Photography

Photography

“My,isn’t that real! Just as it really is! My dear, haven’t you often seen Grant Park just like that?—a little changed, of course.”... She who had spoken was considered not a high-brow but just a good normal cultured woman. Not being a fanatic about art, or anything else, for that matter, she knew absolutely what she was talking about. The thing she was talking about was a painting of Grant Park by Frank C. Peyraud looking east from the top of some Michigan Boulevard office building.... It was indeed “real.” Peyraud’s one-man exhibit at the Art Institute shows him up for what he is—an imitator without imagination, a reproducer, a copyist of nature in her most obvious moods. Not an artist or a creator his landscapes are all “real,” “true-to-life” and they are all enjoyed.... The Public knows where the originals are and the association and comparison gives them pleasure and the artist fame....

“Oh,howclever, and can’t you just hear the policemen, and the buggy-wheels and the bark of the dogs and the grind-organ! Oh, its just wonderful what they can do in music and with an orchestra. Iwouldlike to hear that played again!” A woman speaks—not the one referred to above but one who holds the same position in her set towards music as her friend towards “art” in her circle.... Of course, she can appreciate music, when it is so natural and real.... Carpenter is to be congratulated: the percussions are given a splendid and unusual chance to show their versatility—it is they, it seems to me, and they alone who benefit by this splendid display of music.

“My dear, I just love Stevenson and you know, my dear, those places in his novels aresoreal—you can just see them so plainly. Of course, I’ve never been in Scotland or England or France or, my dear, even in New York but really Stevenson is so descriptive, his stories aresogripping it really is as good as traveling. And I have a lovely new book,[3]just out with beautiful pictures and awfully dear binding, showing how the places Stevenson describes actually exist! You know this book amounts to a liberal education—it’s just the same as going abroad. I just adore places and scenes and travel in books—don’t you? And Stevenson,” she ended with a sigh, “issoromantic.” Which reminds me of a line of the Intolerable Wilde’s in a letter from Reading—“I see that romantic surroundings are the worst surroundings possible for romantic writers.” ... “And, my dear, it brings Art so close to everyday life, does it not?—to have artists portray for us our everyday surroundings and show us how nice they are.”

Long, long ago one Woman spoke to an Artist—will her typeneverbecome extinct?

“But, Mr. Turner” (Artist; contemporary of John Ruskin) “I never saw such colors in a sky in all my life.”

“My dear madam,” he returned, “don’t you wish you had?”

—C. A. Z.

[3]On the Trail of Stevenson by Clayton Hamilton.New York: Doubleday, Page and Company.

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