Clara Erskine Clement Waters

“ Her art is the all-absorbing interest of her life. It is not without its limitations, but within these limitations the artist has known how to be true to herself. Drawing her inspiration direct from nature, she has held on her independent way, steadily faithful to the gift she possesses of evoking a character in a portrait or of making us feel how the common task, when representative of genuine human effort and touched with the poetry of national tradition, of religion, and of nature, becomes a subject of noble artistic treatment. ”

“ The ’Mensonge’ of Salvator Rosa is very natural. I do not speak as a connoisseur; what most resembles nature pleases me most. Is it not the aim of painting to copy nature? I like very much the full, fresh countenance of the wife of Paul Veronese, painted by him. I like the style of his faces. I adore Titian and Vandyck; but that poor Raphael! Provided only no one knows what I write; people would take me for a fool ; I do not criticise Raphael; I do not understand him ; in time I shall no doubt learn to appreciate his beauties. The portrait of Pope Leo X.—I think it is—is admirable, however. ”

“ Few artists have the fresh touch which the child needs and the firm and rapid execution which allows the painter to catch the fleeting expression and the half-forms which make child portraits at once the longing and the despair of portrait painters. Miss Beaux's technique is altogether French, sometimes reminding me a little of Carolus Duran and of Sargent; but her individuality has triumphed over all suggestions of her foreign masters, and the combination of refinement and strength is altogether her own. ”

“ The woman who has signed such a portrait is a great artist." It is well known that the famous sculptor is a remarkable portraitist.
In a review of the Salon at Nice we read: "A portrait by Mme. Massip is a magnificent canvas, without a single stroke of the charlatan. The pose is simple and dignified; there is the serenity and repose of a woman no longer young, who makes no pretension to preserve her vanishing beauty; the costume, in black, is so managed that it would not appear superannuated nor ridiculous at any period. The execution is that of a great talent and an artistic conscience. ”

“ Her touch without overminuteness has the delicacy and security of a fine work of the needle. The accent is just without that seeking for virile energy which too often spoils the most charming qualities. The sentiment is discreet without losing its intensity in order to attract public notice. The painting of Mme. Henriette Browne is at an equal distance from grandeur and insipidity, from power and affectation, and gathers from the just balance of her nature some effects of taste and charm of which a parvenu in art would be incapable. ”

“ It is remarkable that an artist who paints male heads with such a vigorous character should also give to flowers softness, transparency, and grace. Nothing can be more lovely than Miss Boott's flower studies. She has some delicious poppies among wheat, lilies, thistles. She gets a transparency into these works that is not facile in oil. A bunch of roses in a vase was as tender and round and soft-colored as in nature. Among all the many studios of Rome I do not know a more attractive one than Miss Boott's. ”

“ If she paints the branch of a rose-tree, it seems to spring from the ground with its flowers in all their luxurious wantonness, and one can almost imagine one's self inhaling their delightful perfume. This talented artist knows so well how to depict with her brush the transparency and softness of the tender, ethereal rose, that one may seek in vain among a crowd of artists for her equal. ”

“ The sky is most tenderly painted, and with the truest outline of cloud of all in the Exhibition; and the terrific piece of gallant wrath and ruin on the extreme left, when the cuirassier is catching round the neck of his horse as he falls, and the convulsed fallen horse, seen through the smoke below, is wrought through all the truth of its frantic passion with gradations of color and shade which I have not seen the like of since Turner's death. ”

“ AIMÉE RAPIN
frisson de sensibilité which is one of the most precious gifts of the artistic temperament, and which is quick to respond to the ideal in the real. There are some artists who, though possessed of extraordinary mastery over the materials of their art, bring to their work a spirit which beggars and belittles both art and life; there are others who seem to work with an ever-present sense of the noble purpose of their vocation and the pathos and dignity of existence. ”

“ In another mood the artist paints the low rocks among the reeds, with the breakers playing about them, while the distant sea stretches out to a horizon, with dark, stormy clouds brooding over the solitary waste. A remarkable union of the beauty of land and water is produced by a foreground of brilliant fancy flowers relieved by a scrubby tree in the background, with the faint responsive touch of yellow in the clouds over a calm sea, where gentle motion is only indicated by the little boat floating on its surface. ”

“ But though they have been more than ordinarily successful in establishing themselves among the few contemporary painters whose performances are worth watching, they have not sprung suddenly into notice by some special achievement or by doing work so sensational that it would not fail to set people talking. There has been no spasmodic brilliancy in their progress, none of that strange alternation of masterly accomplishment and hesitating effort which is apt at times to mark the earlier stages of the life of an artist who may or may not attain greatness in his later years. ”

