Page 404

ALS IK KAN: NOTES: REVIEWS
more American than foreign in inspiration
and technique, and definitely explicit as to
the fact that women are taking their work
in the field of art seriously, with courage
and sincerity. No sculptor in America is
doing more sincere modeling than Abas-
tenia Eberle. She works from life, any
life that touches her imagination. She is
a fearless, vital worker, and her achieve-
ment is good for herself, for art, for the
country. With a different interest in life,
but the same quality of attainment, is Anna
V. Hyatt. Her animals rank with similar
sculpture of the Borglums. She knows
animal psychology and expresses it with a
sure and subtle technique. Caroline Peddle
Ball did not show a very characteristic ex-
hibit, for her work is extremely individual
as a rule, without affectation or foreign
influence.
  Mrs. Saint-Gaudens' work was delight-
ful, particularly her faun-like children, full
of humor and      insistent charm. Mrs.
Bracken's "Little Boy and Dragon" was
another exquisite presentation of youth, the
appeal of the heartbreaking perfect beauty
of childhood, the idealism  that every
normal youth should have, and that the
mother who has achieved it for her boy
must watch vanish year by year as life
shadows the ideal. There were also some
beautiful nature fantasies of Mrs. Brack-
en's, and a bit of fine craftsmanship in a
bronze door handle. Mrs. Farnham showed
a "Mexican panel" for the "Bureau of
South American Republics," and Mrs.
Whitney an "Aztec Fountain" for the same
building in Washington. The latter seemed
to lack subtlety.
WOMAN'S ART CLUB OF NEW YORK
AT the Macbeth Galleries during the
early part of May there was also an
exhibition of women's work, painting and
sculpture. Going from one of these exhi-
bitions to another, as the writer did, there
was opportunity of interesting contrast of
what American women are doing in these
two fields of art, sculpture and painting,
and the decision, with but very few definite
examples, was in favor of the work done
in the more plastic art. There is no ques-
tion about it--on the whole you do not feel
the personality of women in painting or
music. You feel rather the kind of art in
which they have been interested. The
women who have acquired the freedom of
thought, interest and technique to express
404
themselves genuinely on canvas are the ex-
ception as yet. You feel a vital utterance
in the work of such women as Cecilia
Beaux, Rhoda Holmes Nicholls, Mary Cas-
satt, Charlotte B. Coman; they have be-
come a part of the accomplishment of
painting in America. But at this exhibition
of seventy women painters you were a little
bewildered at the sense of reminiscence
which haunted you from canvas to canvas.
Ellen Emmett's portraits were most inter-
esting, and Alice Schille had an excellent
"Young Man with a Dog." (And it is
worth mentioning that some of the most
interesting plein air pictures at the spring
Water Color Exhibition were by this same
artist.)
  Helen Turner's "Summer Night" held
the mysterious charm of a still summer
evening, and Alethea Platt showed an in-
teresting moonlight scene. The sculpture
was in a way a repetition of the names at
the School of Design,-strong, sincere
work, if one except "Paganism Immortal,"
by Mrs. Whitney, which seemed a definite
striving after the weakest tendency of one
phase of modern French sculpture.
VMRS. DUNLAP HOPKINS' LANDSCAPES
A decidedly unique exhibition of land-
scapes by Mrs. Dunlap Hopkins was
shown in April at the Knoedler Galleries.
Mrs. Hopkins, whose picture we are re-
producing this month among our Signifi-
cant People, is best known as the founder
of the New York School of Applied Design
for Women. It was not until she was past
fifty that she gave any attention to develop-
ing her individual interest in art. Two
years ago she was visiting in Brittany with
a group of people who were painting. As
she watched them from day to day she felt
an almost unconquerable impulse to present
on canvas some of the scenes which had
interested her most. She talked it over
with one of the artists, and finally it was
decided that she should try her hand at an
oil painting. The result was something re-
markable, and she spent the whole summer
painting with her friends. The pictures
which were exhibited at Knoedler's were
the result of this summer's work, and when
one takes this into consideration the work
is a rare achievement. Her color sense is
most interesting; her appreciation of the
subtlety of elimination would be noticeable
in an artist of much longer experience, and
her keen feeling for the poetic phases of