Abroad at Home: American Ramblings, Observations, and Adventures of Julian StreetStreet, Julian
General
Abroad at Home: American Ramblings, Observations, and Adventures of Julian Street
Street, Julian
United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918
Aside from his municipal and national activities, Mr. Lehmann has found
time to gather in his home one of the most complete collections of
Dickens's first editions and related publications to be found in the
whole world. It is, indeed, on this side--the side of cultivation--that
St. Louis is most truly charming. She has an old, exclusive, and
delightful society, and a widespread and pleasantly unostentatious
interest in esthetic things. In fact, I do not know of any American
city, to which St. Louis may with justice be compared, possessing a
larger body of collectors, nor collections showing more individual
taste. The most important private collections in the city are, I
believe, those of Mr. William K. Bixby, who owns a great number of
valuable paintings by old masters, and a large collection of rare books
and manuscripts. As a book collector, Mr. Bixby is widely known
throughout the country, and he has had, if I mistake not, the honor of
being president of that Chicago club of bibliolatrists, known as the
"Dofobs," or "damned old fools over books."
An exhibition of paintings owned in St. Louis is held annually in the
St. Louis Museum of Art, and leaves no doubt as to the genuineness of
the interest of St. Louis citizens in painting. Nor can any one,
considering the groups of canvases loaned to the museum for the annual
exhibition, doubt that certain art collectors in St. Louis (Mr. Edward
A. Faust, for example) are buying not only names but paintings.
The Art Museum is less accessible to the general citizen than are
museums in some other cities. Having been originally the central hall of
the group of buildings devoted to art at the time of the Louisiana
Purchase Exposition, it stands in that part of Forest Park which was
formerly the Fair ground. Posed, as it is, upon a hill, in a commanding
and conspicuous position, it reveals, somewhat unfortunately, the fact
that it is the isolated fragment of a former group. Nevertheless, it
must take a high place among the secondary art museums of the United
States. For despite the embarrassment caused by the possession of a good
deal of mediocre sculpture, a legacy from the World's Fair, which is
packed in its central hall; and despite the inheritance, from twenty or
twenty-five years since, of vapid canvases by Bouguereau, Gabriel Max,
and other painters of past popularity, whose works are rapidly coming to
be known for what they are--despite these handicaps, the museum is now
distinctly in step with the march of modern art. The old collection is
being weeded out, and good judgment is being shown in the selection of
new canvases. Like the Albright Gallery in Buffalo, the St. Louis Museum
of Art is rapidly acquiring works by some of the best American painters
of to-day, having purchased within the last four or five years canvases
by Redfield, Loeb, Symons, Waugh, Dearth, Dougherty, Foster, and others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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