“ As you face the picture the portraits of two hundred and fifty-eight men and women, who, twenty-six years ago, were part and parcel of the legislative, executive, judicial, social, and journalistic life of Washington, look straight at you as if they were still living and breathing things, as, indeed, many of them are. ”

“ Miss Spartali has a fine power of fusing the emotion of her subject into its color and of giving aspiration to both; beyond what is actually achieved one sees a reaching toward something ulterior. As one pauses before her work, a film in that or in the mind lifts or seems meant to lift, and a subtler essence from within the picture quickens the sense. ”

“ Of the colony of American artists, who for a decade or two past have made Paris their home, few have been more interesting and none more serious than Miss Cassatt....Miss Cassatt has found her true bent in her recent pictures of children and in the delineation of happy maternity. These she has portrayed with delicacy, refinement, and sentiment. Her technique appeals equally to the layman and the artist, and her color has all the tenderness and charm that accompanies so engaging a motif. ”

“ Breslau is indeed a poet in her ability to picture youth and its sweet intimacies, and she does this so easily. With a touch she reveals the grace of one and the affectations of another subject of her brush, and skilfully renders the varying emotions in the faces of her pictures. Pleasure and suffering, the fleeting thought of the child, the agitation of the young girl are all depicted with rare truthfulness. ”

“ The lithe and youthful figure of a girl is extended upon a straight-backed settle in somewhat of a Récamier pose. She is intently occupied in the perusal of a book. The turn of the head, the careless attitude, and the flesh tints of throat and face are all admirably rendered. The diaphanous quality of the girlish costume is skilfully worked out, as are also the accessories of the room. Miss Greene's work must commend itself to those who recognize the true in art. Technical dexterity and a fine discrimination of color are attributes of this conscientious artist's work. ”

“ Goethe and Herder were her friends, and the former wrote: "The good Angelica has a most remarkable, and for a woman really unheard-of, talent; one must see and value what she does and not what she leaves undone. There is much to learn from her, particularly as to work, for what she effects is really marvellous." In his work called "Winckelmann and His Century," Goethe again said of her: "The light and pleasing in form and color, in design and execution, distinguish the numerous works of our artist. ”

“ As an artist she stands shoulder to shoulder with the very best; she has taste and fancy, without which she could not be an artist. But what strikes one about her most is summed up in the word 'ability.' She is essentially able. The work which that wonderful left hand of hers finds to do, it does with a certainty that makes most other work look tentative beside hers. The gestures and poses she chooses in her models show how little she fears drawing, while the gistness of her criticism has a most solvent effect in dissolving the doubts that hover round the making of pictures. ”

“ Life is represented as struggling to free herself from the gross earthly forms that cling to her. The figure of Life shows a calm, placid strength, well calculated to conquer in a struggle; and the modelling of her clinging robes and the active muscle of the male figures is firm and life-like. The mantle of truth flows from the shoulders of the angel, forming a drapery for the whole group, and serving as a support for the basin, the edges of which are ornamented with dolphins spouting water. ”

“ From a pupil of Rubens this was praise indeed !
The chief characteristics of Sofonisba's painting were grace and spirit. Her portrait of herself when at her best is in possession of the Lomellini. A second is the splendid picture at Althorpe, in which she is represented as playing the harpsichord. One can scarcely imagine a place in which a portrait would be more severely tested than in the gallery of the Earl of Spencer, beside portraits of lovely women and famous men, painted by master artists. Yet this work of Sofonisba' s is praised by discerning critics and connoisseurs. ”

“ However, this affair brought the name of the artist to the knowledge of the public, and she determined to devote herself to the painting of flowers and fruit, in which she has won unusual fame. There is no sameness in her pictures, and her subjects do not appear to be "arranged"—everything seems to have fallen into its place by chance and to be entirely natural.
Gerardina Jacoba and her brother Julius van de Sande Bakhuyzen, the landscape painter, share one studio. She paints with rapidity, as one must in order to picture the freshness of fast-fading flowers. ”

“ I believe that, in spite of the large sums of money that she received, her habitual generosity and indifference to wealth prevented her amassing a large fortune, but her fame as an artist and her womanly virtues brought the rewards which she valued above any thing that wealth could bestow—such rewards as will endure through centuries and surround the name of Rosa Bonheur with glory, rewards which she untiringly labored to attain. ”

“ Farther on, the eye is carried back through a beautiful vista formed by the road leading through the centre of the picture, giving a fine perspective and distance through a leafy archway of elms and other forest trees that gracefully mingle their branches overhead, through which one catches a glimpse of deep blue sky. ”

“ When still a child, at the age when little girls play with dolls, she was in her father's atelier, working in clay with an irresistible fondness for this occupation, and without relaxation making one little object after another, until she acquired that admirable surety of execution that one admires in her work—a quality sometimes lacking in the work of both men and women sculptors. ”