of drawing, form, finds its source in the brain. To attain completeness in our painter-art requires the amalgamation of these two forces which are in our nature. No two artists will be alike, as no two of us have the same degree of feeling for cool grays, or deep rich shadows, nor could we render them alike. But the minds of our critics will decide

on the merits of our works, and the more they are cultured (not in the German sense) the more discriminating they will become.

Carroll Beckwith

Note: This brief on color by a notable painter was written but a short time before his sudden and deeply lamented death.

C

ONSIDERING color in its relation to the art of painting, the mind immediately becomes a very maelstrom of ideas, seething, useless, many of them-and sometimes they are even vicious -but presently certain things are thrown up that one may take hold of with very real hope of intelligence, even helpful thoughts.

Intense scientific application will lead inevitably to that sort of result which Humboldt desired when he said all landscape was bad that did not show the geological stratifications.

We need not bother ourselves about wave lengths, about the science of optics as affecting the human eye. We quite readily know that we see or apprehend color through the eye and that it affects the mind; also it may be wise to stop long enough to adjust ourselves to the idea that color and colors are very different things indeed-although one may scarcely believe such a proposition in the midst of the conglomeration of things presented to a suffering public as works of art!

Many things are involved in the term color; at once quality, light, atmosphere appear as guardian. angels, each performing a special duty in the mystery of welding or merging colors into color.

While it is demonstrably certain that the art of painting is based upon drawing, equally certain is it that drawing alone is but half the purpose; else, why painting at all? And once this is discerned, color comes into its own and proclaims itself essential, equal. For the moment we need not consider what its own qualities are, but rather its office, and this is surely that of a revealer of form. So much of pigment which in its application is irrelevant, is foolishness, and any detached spotting of pigment is no less than folly. Drawing defines form, color reveals it. We may then reach almost an axiomatic statement that color without form is chaos. haphazard assemblages of the palette, no flowing together of chance tones may rightly be considered color when we are considering the art of Painting. Quality, proportion, balance, juxtaposition, contrast, all these and more must be taken into consideration, and immediately we enter the realm of form, for design is one of the highest attributes of form.

Νο

Color is sensation, and because of this curious and powerful effect upon the nerves of man, it is possible for him to become inebriate, a color inebriate, and when that happens he loses all or nearly all sense of form. A study of the works of Monticelli will show beautiful drawing in his earlier things, progressing then through various changes, as the power of color took hold upon him, until at

the last he had become so heavily "doped" with color sensation that form is lost, and we have a jumble of colors, each lovely in itself perhaps, but contradictory when considered as painting. And so the mind asks, what is it all about?

At his finest, when there was a delicate searching for forms-with gem-like association of color to reveal or to obscure, they are very beautiful. Titian, who is on a far higher plane, proceeds differently, and for us he is the great colorist because there is mastery everywhere. The use of his color is understood, and the turn of a child's cheek is luscious, lovely, because the color makes the cheek turn. What a text, and how it might be enlarged upon! That he used broken color to secure this lusciousness was because he knew that pigment alone is flat, stolid, irresponsive, and that pigment overmixed to secure especial tint is deadened; that is merely part of his sensitiveness to color. It is not necessary to explain here how he secured his glowing vibrations by juxtaposition of pure color, or by the playing of tint upon tint; that he did it is evident upon examination of his work-and ever the command and the revelation of his form are evident.

Nowhere is there a flat or heavy pigmentation, nowhere a color note that is not relevant to the whole design; nor is there in Rubens, though his forms may be to us gross or inelegant. Also, both men, and indeed all true colorists, know that color, however rich, is dependent upon gray, for gray makes possible gradation, and gradation is the means by which the flat surface of canvas or panel is translated into the near and far of form. If this be true, and it is demonstrably so by a study of the masters, it sweeps aside every modernist work, with all the impudent statements of crude color, which really are statements of paint-gross, vile and not color at all!

We are not ready to return to the barbaric excitement of a spot of red or yellow or to enter the mad-house from a suffusion of yellow and purple. For this we cannot give up the exquisite delicacy of nature, her sumptuousness of color and the magic of her grays.

Everywhere in God's world, indeed, we find the Master Worker using form, color; color, form. Nor is it out of doors alone that this law is at work; the delicacy of a child's face reveals it quite as entirely; and always the color must express the form. There has been much of rhapsody written about colorists. We are told of their going mad in the glory of it, and then we see their things

and no longer wonder; indeed, the only wonder is that any who have seen the works remain sane.

