Puslapio vaizdai
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As the theater below was just emptying, the man at the bar could not let it up in time to avoid this crush, because he would be turning one crowd down on top of another and there would be a dangerous jam on the stairs. On the other hand, if he lifted it now, provided he could have got it up at all, the people in front, being suddenly released, would be projected pell-mell down the stairs, with the others on top of them; and the ones behind could not be got to move back because they were held tightly in place by the crowd still farther back. Meantime the ones pinioned against the bar were undergoing a painful experience and becoming excited; a woman was becoming hysterical, and the man at the bar was trying to keep them quiet in order to avoid anything that would start a panic.

Sitting on my platform at the other end of the hall, I was unaware of the seriousness of the situation till suddenly the manager, a decisive little man who would have made a good mate on a steamboat, came running back on the platforms and jumped down in the clear space behind the crowd. I heard him say "Stewart," and as he caught my attention he snapped his fingers and said, "Start something." It did not take me long to gather that there was some reason for quick action. I jumped up and, to the best of my ability, started a sensation in the world. of words. While I announced in stentorian tones the wonders I was now going to perform, I called attention to the blackboard; and as there was no one to pro

pound words to me, I propounded a few to myself. The ones in the rear, thinking something unusual had been missed, began coming back; and as I kept up my sensa tional demonstrations to the crowd about me there was a general drift in my direction. The man at the head of the stairs took the opportunity to lift up the bar, and a large part had made their escape down the stairs before the rest had discovered the hoax.

In the Twin Cities I was not aware of achieving anything more than museum prominence, there being a great difference in cities in this respect. It was when I struck the intellectual belt at Fort Wayne, Indiana, that I began to feel myself spreading; and when it was seen that I was running in successful competition. with such an attraction as Che Mah, my fame preceded me to Cincinnati. And there I came into that prominence which, by making me take serious thought, drove me out of the business.

Yes, I can still talk backward. There have been few times, however, in the last quarter of a century when I have done it, which shows that I did not deserve the credit of "assiduous practice."

The friends of those days who knew that I did it are many of them dead, and the rest are scattered we know not where. The scrap-book is yellow with time, and the papers from which the clippings came were long ago buried deep under the daily snow of news. Time hath a wallet at his back, and in it is yesterday's newspaper.

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IN

By KATHARINE METCALF ROOF

N consideration of a painter's art two phases are involved-its influential or historical interest and its intrinsic value. The first is concerned with the impress a man has left upon his time, the direction his personality may have given to the trend of art; and the other with the pleasure-giving quality of the canvas itself.

William M. Chase influenced American art profoundly as an original painter expressing himself in a new way at the time when contemporaneous painting was in that period of candy-box art which produced Bouguereaus and Lord Frederick Leightons; as a teacher of an enormous number of pupils from all over the country; and as a juror serving upon the committees of most of the important exhibitions for the last thirty-five years, forfeiting by that unselfish allegiance to the cause

of art his own eligibility to medals and prizes.

On the other hand, the influences that worked upon him and went to form his individual style are interesting not only because of the part they played in his own artistic destiny, but because they are concerned with the great transition period of modern art. When the talented young American boy was a student in Piloty's studio in Munich he painted brilliant old masters. His particular gods then as afterward were Hals and Velasquez. From that stage he passed to that significant period when, in the language of criticism, he "found himself." That he was deeply influenced by the Spanish masters and by the introduction of Eastern art in the form of the Japanese print all painters and students of pictures know. The influ

ence of Dutch art is noticeable in his treatment of interior subjects; that of the French painters Vollon and Chardin in his still life, a form of art that he made peculiarly his own. From Manet and Whistler he also imbibed points of view; but the thing that developed out of these influences and associations, this opening. out of new vistas, was so essentially his own that one always identifies as such not only a real Chase, but anything in the manner or imitation of one. More than one pupil has never got beyond the stage of making little Chases.

