The Project Gutenberg eBook ofScribner's Magazine, Volume 26, July 1899

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofScribner's Magazine, Volume 26, July 1899This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Scribner's Magazine, Volume 26, July 1899Author: VariousRelease date: January 19, 2013 [eBook #41871]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Victorian/Edwardian Pictorial Magazines,Jonathan Ingram, Melissa McDaniel and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE, VOLUME 26, JULY 1899 ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Scribner's Magazine, Volume 26, July 1899Author: VariousRelease date: January 19, 2013 [eBook #41871]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Victorian/Edwardian Pictorial Magazines,Jonathan Ingram, Melissa McDaniel and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Title: Scribner's Magazine, Volume 26, July 1899

Author: Various

Release date: January 19, 2013 [eBook #41871]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Victorian/Edwardian Pictorial Magazines,Jonathan Ingram, Melissa McDaniel and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE, VOLUME 26, JULY 1899 ***

Transcriber's Note:Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation in the original document have been preserved.

Transcriber's Note:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation in the original document have been preserved.

Daniel WebsterDANIEL WEBSTEREngraved by Gustav Kruell; after a daguerreotype in the possession of Josiah J. Hawes, Boston.

DANIEL WEBSTER

Engraved by Gustav Kruell; after a daguerreotype in the possession of Josiah J. Hawes, Boston.

PUBLISHED MONTHLYWITH ILLUSTRATIONS

VOLUME XXVI JULY-DECEMBER1899

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS NEW YORKSAMPSON LOW, MARSTON & Co.LimitedLONDON

Printed by Trow Directory, Printing and Bookbinding Company, New York, U. S. A.

VolumeXXVIJuly-December, 1899.

Scribner's Magazine

VOL. XXVI. JULY, 1899. NO. 1.

A Study.

The artist of four hundred years ago, or of any great time for individual effort as opposed to the associated and unrecorded work of more primitive times, was a many-sided man. He was probably a traveller, if not a monk; he was almost certainly a man of adventure; a man of thought, whether monk or layman. The artist did not travel far; but he encountered more personal risk between Florence and Naples than our contemporary does in voyaging to the Isles of Summer; he encountered in Sicily, in Hungary, or in Spain a people as remote from him as the Japanese are from us; and he had still Constantinople and Cairo to visit, places more distant and as inaccessible to him as Thibet or Kafiristan in the nineteenth century. The old artist was something of a scholar, too, with a habit of study and meditation, if not master of many books. And, moreover, the old artist was very much in love with his work and loved to play with it as well as to work in it; so that he touched many materials, handled many processes, and used many methods of artistic utterance. Again it is worth noting that no one had discovered, in 1499, that architecture was an art to be practised without regard to the other manifestations of the artistic spirit; nor yet that the sculptor and the painter were two workmen whose art was to be practised apart from and independent of building or other industrial occupation.

Study for Browning's "Men and Women."

All these things have been so much changed of late that it is noticeable in Mr. La Farge's life that he should be, in many ways, like a painter of old time, that is, traveller, reader, collector and student; colorist and decorator; painter in large and in little. He has been a working artist for forty years, and has done many things. He has made many book illustrations which have been published and many which have never been given to the world. The illustrations to Browning's book, "Men and Women," as it was originally published in 1855, are among these; and there are reproduced here the full-page design for the beginning ofProtusand also two studies forFra Lippo Lippi:

The little children round him in a rowOf admiration, half for his beard and halfFor that white anger of his victim's son.

The little children round him in a row

Of admiration, half for his beard and half

For that white anger of his victim's son.

This was early work. The illustration toMisconceptionsis as mystical as that forProtus; and that which concludesBishop Blougram's Apologyis as realistic as these studies of children.

Study for Browning's "Men and Women."

Then, still of his early days, are to be considered the faithful little studies and close-to-nature drawings which served as a foundation for a structure of knowledge which was to pile itself high enough.Sic itur ad astra; and with a different result from the tower-building recorded in Genesis. The reproduction given [on page 9] is from a sketch-book of 1860; and the work has been a careful drawing in black on white, done in the flat country about Bayou Têche. These are drawingsin values, or made for values; that is to say, the relative force of darkness or of light is carefully preserved. A certain green of the trees may be lighter than the blue, still water below, but is very much darker than the same water where it reflects the pale evening sky; the reflection in the water of those same trees is a shade or two darker than the mass of trees themselves; and so on, forever. Of the same epoch is this drawing of a beacon [page 10], a flaming cresset, a signal light seen against a night sky. These are warnings to steamboats on the Mississippi to avoid a shoal or to make a landing. Other studies, those of pure line and those of masses, those of his youth and those of his maturity, are scattered over these pages.