Whistler, who is considered a colorist, shrank from the use of pure colors; indeed, he went so far as to mix black with every tint, whether in the search for gray or to secure the truth of his edict that everything should retire behind the frame. The overindulgence of this habit has robbed many of his works of what may be called charm of color, and made them monotonous, and also kept him in

SOME MASTERPIECES

N°

the group of tonalists rather than in the aristocracy of the colorists. It is said, too, that great colorists never draw well. Perhaps this is true, I do not know-Turner seems to have drawn very well at times but there is nothing in color itself to prevent one drawing well, and perhaps some day the man will come along who perfectly understands and combines in himself the draughtsman and the colorist. Speed the day!

Elliott Daingerfield

HUDSON RIVER

OW that half a century has passed since the flourishment of what is somewhat vaguely called the Hudson River School of Painting -one of those comprehensive terms people are forced to use for lack of a better-it is time to consider the leading artists who were assigned to that ill-defined band and endeavor to trace the good and evil in them, if so be such existed, and determine the justice respectively of that praise and that blame which befell them.

Was it perhaps a mere chance that the nickname or clan name in question was applied? Might it not have been with equal reason the Adirondack, the Catskill, the Long Island Sound School? True enough that the easiest exit from Manhattan until recent times was northward, from the days when passengers patronized the Dutch sloops and schooners running, or shall we say loafing? to Fort Orange and back, until the trains and fast steamboats on schedule time took one to Albany. Northward also along the left bank of the Hudson rose the summer manses of the Manhattanese such as had the means and the walls for paintings. So the painters followed northward rather than eastward along the picturesque north shores of the Sound and Long Island and the still more paintable cliffs and bluffs of rosy Rhode Island which the Dutch skippers, viewing them from the water, correctly described as roode. Nor did the wonderful views south and westward from Staten Island hold them. North lay their course to the Tappan Zee and the beautiful coils of the Hudson through the Highlands, to the smiling stretches above and the lovely outlines of the Catskill and Helderburg ranges etched upon the northwestern sky. There Thomas Cole, a genius in his way, set up his easel and drew to him others. Cole became so identified with these upper reaches of the stream-although primarily he was not a landscapist pure and simple -that the historians of American art have dubbed him the beginner of the Hudson River School.

And Tom Cole Mountain in the Catskills stays on the map to clinch the statement.

Nevertheless, one has to look beyond Thomas Cole for the artist who held the leadership of the New York landscapists and kept them together, for more, a good deal more that half a century. He was an engraver born at East Orange on Jersey soil across the Hudson, but a New Yorker all the same, and he rivaled Titian, if not in the magic mastery of the brush, yet in the length of his life

and the steadfast, unpretentious, reverent devotion to art. From engraver he became painter and in both capacities showed more than talent. He was born the year George Washington died and he paid the debt of nature in 1886 . . . Asher B. Durand!

Durand had the qualities to enlist and keep the respect and indeed the love of his comrades in art. His talents were not so overwhelming as to raise jealousy and his conduct was that of a man of wisdom and of heart. Always ready to help a beginner with advice, perfectly unassuming at a time when the British were afflicted with particularly atrocious manners and had the upper hand in New York society, Durand stands out as that rara avis a gentleman in the fine sense of the term. The traits of serenity, of wisdom, of dignity are almost never absent from his engravings and paintings; one or other of these characteristics will be found in the works of those who in a sense came after but really were his contemporaries.

Overwhelmed as we are just now with the noise like to beaten pans of the moderns, who hope to stun you, so that you will not be able to think, and thus you will miss the fact that they have nought to say is it not a relief to turn to certain paintings by the Hudson Riverines and rest the nerves in their balance and gentle charm, their moderation, dignity-their poise? Then one ponders: is there really any use of taking an art like painting in order to force it upon alien paths? For instance, because music has courted dissonance and the clamors of the cave man, therefore may painting drop all suavity and subtility and blare about in a way more suited to colored placards and electric signs? These French and Germans and Italians with their American imitators have made the grievous radical mistake of the vehicle and trusted to paint wherewith to carry out feats that would be only possible to gorgeous stuffs and metals and semi-precious stones.

Coming onward from his early training with the graver, Durand brought to the painting of landscape a feeling for the distribution of masses in light and shade which holds us still. The old charm of Claude the Lorrainer that Constable and Turner could not evade, with all their genius, sticks to Durand and other Riverines. The power of structural design in painting which moves us in the grand western landscapes of Thomas Moran and lingers in France with Harpignies was a living