I
By the time I grew up years had passed since Philadelphia had ceased to
be the Capital, and during these years its atmosphere had not been
especially congenial to art. But the general conditions had not been
more stimulating anywhere in America. The Hudson River School is about
all that came of a period which, for that matter, owed its chief good to
revolt in countries where more was to be expected of it: in France, to
first the Romanticists and then the Impressionists who had revolted
against the Academic; in England to the Pre-Raphaelites who, with noisy
advertisement, broke away from Victorian convention. Art in America had
not got to the point of development when there was anything to revolt
against or to break away from. What it needed was a revival of the old
interest, a reaction from the prevailing indifference to all there was
of art in the country.
[Illustration: THE OLD WATER-WORKS, FAIRMOUNT PARK]
Some say this came in Philadelphia with the Centennial. The Centennial's
stirring up, however, would not have done much good had not artists
already begun to stir themselves up. How a number of Americans who had
been studying in Paris and Munich returned to America full of youth and
enthusiasm in the early Eighteen-Seventies, there to lead a new
movement in American art, has long since passed into history--also the
fact that one of the most remarkable outcomes of this new movement was
the new school of illustration that quickly made American illustrated
books and magazines famous throughout the world. But what concerns me as
a Philadelphian is that, once more at this critical moment, Philadelphia
took the lead. The publishers of the illustrated books and magazines may
have been chiefly in New York, the illustrations were chiefly from
Philadelphia, and there is no reason why Philadelphia should not admit
it with decent pride. Abbey and Frost were actually, Howard Pyle and
Smedley virtually, Philadelphians. Blum and Brennan passed through the
Academy Schools. J., when I met him, was at the threshold of his career.
And the illustrators were but a younger offshoot of the new Philadelphia
group. Miss Mary Cassatt had already started to work in Paris, where
Jules Stewart and Ridgway Knight represented the older Philadelphia
school; Mrs. Anna Lea Merritt was already in London; J. McLure Hamilton
had finished his studies at Antwerp; Alexander and Birge Harrison had
been heard of in Paris where Sargent--who belongs to Philadelphia if to
any American town--had carried off his first honours. At home Richards
was painting his marines; Poore had begun his study of animals; Dana, I
think, was beginning his water-colours; William Sartain had long been
known as an engraver; Miss Emily Sartain was an art editor and soon to
be the head of an art school; the Moran family, with the second
generation, had become almost a Philadelphia institution; from Stephen
Ferris J. could learn the technic of etching as from the Claghorn
collection he could trace its development through the ages; and of the
younger men and women, his contemporaries, he did not leave me long in
ignorance.
My own work had led me to the discovery of so many worlds of work in
Philadelphia, I could not have believed there was room for another. But
there was, and the artists' world was so industrious, so full of energy,
so sufficient unto itself, so absorbed in itself, that, with the first
glimpse into it, the difficulty was to believe space and reason could be
left for any outside of it. This new experience was as extraordinary a
revelation as my initiation into the newspaper world. I had been living,
without suspecting it, next door to people who thought of nothing,
talked of nothing, occupied themselves with nothing, but art: people for
whom a whole army of men and women were busily employed,
managing schools, running factories, keeping stores, putting up
buildings--delightful people with whom I could not be two minutes
without reproaching myself for not having known from the cradle that
nothing in life save art ever did count, or ever could. And at this
point I can afford to get rid of Philadelphia reticence without scruple
since through this, to me, new world of work I had the benefit of J.'s
guidance.
It was a moment when it had got to be the fashion for artists in all the
studios in the same building to give receptions on the same day, and I
learned that J.'s, so strange to me at first, was only one of an endless
number. For part of my new experience was the round of the studios on
the appointed day, when I was too oppressed by my ignorance and my
desire not to expose it and my uncertainty as to what was the right
thing to say in front of a picture, that I do not remember much besides,
except the miniatures of Miss Van Tromp and the marines of Prosper
Senat, and why they should now stand out from the confused jumble of my
memories I am sure I cannot see.
Then J. took me to the Academy of Fine Arts and it was revealed to me as
a place not to pass by but to go inside of: artists from all over the
country struggling to get in for its annual exhibition of paintings
which already had a reputation as one of the finest given in the
country; artists from all over the world drawn in for its international
exhibitions of etchings--Whistler, Seymour Haden, Appian, Lalanne, a
catalogue-full of etchers introduced for the first time to my uneducated
eyes; everybody who could crowding in on Thursday afternoons to sit on
the stairs and listen to the music, while I upbraided myself for not
having known ages ago what delightful things there were to do, instead
of letting my time hang heavy on my hands, in Philadelphia.
