Geneva Armstrong

“ The motif a woman.
In spite of constant strife of parties and principles, political and religious, during the Renaissance, each of those wonderful centuries sent brighter beams up and athwart the dark and troubled world, and ever-increasing light was prophetic of a broadening day.
The outcry of man's religious nature for truth wherewith to feed his soul; the hunger of his mind for knowledge; the craving of his spirit for the beautiful, the ideal, and to express his art instinct; all these powers within man were responsible for the new day, as they are today for the centuries to come. ”

“ Alice Smith loves art for art's sake, but more for the sake of its influence in historic Charleston. She is first of all a landscape painter in the zenith of her power; but some years before, she was just a normal girl, so in love with nature that she would go rowing or fishing at sunrise or before, or into the cypress swamps to study "the herons at home," or amid the magnolia trees glorious at sunrise opening their white cups of fragrance, where cardinals and orioles, unaffrighted, gave her studies in color and pose. ”

“ So we have a great assortment to choose from, beauty of nature and beauty from the handiwork of man; the appealing beauty of helplessness and the compelling beauty of strength; the pulsing physical beauty, and the fadeless beauty of spirit, also the combined beauty of power and restraint producing grandeur.
Man-made beauty has man's thought in it. Nature's beauty has God's thought in it. We have already learned to recognize an artist by his work. Two or three canvases from one man's easel will acquaint you with his character, his thought and technique, choice of color scheme and subjects. ”

“ Every sound mind is susceptible to these influences, be it beauty of color, loveliness of face or flower, tenderness of action, strength of thought or purpose, nature's message or the message of God's truth expressed in the soul's output for the world.
Pictures that stand out as Kohinoors in the art treasures of the centuries have this hall-mark which we call feeling, for no language can express it. Being spirit it alone touches our spirit, nor hath need of words, "even as love is known of love, nor needs the sense of hearing." ”

“ You are looking at a painting, yet feel a vital something that quickens your own vitality. Spirit touches spirit. The mother inspired the painter, the painter the canvas, the canvas—after five hundred years—gives of its recorded spirit to your spirit. Is art developing? Is the ideal gliding down the arm and spirit lifting the heart of him who holds the brush? Is true beauty manifesting in the life of humanity? ”

“ The expression of soul in its sincerity and devotion as the man and woman pause work, in response to the distant bell calling to evening prayer, was an oasis in the field of art and in the eagerness of the nineteenth century; it rang true to the religious instinct in men who have eyes to see and ears to hear.
Bastien Lepage depicts a pitiful condition of woman in civilized France. Something more than the weary spirit and body is on the canvas titled "Rest." A pitiful vacancy is in the stolid face of the woman who looks into space or at nothing. Her mind is limited to her little spot of life. ”

“ Their art has kept alive many a legend and spiritual truth, that even a reading world of recent times has well-nigh lost sight of. Raphael was an idealist or he could never have painted the prodigious number of Madonnas and Saints that have given honor and fame to his name. The story of Saint Margaret lived as a legend through many centuries, coming from pagan Greece to the heart of the Renaissance and its most illustrious painter.
Raphael's ideal of Saint Margaret stands for the soulful art of that great artist; it stands for innocence, purity, and the faith and peace that fears no evil ”

“ Now and then through the ages, circumstances have singled out a woman as ruler or leader of a nation or movement, but rarely has she been identified with art except as a promoter or model for the assistance of man: a living thing of beauty that challenges his effort and skill.
Thus did their women make the art of Greece famous. So did the exquisite beauty of Simonetta lend time-honored fame to the Madonnas from the soul and brush of Botticelli. From Egypt to Greece, Greece to Rome, Rome to the Renaissance, we find few names of women in the annals of art. ”

“ It is not the figure of a man, but of a woman, and the marble is powerful with the spirit of woman triumphant. Her very drapery is eloquent of action, of onward pursuit in the teeth of opposing wind and wave, of the will that gives no quarter till the unseen trumpet in the unseen hand proclaims—"Victory!" You do not see the lips that voice that fact; you miss the shapely head and its poise on the powerful neck; because of time and accident your imagination must supply the face alert with determination that Is Victory, with eyes that would have flashed with the exultation of Victory. ”