He has produced also a very great number of water-color drawings, generally small, and very commonly having for their subjects pieces of foreground detail, such as one or several blossoms in a pool of water, or a water-lily or two afloat on the surface of a still pond. It might almost be said that his water-colors were generally of such detail as this, except that the work done during his journeys into tropical and oriental lands has resulted differently.

Again he has produced, during those years of work, a few large pictures painted in oil-color or by a process which he learned in his youth and in which melted wax has a part; though this is not the encaustic process of antiquity or of modern revival. One or two of these are portraits, several are landscapes, several are studies of interesting details which he wished to preserve and which for some reason or other had struck him as more easily rendered on a large scale and in the more solid material; and some are, to all appearance, concepts for mural decoration—advance studies for that which was to be painted on a still larger scale, or in combination with other parts of a large composition, and finally to be fixed upon the wall where it was to remain permanently. Some, also, of the water-colors producedin recent years are, though not large in superficies, very large in treatment. A glowing color composition suggested by the mountain country of Fiji, a monochrome study of a river landscape in Japan, may be as grandiose in character and may contain as much matter, both in represented detail and in artistic purpose, as an oil-painting of four times the surface-measurement. Some illustrations given on another page of this treatise may partly show the qualities here suggested.

Panel, from One of the Ceilings in Cornelius Vanderbilt's House. Inlaid glass, ivory, bronze, marble and silver, and mother-of-pearl.

Figure from the Vanderbilt Ceiling.

He has produced, also, a few such mural paintings as those whose intention is assumed in the last paragraph. Of these, much the largest is that which covers the end wall of the Church of the Ascension in New York. There are others in St. Thomas's Church and in the Church of the Incarnation, both in New York City; the interior of Trinity Church in Boston was painted by him with a series of figure subjects, though the chromatic treatment of this interior does not include any large single painting of great importance; and of late years, two lunettes in the Villard-Reid house in New York and one in the Walker Art Gallery at Bowdoin College have been added to this summary list. There is reproduced here the last-named picture [page 17]; a picture of fantastic subject in the "literary" or narrative sense.Athensis its given name; but it represents Pallas making a drawing of the lovely and unadorned genius of the open country or wood, while the robed and crowned impersonated City looks affectionately at both the subject and the recording goddess. To be classed under the head of mural paintings also is the remarkable composition of small pictures involved in a large design with panels and arabesques, which decorates the wooden vaults of that gallery in Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt's house, which used to be called the Water-Color Room, and which now, since the alteration of the house and the removal of this painted vault into the new building, may be considered the gallery of entrance for stately entertainments. To a limited extent, the work of other painters is associated with his own in the last-named achievement, as also in Trinity Church. In this, the work of the artist comes very near to decoration pure and simple. The reader is not to understand that any sharp distinction is made here between decoration and that painting which is not so designated. It is to be hoped that he, the reader, will see as he reads that to deny this distinction is part of the life-purpose of John La Farge; apurpose which his critic is glad to recognize and to second. It is merely with reference to its placing—to its apparent intended service—to its fixed location and its consequent exclusion from the category of "gallery pictures" or "easel pictures" that the words decoration and decorative are here applied to certain paintings. For throughout his career this artist has leaned strongly toward the treatment of his expressional and significant painting in a decorative way.