J. had me invited to more private evenings and reunions of societies of
artists, and I remember--if they do not--meeting many who were at the
very heart of the machinery that made the wheels of the new movement go
round:--Mr. Leslie Miller, the director of the School of Industrial Art
from which promising students were emerging or had emerged; Stephen
Parrish and Blanche Dillaye and Gabrielle Clements, whose etchings were
with the Whistlers and the Seymour Hadens in the international
exhibitions; Alice Barber full of commissions from magazines; Margaret
Leslie and Mary Trotter in their fervent apprenticeship; Boyle and
Stephens the sculptors; Colin Cooper and Stephens the painters. What a
rank outsider I felt in their company! And how grateful I was for my
talent as a listener that helped to save me from exposure!
II
I saw another side of the revival at my Uncle's Industrial Art School in
the eagerness of teachers and pupils both to know and to learn and to
practise--an eagerness that had, I fear, an eye to ultimate profit. That
was the worst feature of the booming of art in the Eighteen-Eighties.
Gain was the incentive that drove too many students to the art schools
of Philadelphia as to those of Paris, or London, and set countless
amateurs in their own homes to hammering brass and carving wood and
stamping leather. Art was to them an investment, a speculation, a
gentlemanly--or ladylike--way of making a fortune. An English painter I
know told me a few years since that he had put quite six thousand pounds
into art, what with studying and travelling for subjects, and he thought
he had a right to look for a decent return on his money. That expresses
the attitude of a vast number of Philadelphians in their new active
enthusiasm. However trumpery the amount of labour they invested, they
counted on it to bring them in a big dividend in dollars and cents.
[Illustration: THE STAIRWAY, STATE HOUSE]
I am afraid my Uncle, without meaning to, encouraged this spirit, when
he started not only the Industrial Art School, but the Decorative Art
Club in Pine Street. He was an optimist and saw only the beautiful side
of anything he was interested in. To please him I was made the Treasurer
of the Club. The Committee sympathised with my Uncle and worked for the
ultimate good he thought the Club was to accomplish in Philadelphia.
Mrs. Harrison, Mrs. Mifflin, Mrs. Pepper, Miss Julia Biddle with whom I
served, agreed with him that women who had some training in art would
understand better the meaning of art and the pleasure of the stimulus
this understanding could give. My Uncle, however, always ready to do
anybody a good turn, went further and was anxious that provision should
also be made to sell the work done in the Club, which in this way would
be open to many who could not otherwise afford it. I fancy that this
provision, if not the success of the Club, was one of its chief
attractions. The amateur is apt to believe she can romp in gaily and
snatch whatever prizes are going by playing with the art which is the
life's work, mastered by toil and travail, of the artist.
I criticise now, but in my new ardour I saw nothing to criticise. On the
contrary, I saw perfection: artists and students encouraged,
occupations and interests lavished upon amateurs whose lives had been as
empty as mine; and I worked myself up into a fine enthusiasm of belief
in art as a new force, or one that if it had always existed had been
waiting for its prophet,--just as electricity had waited for Franklin to
capture and apply it to human needs. I went so far in my exaltation as
to write an inspired--or so it seemed to me--article on Art as the New
Religion, proving that the old religions having perished and the old
gods fallen, art had re-arisen in its splendour and glory to provide a
new gospel, a new god, to take their place, and I filled my essay with
ingenious arguments, and liberal quotations from William Morris and
Ruskin, and rhetorical flights of prophecy. I had not given the last
finishing and convincing touches to my exposition of the new gospel
when, with my marriage, came other work more urgent, and I was spared
the humiliation of seeing my Palace of Art collapse, like the house
built on sand, while I still believed in it. In the years that followed
I got to know most of the galleries and exhibitions of Europe; despite
my scruples I made a profession of writing about art; and the education
this meant taught me, among other things, the simple truth that art is
art, and not religion. But I cannot laugh at the old folly of my
ignorance. The enthusiasm, the mood, out of which the article grew, was
better, healthier, than the apathy that had saved me from being
ridiculous because it risked nothing.
III
These years away from home were spent largely in the company of artists
and were filled with the talk of art; what had been marvels to me in
Philadelphia became the commonplaces of every day. But I was all the
time in Italy, or France, or England, and could not realize the extent
to which, for Philadelphians who had not wandered, artists and art were
also becoming more and more a part of everyday life. I did not see
Philadelphia in the changing, not until it had changed, and possibly I
feel the change more than those who lived through it. It is not so much
in the things done, in actual accomplishment, that I am conscious of it,
as in the new concern for art, the new attentions heaped upon it, the
new deference to it. Art is in the air--"on the town," a subject of
polite conversation, a topic for the drawing-room.
