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After looking carefully over the field, Bok finally decided upon Edwin A. Abbey. He took a steamer and visited Abbey in his English home. The artist was working on his canvases for the State capitol at Harrisburg, and it was agreed that the commission for the Curtis Building was to follow the completion of the State work. "What subject have you in mind?" asked Abbey. "None," replied Bok.
Here was something to live for, to win to, to fight for ay, and die for. The books were true. There were such women in the world. She was one of them. She lent wings to his imagination, and great, luminous canvases spread themselves before him whereon loomed vague, gigantic figures of love and romance, and of heroic deeds for woman's sake for a pale woman, a flower of gold.
The new moon behind her head, an old helmet upon it, a diadem of accidental dewdrops round her brow, would have been adjuncts sufficient to strike the note of Artemis, Athena, or Hera respectively, with as close an approximation to the antique as that which passes muster on many respected canvases.
Some of them avenge themselves by making fun of the whole matter: they tell you that there is a great deal of humbug about your great pictures and statues; that Raphael is nearly as much overrated as Shakespeare; that it is all nonsense for people to pretend to admire headless trunks and dingy canvases. To them I have nothing to say: they find consolation in their own cleverness.
A gray wall quadrangularly vaulted to a large north light; casts of feet, hands, faces hung to nails about; prints, sketches in oil and water-color stuck here and there lower down; a rickety table, with paint and palettes and bottles of varnish and siccative tossed comfortlessly on it; an easel, with a strip of some faded mediaeval silk trailing from it; a lay figure simpering in incomplete nakedness, with its head on one side, and a stocking on one leg, and a Japanese dress dropped before it; dusty rugs and skins kicking over the varnished floor; canvases faced to the mop-board; an open trunk overflowing with costumes: these features one might notice anywhere.
In such canvases as "June" and "White Oak" one finds some of the best that American art has built on the theories of Monet. Gallery 50 contains some good landscapes, but nothing that demands special attention aside from Sergeant Kendall's refined figure studies. Gallery 51 is given over in general to the independents and extremists of American art.
He had been previously told that if he attempted any interference, his supply of paints, brushes, canvases, and guitar-strings would be cut off, and, as he was at present deeply engaged on a new picture of Julius Cæsar overturning the Altars of the Druids, he hesitated before the alternatives offered to him.
His canvases are ever in modulation. His sense of tactile values is profound. His is true atmospheric colour. A feeling of exhilaration comes while contemplating one of his open-air scenes with jockeys, race-horses, and the incidental bustle of a neighbouring concourse.
In Bertram's studio the latest "Face of a Girl" had made way for a group of canvases and plaques, every one of which showed Billy Neilson in one pose or another. Up-stairs, where William's chaos of treasures filled shelves and cabinets, the place of honor was given to a small black velvet square on which rested a pair of quaint Battersea enamel mirror knobs.
We've got a dozen young fellows in this very town that put more real stuff into their canvases than all your men put together. They don't tickle their things to death with detail. They get air and vitality and out-of-doors into their work, and " "Names! Names!" shouted "My Lord" Cockburn, rattling the scuttle to drown the answers to his questions.
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