The direct influence of Japanese art upon Chase is obvious in the decorative use of the kimono-clad figure, the Japanese arrangement, the manner of introducing Japanese color notes. The indirect influence, in eliminations, in color composition, and in pattern, is infused into the very fiber of his art. The Spanish suggestion is less definite. In the painting of face, hair, or figure, in the treatment of the actual Spanish subject, in the masterly handling of blacks and whites, one glimpses the Velasquez lesson; but the trail that contact with the art of Spain left upon the painter's imagination is something less specific than the influence. of any one painter, however great. It is an essence as light and elusive as the rhythm of a Spanish dance.

The artist's material may be found anywhere; the subject exists in the eyes of the painter. It becomes art when he shows us how he has seen it. The lay mind does not imagine the ancient fish-basket to be a paintable object; yet there is one in a Chase canvas, allied to a pink fish and others, proclaimed with subtle brushes of rose and brown, that is as unforgetable to the artist or student as a Botticelli Madonna is to the sentimentalist. But fish are of the wonders of the sea, miracles of light and color. Few painters could discover the possibilities of the too neighborly seaside cottage as a subject; yet Chase has so treated a group of these drearily trim little houses that they have the light charm of a Japanese print.

In his portraits the type of the subject

or the costume often influenced the point of view, as in the picture of his daughter Dorothy. The old costume of rose-colored satin seemed to suggest the eighteenth-century pose and atmosphere. The texture of satin is ever fascinating to the painter. In the good modern canvas it is often beautifully handled, crisp, clean, sharp, and fine, with all its play of light felt and recorded; yet often, despite that fact, it remains the material of the shopwindow, whereas the satin gown in a Chase portrait has the dignity and dis tinction of an immemorial fabric.

Although remarks concerning the socalled "soul" of the subject, that mysterious thing which is supposed by picture-lovers with the emotional and literary point of view to be impaled upon the canvas, somewhat disturbed the serenity of Chase, he was willing to discuss it in his suggestive fashion with the pupil not yet free from sentimental yearnings.

"Do not imagine that I would disregard that thing that lies beneath the mask," he said; "but be sure that when the outside is rightly seen, the thing that lies under the surface will be found upon your canvas."

The proof lies in his portraits. Less startlingly than Sargent, but not less convincingly, he was able to catch the personality of his sitter. In the portrait of Clyde Fitch, painted from memory after his death, in those of Emil Pauer, of the late Dean Grosvenor, of Mr. Gwathmey, and of Louis Windmüller, to cite a few examples, he has presented not only quietly brilliant bits of virtuosity, but portraits in the truest sense of the word.

In formulating Chase's most obvious contribution to the development of art, one would naturally state first his introduction of and emphasis upon the value of still life as material for the painter, and his masterly demonstration of the painting of interior light; more directly, with his pupils, his reiteration of the fact that a painter's first consideration must always be the purely technical side of painting: and his insistence upon what is in truth the very spirit of Greek art-the joy of

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the creative impulse, the reflection of which should inform the slightest sketch as well as the finished picture. "You must enjoy what you are doing if others are to enjoy it with you," he often used to say to his pupils.

In a final consideration of Chase's art itself one must decide that this painter's most distinguishing qualities are his style, rarest of gifts, and his use of color, including his painting of blacks and whites.

But essential artist that he was, he was ever humble before the great spirit of art. In his mind there remained always the distance between his ideal and his achievement, a deep feeling beautifully expressed once when, after showing a number of his pictures to a guest, he pointed to a blank canvas. "But that is my masterpiece," he said-"my unpainted picture."

In a special sense Chase belongs to America. Born in Indiana, with real Americans for his ancestors, except for his student years in Europe and his frequent visits to the Old World to gain contact with its art and atmosphere and to pass on the appreciation of it to his pupils, he spent all of his life in America. He studied first

in Indianapolis with Benjamin Hayes, and after that two years in New York with J. O. Eaton. In St. Louis, to which he went next, he was specially struck by the work of an artist who had studied in Munich, and when some interested patrons furnished the opportunity for the young painter to go to Europe, he chose the Bavarian city.

