Impressionists, who are popu-larly but erroneously supposed to be the apostles ofugliness, are so-mindod. riaudr ^fonot has for yearsbrf>n trying to show you ibo beauty of , col-ored air, and colored sliadows upon haystacks, KournCathedral, and Westminster Towers; but you worryabout Rouen and Westminster and what they mean,and never see the sunlight, the air, or the shadow. Lest you misunderstand, perhaps it should be said. XX.—BOTTICELLI, Spring (detail). Academy, Florence. WORKMANSHIP OF THE OLD MASTERS 67 again that subject and meaning in painting are byno means to be despised. Ideas in art, the significanceof things, must always exist to lend coherence; but,as I have tried to explain, these may be perishablefeatures. They keep slipping away like the teachingof the Sistine Madonna or the story in Botticellis Spring, leaving only the figures^^the colors, theworkmanship behind. These latter, which make upthe material and decorative look of the picture, arethe enduring features. They live for us to-day ina decorative sense if we will but accept them andlook at them in the proper way. So it is that the painter—the artist-workman asdistinguished from the pietist or the historian or thenovelist with the paint brush—must be reckoned within all our study of art. Heretofore in history andcriticism he has been overlooked in favor of someteller
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