Decoration in the more usual sense has been also a large part of his work. Thus, when in 1878 he contracted with Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt for a carved ceiling, it appeared that his intentions in the matter were those which could have been suggested only by a mind full of the decorative idea. "A carved ceiling" might have been almost anything; but this one was an elaborate composition of colored sculpture, or, if you please, of polychromy in relief; certainly one of the most remarkable undertakings of the time. What seem to be (for the true constructional character of the ceiling is not here guaranteed) what seem to be the beams, the constructional part of the ceiling, were of light-colored walnut. The panels within were filled with figures of armed warriors and of draped women of about half life-size, and these panels were framed by rim within rim, moulding within moulding, of elaborate sculptured pattern. All these sculptured patterns, all these figures, were invested with color in a way which it is hard to describe; for different chosen woods, alloys of metal of which some are of Japanese origin, opaque and colored glass, ivory, mother-of-pearl, and even coral are combined to give delicately tinted color and subtle variety of surface to the work. That ceiling has been broken up; but there has been great good judgment shown in its rearrangement. The panels of the ceiling are now arranged so that they are well lighted both by day and by night, and show admirably. Although the original design has disappeared, the separate panels, each with its enclosing mouldings and woodwork, at least four by six feet in superficies, arewell displayed. One of these panels is here engraved [page 6]. Here also is given part of a decorative frieze in which castings specially made of blue glass were used with ivory and with carvings in solidnacre, in combination with the carved walnut.

Dry Bed of the Dayagawa River.Drawn by John La Farge.

Dry Bed of the Dayagawa River.

Drawn by John La Farge.

Study for Values.

Similar work has been done by Mr. La Farge in connection with his own paintings, and sometimes where no paintings were used. This use, on a large scale, of rich material, rich in color, in surface and in lustre, as a medium for sculpture, is almost peculiar to this artist among modern men. Others who have cared for color in sculpture have played with it, rather, in small objects of the cabinet; and this remains true in a general way in spite of a pleasant use of enamel in some French work in bronze of a more important or, at least, more pretentious character.

On the Bayou Têche; Study for Values.

At a time not far removed from the undertaking of the ceiling and the mantelpiece above mentioned, a monument was put up in the Newport Cemetery under the direction of Mr. La Farge [page 16]. He associated with himself in this task the sculptor, since so widely known, but then a young man, Augustus St. Gaudens, who had already worked with him on the carved and colored ceiling. Every student of architectural designs will be struck by the informal character of this design: the steps which are clearly not meant to be ascended and which have an obvious symbolic meaning; the horizontal cross sunk in the table of the monument in such a way that few persons can be so placed as to see it favorably; the inscription carved upon the butt or foot of that cross; the apparently disproportionate slenderness of the upright cross with its thin cylindrical shaft; the placing of other inscriptions on the body of the massive base in which no specially arranged panels or medallions have been prepared for them; and, most of all, the treatment of the leaf sculpture which, though composed carefully enough and far enough in itself from being a piece of crude realism, is yet realistic in its disposition—suggesting the natural fall of sprays and branches of leafage allowed to dry and harden in the sun. No architect—as we now understand the term—no architect, even one who had kept himself free from the neo-classic influence and the teaching of the schools, could have designed such a piece as this. It is the more interesting to see how the highly trained decorative artist who has not been fettered by the taught maximsof the architect's school or the architect's office has handled this problem—a problem rarely met by decorators of modern experience.

Study of a Mullein-stalk.

About 1876 these same demands upon him for decoration led him to the careful observation of ancient stained glass, with a view to providing the modern world with something which might be to it what the windows of Reims Cathedral and Fairford Church were to the Middle Ages. It appeared to the modern artist that there was still a course open to him which had not been tried by the decorators of the Middle Ages, early or late. It appeared that the modern materials and processes of glassmaking might give to the artist in glass a "palette" such as the mediæval man had never possessed. What is called opal glass, opaline, and also opalescent glass may be said to have formed the basis of a new system of window decoration, though the other essential, the leaden framework, was to play its own part in the artistical result. Uncolored opaline glass has a milky-white look when seen by reflected light; but by transmitted light its color passes from a cloudy bluish-gray to red, with a yellow spark. If, now, such glass be charged with color of many shades, the chromatic effects producible by the combination of such translucent materials, at once contrasting in color and harmonized by the opaline quality, might prove successful beyond what had been known. To this, then, La Farge set himself; to obtain glass of richness, depth, and glow of color hitherto unattempted, and in a multitude of tints; so that, whereas the thirteenth-century artist had five or six colors in all, susceptible of nothing more than a gradation from darker to lighter, as the glass was thicker or thinner or more or less thickly flashed—now, colors were to be supplied by the score, each color capable of these same gradations in darker and lighter, and each color harmonized with all the other colors by the common quality of softness and a certain misty iridescence caused by the opaline stain. Even in a piece of glass so brilliant in color that the opalescence is hardly perceptible, its presence in that part of the general chromatic scheme will surely be felt.

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