“ There is a painting true to the life and suggestive of the generation that is passing. Again we have one of those Rembrandt backgrounds, for it is a deep twilight effect. You can just discover the window through the delicate curtains, and the blooming plant on the sill. The mother is at the piano, and the gleam from the one candle lights the faces of mother and daughter. With one hand she accompanies the old song, the other is about the listening child. It is the sweet refrain of an old, old song to the mother; it is just a lovely experience to the little girl. ”

“ A tiny girl about two and a half years, singing a wordless happiness to herself, climbed upon the couch under the painting to play amid the soft pillows. Soon her eye caught the face of the Boy, radiating a sort of spirit-light as he talked. After a little, touching him with a dainty finger, far as tip-toes enabled her to reach, she lisped to herself, "Pitty boy, I loves oo, I loves oo," and baby fashion danced up and down as she studied the face. Then her eye lighted on the sober man. The song ceased, the happiness went out of her flower-like face as she slowly pointed her finger at him. ”

“ A more than life-size portrait of the man, seated, is in high relief, and he holds the quill pen over the manuscript; the background is in low relief, and indicates beautifully the female figure of Inspiration, with wings outspread, holding a Roman lamp as she inclines gracefully toward the earnest thinker, whose upturned face expresses inspiration. Although Miss Longman's work is with the hard material of marble, she not only achieves grace of form and line, not only texture of metal, feather, or fur, but in a marvelous degree the impress and expression of spirit, of emotion. ”

“ From the very shape and form of that memorial tablet, carved as an intaglio, comes the low relief of Inspiration bringing forth the high relief of thought in the brow and eye to action with hand and pen.
The setting, the environment of even the finest works of plastic art may heighten or mar their beauty, if not in harmony; but the architect, Henry Bacon, has enhanced the idea of the artist by his appreciation of the spirit and dignity of her subjects. ”

“ In placid beauty and perfection of form, grace, and proportion, the Venus de Milo is the seeming ultimate; chaste and noble, it represents the age of perfection amid the multiforms of Greek art.
Were it a living being we would say that soul was latent. The perfection of form seemingly animated by spirit, with the added forces of nature and mind in combat, have given the world a translation in marble of the fact and act of Victory. Victory means overcoming; overcoming implies force, will, and determination; the spirit that does not weaken, that says No to wrong. ”

“ There were no rules governing that playroom, except that Miss Eberle liked you to say "Good morning," and put you out for the day if you were too noisy. The door was always open between studio and playroom. But the motive was not to keep tabs—at least not in the school-marm way. One would think the children would have invaded Miss Eberle's privacy rather than she theirs, for she stood there all day at a tall stand playing her own games with heavy, messy, soft clay. But she had drawn a chalk mark—like Merlin's magic circle—around the modeling stand, and none dare invade it except—invited." ”

“ Barring accident, neglect or epidemic, the human is bound to live to a good old age. All things being normal, hard work does not kill a man be he a farmer, mason, or artist. Some few of the Renaissance masters reached great age, also a few American painters. Being an artist does not prolong life, but the love and desire for beauty, the ability to appreciate it on canvas, the longing to depict and the thrill of the developing ideal under your hand, the spirit ever reaching higher and for truer beauty, these are the powers that enrich and prolong life. ”

“ The responsibility and love that has come to her with her sweet and marvelous babe gleams from her face and from her clasp of the little one to her breast. He is hers yet not hers. He is born with a mission, and the mother is God's helper in preparing Him for that mission. The throng of thoughts that mean motherhood can be read in that saintly face, and so powerful is thought to the human soul that the soul of the Child seems one with hers.
Such is the beauty and mystery of spirit. ”

“ What could be a more natural sequence of such art work than that which Miss Smith has developed from it—the painting of portraits of children; and they are charming portraits. She has pleasured the child-spirit so devotedly that the child-nature is at home in her own heart, and the result of her brush work is most vital and enticing. The little ones seem to wake up from her canvas and look at you as an interesting study, innocent of the fact that you find them most interesting ”

