At the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. I: In the Art Gallery

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AT THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE EXPOSITION.

[As a first number in a series of short sketches, written for the Era by visitors from Utah to the Fair, the following article is an interesting and instructive sample. Mr. Alfred Lambourne is a poet and artist of the west who has spent his time and talents in the grand and magnificent arid regions. There is a tone of despondency in what he says about the tabooing of western art, but still a ray of hope in the statement that "its artists will shine again." He was born in England, and came to Utah as a youth, in 1866, and is therefore one of the first Utah artists. Among his well-known paintings are "Cumorah," and "Adam-Ondi-Ahman," both in the Salt Lake Temple; and he is the author of several prose and poetical works, among them, "Holly and Easter Lillies," "Three Season's Flowers," "Cicadas in Home, Sweet Home," and "The Inland Sea." Editors].

I.

IN THE ART GALLERIES. BY ALFRED LAMBOURNE.

Perhaps the main benefit to the visitor to the Fine Art department of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, at St. Louis, aside from the study of individual artists, comes from the unexampled opportunity for comparison. The vast and varied exhibit of paintings would simply be bewildering were they not already divided into the national schools of art, expression, and thought, and did one not also make mental division for his own guidance. The United States loan exhibit, opulent in possession of many of the greatest masters, is a key, as it were, or rather a preliminary essay, upon the exhibit of other nations. There one may see the works of such widely dissimilar artists as Rembrandt, Corot, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Turner and Vedder, and in a certain way prepare himself for the larger special exhibits of the other nations. Hokusai, the great Oriental master, of whose work there is an example in the Japanese section, opens the mind, through the eye,

836 IMPROVEMENT ERA.

to the subtleties of the Asiaian mind in preception and thoupjht'; and is a guide to Japanese intensity of analysis and expression. Pass from that work to the broad synthetic canvases of France, England, and Germany, and we cannot fail in receiving one strong lesson, at least. What is art? The question is asked. And the many answers may be read at St. Louis. Messionier has certainly a splendid individual answer, (subdividing a national) in his picture "1812," in the French section. All art lovers at the Exposition should not fail to see this picture. Messionier is one in a triad of French artists —Messionier, Gerome, — and Bouguereau whose works have had a wide-spread influence on all the schools and nations, and who mark an epoch in modern art,

as already younger men are coming to the front with new ideals. "Chill October," by Sir John Everett Millais, is a picture upon which an entire article might be written, so many are the questions of art involved in it, and so many the answers given. "Portrait of J. C. Hook, R. A.," by the same artist, and in the same room as the former work, is one of the most wonderfully painted and life-like portraits in the world. The same may be said of the portrait of Cardinal Newman, hung by the side of "Chill October," The story of a wonderful life — its genius, its trials, its

hopes, its despairs, — told is in that aged face on the canvas. One may read there, as on a living face, the history of a soul. Passing from the two last portraits to one by Walter Ouless — "A Lady and her Daughter"— one may see the elegance, the luxury, the pride, and the refinement of modern English life, painted only as Ouless now paints. Ideal pictures, realistic pictures, symbolical pictures, psychological, religious, and sensuous pictures — all are there in the fine art exhibit, at the World's Fair. With leisure and inclination, one could dream away the half of a life there, and perhaps not entirely waste it. Art is the expression of individual and national thought, the culmination, and the setting down of realized or hoped for ideals, and to see them thus before us, gathered into the compass of the three art buildings, is a privilege indeed. "The Roman and the Teuton," this is a colossal and powerful

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AT THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE EXPOSITION. 837

work in the German section, which everyone ought to see. Those who have read Kingsley's book of the same name will especially enjoy it. It shows one side of the vigorous German mind, as that other picture, "A New Made Grave," covered with flowers amid the snow-covered hillocks of the dead in a country churchyard shows another side of Teutonic thought —the dreamy and metaphysical one. Do you want a lesson in what environment does for the individuals of the human race ? Look, then, at the exhibit of pictures, first from Norway, and then from Italy and Belgium, Do you not see there the lessons taught by adversity; or rather by the struggle with adversity — the land of fjords, of floods, and rock-ribbed mountains, crowned with everlasting ice and snows, and the life of ease, or perhaps of indolence rather, by the side of groves of olive and orange, and blue summer seas? It is there to be seen, at least, and the lesson is taught in no uncertain characters. Belgium and Austria should be, to judge from their art works, among the most frivolous, enervated, and pleasure-loving people of the earth. The same thought occurred to me when looking at their national buildings and other exhibits. French nude art is not quite as conspicuous as in days of yore. The arts useful, the arts varied, the fine arts; yes, they are all the same, as our latest men following the thought of the sixteenth century all admit. From the making of a spoon to the making of wrought iron gates, a pair of bronze doors, or the carving of a — marble statue the same qualities of heart and brain should be used, and this we will certainly learn if we extend our examination from the fine art building to those of the useful and varied, upon the Exposition grounds, or follow, a vice versa process. Not to go outside of our subject, this is one of the great lessons of the Fair. — Western landscape? no; it has no place in the popular art of today. Our mountains, our rivers, all that is distinctively ours, seems now tabooed! This is probably a reactionary phase in art, which will be subject to a reaction, in turn, and thus the name of artists, now somewhat dimmed over, will shine again; or, perhaps our future western artists will approach their subjects in a different mood. We will wait and see.