When I first came out, art had never supplied small talk in society,
never filled up a gap at a dull dinner or reception. We should have been
disgracefully behind the times if we could not chatter about Christine
Nilsson and Campanini and the last opera, or Irving and Ellen Terry and
their interpretation of Shakespeare; if we had not kept up with Trollope
and George Eliot, and read the latest Howells and Henry James, and raved
over the Rubaiyat. But we might have had the brand-newest biographical
dictionary of artists at our fingers' ends--as we had not--and there
would have been no occasion to use our information. Nobody sparkled by
sprinkling his talk with the names of artists and sculptors, nobody
asked what was in the last Academy or who had won the gold medal in
Paris, nobody discussed the psychology or the meaning of the picture of
the year. I remember thinking I was doing something rather pretentious
and pedantic when I began to read Ruskin. I remember how a friend who
was a tireless student of Kuegler and Crowe and Cavalcaselle, as a
preparation to the journey to Europe that might never come off, was
looked upon as a sort of prodigy--a Philadelphia phenomenon. But to-day
I am sure there is not the name of an artist, from Cimabue and Giotto to
Matisse and Picasso, that does not go easily round the table at any
Philadelphia dinner; not a writer on art, from Lionardo to Nordau, who
cannot fill up awkward pauses at an afternoon crush; not one of the
learned women of Philadelphia who could not tell you where every
masterpiece in the world hangs and just what her emotions before it
should be, who could not play the game of attributions as gracefully as
the game of bridge, who could not dispose of the most abstruse points in
art as serenely as she settles the simplest squabble in the nursery.
The Academy is no longer abandoned in the wilderness of Broad and Cherry
Streets; its receptions and private views are social functions, its
exhibitions are events of importance, the best given in Philadelphia and
throughout the land, its collections are the pride of the wealthy
Philadelphians who contribute to them, its schools are stifled with
scholarships.
[Illustration: UPPER ROOM, STENTON]
The other Art Schools have multiplied, not faster, however, than the
students whose legions account for, if they do not warrant, the
existence not of the Academy Schools alone, but of the School of
Industrial Art, the Drexel Institute, the Woman's School of Design, the
Uncle's old little experiment enlarged into a large Public Industrial
Art School where, I am told, the Founder is comfortably forgotten--of
more institutes, schools, classes than I probably have heard of.
The Art Galleries have multiplied: there is some reason for Memorial
Hall now that the Wilstach Collection is housed there, and the _Yellow
Buskin_, one of the finest Whistlers, hangs on its walls, now that the
collections of decorative art are being added to by Mrs. John Harrison
and other Philadelphians who are ambitious for their town and its
supremacy in all things. Nor does this Philadelphia ambition soar to
loftier heights than in the project for the new Parkway from the City
Hall with a new Art Gallery--the centre of a sort of University of Art
if I can rely upon the plans--to crown the Park end of this splendid
(partially still on paper) avenue, as the Arc de Triomphe crowns the
western end of the Avenue of the Champs-Elysees.
The collectors multiply, their aims, purse, field of research, all
expanding; their shyness on the subject surmounted; Old Masters for whom
Europe now weeps making their triumphant entry into Philadelphia; the
highest price, that test of the modern patron, paid for a Rembrandt in
Philadelphia; the collections of Mr. Johnson and Mr. Widener and Mr.
Elkins and Mr. Thomas in Philadelphia as well known by the authorities
as the Borghesi collection in Rome or the Duke of Westminster's in
London.
The social life of art grows and can afford the large luxurious Club in
South Broad Street, artists and their friends amply supporting it. And
the old Sketch Club, once glad of the shelter of a room or so, has
blossomed forth in a house of its own in the flourishing "Little Street
of Clubs," with the Woman's Plastic Club close by.
