English

Cecelia Beaux affects the Sargent style,
And proud Invention passes with a smile.
As Cassatt apes Chavannes, and Gardner seeks
To trace the arid Bouguereau's angel freaks,
So Sears recalls the Thayer schemes, and lo!
The " lady artists" lightly come and go.

John Sargent has a magic with the brush
That puts the common painter to the blush.
His method is so large and sound and free
It rings the changes of a lyric glee.
To pose dramatic and to style intense
He weds imaginative colour sense,
And turns off Pictures with a dash and ease
That please the amateur and expert please.
A rare conjunction, such as Corot knew
Who charmed the Many as he charmed the Few.
Sargent has never catered for the mart.
A thing to say! the man respects his art.

For many years the prints of London Town
Have treated " Jimmie" Whistler as a clown,
While Yankee journals tailed the cockney van
And showed him as a snobbish, vain old man.
He 's all of that; but he is something more,
And years to be his prestige shall restore.
When " Jimmie" sleeps beneath the daisied sod —
In peace, at last, with man if not with God —
Then we 'll forget the " Jimmie" whom we know,
The vulgar " Jimmie," posed for public show,
Who proves in ways at war with wit and art

America may boast two men of sight,
Two painters of supreme pictorial might —
Whistler and Sargent, who have clearly wrought
Serene inventions of artistic thought.

The Bismarck of the fine and lordly pose
Carries the dignity that Lenbach knows.
Such painting is not wrought to disappear
With short-lived, puerile " pictures of the year,"
As brushmen of the year so aptly class
Their Springtide produce that but blooms to pass.

The painters of a clean, artistic aim
Are alien to the yearly Salon game
Where journalists who cannot understand
Conceive the daub the Big Drum of the band.

Paint-quacks or " critics," call them what you will,

George Inness is en route to happy Fame
With restful landscapes of romantic aim.
The vapour of the verdure bathes his work,
And tender half-tones in the foliage lurk.
He knows the hour, the season and the scene
When Lady Nature dons her darkest green.

A slop-pot painted with artistic grace
Is greater than an angel commonplace.

Lerolle a Flight to Egypt has essay'd,
And does his best the subject to degrade.
The girls who pose as angels in the sky
Reveal the value of this tradesman's eye;
Feeble in colour, false to art and fact,
They fit, in black-and-white, " a moral tract"
Such as fond parents give to little boys
To make them weep and blight their youthful joys.

But when of water-colour work I sing,
Let me an artist to your notice bring:
Rare Arthur Melville, of achievement bright,
Who makes the card-board pulse with living light;
Whose Spanish bull-fights and whose Arab scenes
Reveal his perfect grip of all the means
That go to make the product that's unique —
The toil-won triumph that the masters seek.

Ere Cosmo Monkhouse writes another book
To blind our sense, and bait the trader's hook,
With praise of English water-colour schools,
Let him acquire the water-colour rules:

Zorn takes the short cuts with a Gallic " flair ,"
And seldom hesitates or beats the air.
A water-colour nude that bears his name
Is one to widen any painter's fame.
Of tone authentic and of treatment quaint,
It would arouse the Lady Grundy's plaint
Were she alive, but, as is known, she's dead —
Dead to the dainty, to refinement dead.