"The best place to study is anywhere," he remarked characteristically, adding, "I went to Munich instead of to Paris because I could saw wood in Munich instead of frittering in the Latin merrygo-round."

In Munich he immediately attracted the attention of his master, Piloty, then reckoned one of the greatest of living painters, but aroused his ire when, in a prize competition in which the subject to be treated was Columbus, he placed the figure of the great navigator with his back to the spectator, which was young Chase's manner of showing his contempt for the popular historical subject of the time. The picture took the prize, but Piloty forced his pupil to make a second sketch. In this he consented to reveal a glimpse

and see the show as often as I pleased, and
instead of having to pay for a seat, like
the rest of the world, I would receive an
honored smile and a bow of acknowledg-
ment as I passed scot-free. I could enjoy
the comedian's newest joke about the
"backward scholar" up-stairs; and tiring
of that, I could retire to the sanctity of
my own stage, a capacious private nook,
and lose myself in some queer volume that
I had picked up at the second-hand book-
store. Most flattering of all flatteries,
however, and one not to be denied by any
man even if he were President, was the
tribute of the newsboy, who, as I appeared
on the street, would put his hand to his
mouth and say in a whisper that could be
heard a block away, "Dere goes Stewart."

Preferably, however, I spent my idle hours watching Winsor McCay as he bodied forth pictorial promises for the week to come. All who are familiar with the altitudinous dreams of Little Nemo and the fine color world he lived in, may imagine what his creator was able to accomplish in those days when he had the real nightmares of nature to begin with.

hung where all could see. Expense did not bother him. He could buy carmine by the pound if he wished or indulge in solid masses of the most expensive blues; and as to the body and hang of his brushes, he could satisfy his most artistic whim. Naturally such retreats attracted men of considerable ambition, some of whom, when the museums were on the wane, continued their careers with credit. Of much fame in Chicago was Melville, whose tropical imagination had good draftsmanship behind it. Lithographic

The regulation museum of those days had three floors, the menagerie, the curio hall, and the auditorium; but some of them had a fourth floor, and this was entirely given over to the artist. Around its walls stood the sheeted stretchers newly sized with zinc white and waiting their turn with the artist. Every week the old pictures would be washed off with a sponge, and the surface would be given a new coat of white. The artist, in order to reach all parts of his picture conveniently, stood on a platform rigged with ropes and pulleys by which he could let himself up and down as on a big freightelevator; and at the back of this, like a long chicken-trough divided into many compartments, was his palette wherein the colors, beginning with white, ran the gamut of buffs and yellows and reds and blues and so on down to black.

In such a place an artist was in a heaven of his own. His Bohemian temperament was free from all commercial harassments, and each week his latest masterpieces were

artists of the first class have been known to go to the museum every Monday morning to gather ideas from the latest combinations in color.

Not to be omitted from a record of those days is the freak boarding-house. If the circus or theater is a world unto itself, the dime museum was even more SO. As these "curios," strange people whom Nature had struck off in her most daring moods, could hardly sit around the table with the rest of the human family, -even the American boarding-house being too orthodox to take them in,-they had to have stopping-places of their own. In Chicago they all resorted to a place on West Madison Street where a motherly German woman received them as a matter of course, the fat lady, the living skeleton, the giant, and the midget,-and maintained a bounteous table. Here in a world that did not gaze at them they settled into homelike surroundings and were comfortable in the atmosphere of their own profession.

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In Fort Wayne, where there was no such metropolitan specialization, they were boarded by the owner of the museum, and a true showman's wife made them feel at home. As I was then inexperienced in hotels and generally inclined to do as the Romans do, I always went along with them; and thus, from being invited to spend the evening in the room of the Chinese midget or the What-is-it, or from meeting them all in a social hour before going to bed, I became a member of their charmed circle.

In Fort Wayne it was the custom to

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