The artists only, as far as I can see, have not multiplied and grown in
proportion. But the artist somehow appears to be the last consideration
of those who think they are encouraging art. Still there are new names
for my old list: Henry Thouron, Violet Oakley, Maxfield Parrish, now
ranked with the decorative painters--and, I might just point out in
passing, it is to Philadelphia that Boston, Harrisburg, and at times New
York must send for their decorators, whose work I have not seen in place
to express an opinion on it one way or the other. Cecilia Beaux and
Adolphe Borie now figure with the portrait painters; Waugh and Fromuth
with the marine painters, who include also Stokes, the chronicler of
Arctic splendors of sea and sky, and Edward Stratton Holloway, the
making of beautiful books claiming his interest no less than the sea;
Glackens, Thornton Oakley, Elizabeth Shippen Green, Jessie Wilcox Smith
with the illustrators; McCarter, Redfield with the group gathered about
the Academy; Grafly with the sculptors; Clifford Addams, Daniel Garber
with the winners of scholarships. Architects have not lagged behind in
the race--after the Furness period, a Cope and Stewardson period, a
Wilson Eyre period, to-day a Zantzinger, Borie, Medary, Day, Page,
Trumbauer, and a dozen more periods each progressing in the right
direction; with young men from the Beaux-Arts and young men from the
University School, eager to tackle the ever-increasing architectural
commissions in a town growing and re-fashioning itself faster than any
mushroom upstart of the West, to inaugurate a period of their own.
IV
I am not a fighter by nature, I set a higher value on peace as I grow
older, and I look to ending my days in Philadelphia. Therefore I
chronicle the change; I do not criticise it. But a few comments I may
permit myself and yet hope that Philadelphia will not bear me in return
the malice I could so ill endure. I think the gain to Philadelphia from
this new interest has, in many ways, been great. If art is the one thing
that lives through the ages--art whether expressed in words, or paint,
or bricks and mortar, or the rhythm of sound,--it follows that the
pleasure it gives--when genuine--is the most enduring. This is a
distinct, if perhaps at the moment negative, gain. A more visible gain I
think comes from the new desire, the new determination to care for the
right thing: a fashion due perhaps to the insatiable American craving
for "culture," and at times guilty of unintelligent excesses, but
pleasanter in results than the old crazes that filled Philadelphia
drawing-rooms with spinning wheels and cat's tails and Morris
mediaevalism,--if they brought _Art Nouveau_ in their train, thank
fortune it has left no traces of its passing; a fashion more dignified
in results than the old standards that filled Philadelphia streets with
flights of originality, and green stone monsters, and the deplorable
Philadelphia brand of Gothic and Renaissance, Romanesque and Venetian,
Tudor and everything except the architecture that belongs by right and
tradition in Penn's beautiful town.
[Illustration: WYCK--The doorway from within]
But interest in art does not create art, and when Philadelphia believes
in this interest as a creator, Philadelphia falls into a mistake that it
has not even the merit of having originated. I have watched for many
years the attempts to make art grow, to force it like a hot-house plant.
The same thing is going on everywhere. In England, South Kensington for
more than half a century has had its schools in all parts of the
kingdom, the County Council has added to them, the City Corporation and
the City Guilds have followed suit, artists open private classes,
exhibitions have increased in number until they are a drug on the
market, art critics flourish, the papers devote columns to their
platitudes. And what has England to show as the outcome of all this
care? Go look at the decorations in the Royal Exchange and the pictures
in the Royal Academy, examine the official records and learn how great
is the yearly output of art teachers in excess of schools for them to
teach in, and you will have a good idea of the return made on the money
and time and red tape lavished upon the teaching of art. It is no better
in Paris. Schools and students were never so many, foreigners arrive in
such numbers that they are pushing the Frenchman out of his own Latin
Quarter, American students swagger, play the prince on scholarships, are
presented with clubs and homes where they can give afternoon teas and
keep on living in a little America of their own. And what comes of it?
Were the two Salons, with the Salon des Independants and the Salon
d'Automne thrown in, ever before such a weariness to the flesh?--was
mediocrity ever before such an invitation to the poseur and the crank to
pass off manufactured eccentricity as genius?
It would not be reasonable to expect more of Philadelphia than of London
and Paris. I cannot see that finer artists have been bred there on the
luxury of scholarships and schools than on their own efforts when they
toiled all day to be able to study at night, when success was theirs
only after a hard fight. The Old Masters got their training as
apprentices, not as pampered youths luxuriating in fine schools and
exhibitions and incomes and every luxury; they were patronized and more
splendidly than any artists to-day, but not until they had shown reason
for it, not until it was an honour to patronize them. The new system is
more comfortable, I admit, but great work does not spring from comfort.
Philadelphia is wise to set up a high standard, but not wise when it
makes the way too easy. For art is a stern master. It cares not if the
weak fall by the roadside, so long as the strong, unhampered, succeed in
getting into their own. The best thing that has been done at the Academy
for many a day is the reducing of the scholarships from a two, or three,
years' interval free of responsibility, to a summer's holiday among the
masterpieces of Europe, which, I am told, is all they are now.