“ Whence the mentality that produced their poets, dramatists, and thinkers who brillianced the centuries of Greek dominance in culture? The various shades of life in tribes and nations are needed in the weaving of the endless tapestry of humanity; shades of skin may count with some, but in the study of art it is the shade of mentality, of innate moral fibre and refinement, that counts.
Not all the inhabitants of Greece, nor even of Athens, were artists, nor men of letters. There were as wide differences in humans then as now and here. ”

“ The tender blending of light and shade, curves and color-tones of flesh, pulsing warmth and glow radiating from the spirit within, chaste in idea, in subject—such a nude has a charm and conveys a sacredness of the body as the work of the Creator.
The very illusiveness of spirit gives the greatest difficulty in painting the nude, and has caused that branch of delineation to be the high-water mark of excellence among painters. When they cannot reach it, the public has the opportunity to see poor or bad art. ”

“ Landscape painting in oil and water color was her principal interest, but whatever she saw had a message for her, and her expression of it on canvas made one feel the open, far-flung plain, or the height and scope of mountains, distant towns, boats, and people, for she painted what appealed to her. She did not abandon one branch of art for another—she simply carried on from one application of art to another. ”

“ When man would aspire, would climb, he has, since the era of emancipation, rested the heaven-formed ladder of his desires upon the star of his ideal—woman's character.
You have watched the oncoming waves of the sea, the stronger absorbing the lesser, as they roll shoreward with an ever increasing volume and velocity. So with art if we could but draw the wave line of its progress. ”

“ The flash of its glistening petals almost pulses in the sunlight, so dazzling is its purity. The distilled drop of honey in the corolla, the gold dust of the stamens, the graceful curve and droop of the petals—a moment ago all were a sealed bud e'er the magic of light unclasped it, so softly, you would not have seen it had your eyes been diverted a moment, if you had not been watching and considering. They toil not, neither do they spin—not for their beauty, they are as God made them. ”

“ The drawing of Elizabeth Nourse at first puzzled the French artists, for she is a small, sweet, feminine creature, yet the verdict of one of the most noted critics was, "She paints like a man six feet tall, yet she is frail and delicate, a child in appearance and manner." They cannot reconcile, what she seems, and is physically, with the vital force of her drawing and brush work. "No painting leaves her studio that does not bear the impress of deep thought." ”

“ The eager forward bending of the body, only one foot touching a cloud; the gossamer drapery and hair floating with the speed of a star through space, all picture an ideal of diaphanous loveliness that carries thought and imagination to the heights. A world and a woman are etherealized.
Nothing is so intangible as the human soul. It makes or mars the house-beautiful in which it lives its human years. ”

“ In those days men of talent and taste were wont to give to women of their admiration and love a literary setting, as did Petrarch to his Laura, Abelard to Heloise, and others, thus assuring us of exalted womanhood, if not perfect.
It was not mere beauty of color and curve that captured the eye and mind of the great Florentine master of chisel and brush; one cannot read his sonnets without knowing that the goddess of his heart exercised an influence far nobler than the art it helped to ennoble. ”

“ As love responds to love, so does beauty touch the note of beauty in the human heart, with more or less of vigor according to its expression or presentation.
The art of a nation marks its growth; we realize this when we note that individuals, groups, art leagues, schools, and museums of art, with great rapidity and vigor, are springing up in all sections of the country—those in the south and west of prime interest because they are younger, fresh and strong with enthusiasm, new ideas, and the freshness of spirit with which they appreciate and appropriate what their section of country offers. ”

“ And the beauty came, not from without, but like the beauty of the lily it came from the inner growth outward.
The renaissance was not confined to painting; it was the awakening of soul, gifted with new vision, new thought, and looking higher for its inspiration. No wonder painting was considered a divine art. Artists brought a scripture knowledge to their work in chapel, church, wall and window. No immoral person was permitted to work on any sacred edifice. ”