American Masters of Painting: Being Brief Appreciations of Some American PaintersCaffin, Charles H. (Charles Henry)
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American Masters of Painting: Being Brief Appreciations of Some American Painters
Caffin, Charles H. (Charles Henry)
Painters -- United States
From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Copyright, 1897, by Foster Brothers.
MOTHER AND CHILD.
BY GEORGE DE FOREST BRUSH.]
and a largeness of conception that has been able to grasp the big
significances and to feel them in their relation to perennial truth. For
they not only suggest the life and environment of the early redman,
picturing both with a fulness of comprehension that brings them vividly
to our consciousness, but they involve allusions to our own experience.
There are periods of sorrow when the world seems very empty and desolate
to-day; there still are yearnings after higher things, the flutterings
of doubt and hope that precede the beginning of growth of something
better; and still a grandeur in the solitude of nature and maybe in that
of a man’s own communings with himself. We may or may not have
experienced those things, but, at least, we have an intuition of their
possibility; and if a picture can recall the past and show it as part of
the eternal relation of spirit and matter, we are justified in honouring
its author. So these pictures of Brush’s seem to me great,
notwithstanding a certain smallness--I will not call it pettiness--in
their execution. As I recall the “Mourning her Brave,” it has
considerable breadth of method, and, no doubt, others of the Indian
series show increase of manual accomplishment. But the painting in
“Silence Broken,” still influenced by Gérôme’s, is hard and shiny; and
the drawing in “The Sculptor and the King” has a quality of timorous
and laboured exactness. It is not in consequence of style, but despite
it, that they are impressive.
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