CURRENT NOTES ON ART.

It is late, now that in all art centres preparations are being made for the spring exhibits, to revert to the much talked of St. Louis Exposition; still we wish to acknowledge the courtesy of the Swedish Commissioner in sending us reproductions from pictures in that section. One that it was pleasant to receive was the "Summer Morning" of Knut Borgh, and the accompanying note that the canvas had been purchased for a private residence in St. Louis, was a matter of personal satisfaction, as we had expressed, even in these pages, the hope that "Summer Morning" might not be suffered to leave American shores. Knut Borgh is an extremely young man, but a most exquisite brushman and true artist; his delicate, dreamy, lyrical quality and harmonious suffusion of color veiling the fine certainty of drawing, combine to make one feel very sure before his canvases that there is a rarer, more intoxicating poetry than that of the pen. His tremulous, vibrating sunrise partakes of the opening hope and passionate promise of mid-summer dawns in music. Then we have The Fir Bank" of Kallstenius, so strong in its manful handling, so robustly trenchant in color. Technicians immediately recognize Kallstenius. He is a power; it is forced upon you; you must confess it on the spot. His rugged drawing, his intensely pictorial mode of sight, his rude fidelity to nature, coupled with a sense of admiration so profound, her beauty well-nigh overpowers him. Lovers both, Borgh and he, and of the same mistress, but each wooing according to his own temperamental fashion. "Mes enfants," Paul Verlaine would take his pipe from between his teeth to say: "mes enfants, l'Art c'est d'être soi-même." The "Fir Bank" goes to the Indianapolis Art Museum. The two portraits by the Östermans we noticed elsewhere and will not repeat ourselves, but merely remark upon their general excellence. Emil Österman in his "Landscape painter J." is astonishingly firm of outline and modeling. There is no harshness, but neither hesitation nor equivocacy. The whole man is there before us and we have to take him or leave him as he is. The characterization is so certain nothing is left to the imagination save what the thoughtful face will itself furnish. Bernhard Österman's portrait of a lady is necessarily a little softer, but his drawing, too, is broad and secure; there is a great cleanness and freshness in the color hand

ling, careful understanding of the subject, and, as we said elsewhere, the dress is a good study in black. For their textures and general technique both the Östermans are true to Paris schooling-Bernhard with a touch of quiet sentiment, Emil with a brush that is a chisel. Torn's "At the Brook" is too well known to require description. It is astonishing, like all his work; his vigor, his plasticisin, his raw gorgeousness of color, even his method of laying on the paint, are his own, and inimitable as practised by his hands. One could scrape layers from Torn's foilage and yet is it not admirable? as formimpression are not the leaves true as nature and do they not shine before us in their sun-flecked, succulent viridence? It is Torn, his work: a kind of painting in relief. How much he owes to mere dash of manner and how much is scientific production of effect we could not say. But we are inclined to think there is as much hard work as bravura in Torn's canvases and that his heavy pigment is neither careless impetus nor a mere fishing to obtain certain results for the eye. He is simply working out his innermost intentions with such methods as he finds will express them best. As to the figure it is well drawn and well painted, but we are not the first to say that Torn's type-woman is coarse. She is large limbed, heavy built, full fleshed. The very features and complexion are those associated in our minds with the blonde and florid Scandinavian of low class. It is eminently to Torn's credit that having been born a peasant he is now what he is, but the matter of his birth comes inevitably to one's recollection in his choice of buxom nymphs. To portraiture, where the sitter does but meet him half way, Torn responds quickly to the motif of elegance and distinction.

From Stockholm to Naples is a far cry, but speaking of naturalistic pictures there came to our hands the other day one of the Virgins of Morelli; that one (we should imagine, for it comes nameless), which he himself would designate as the Madonna del Bacio, Our Lady of the Kiss. Morelli is dead: alas that he should be! and since 1901, which means three centuries, or more. Few people speak of him any longer; only now and again some student who discovers for himself the work of this splendid, human-hearted old man waxes warm and eloquent over the find. Domenico Morelli, be it said for those who do not know him, was born in Naples in 1826; his life in its struggle and achievement sums the history of art in the 19th century; as regards Italy he was the pioneer of modernity. Entering the Academy early there was no reason why he should not have

accepted the mode of art in vogue and the teachings of the school. Morelli instead grew restive. He wanted to see the works of the great masters and complained that students had rarer access to the "Quadreria" than wandering tourists. He urged that students must have books on art and books in general to develop by. Finally, worst of heresies, he said that the plaster-cast was plaster and that the reduction of figures in the life-class to suit Greek measurements or the so-called Ideal was anathema. Note that he was a mere barbarian in his teens and the Academy a very venerable, if stagnant, institution. Not so stagnant, however, but he was allowed to follow his own bent. His painting was raw and unlovely, but it was entirely different from that of any other worker in his class, and his companions, a little fearful, but admiring, too, surnamed him "the courageous painter." Next, the boy took his paints out into the open and studied light and shadow in free air. We think Manet an inventor for doing this in the sixties; but in the forties a half-fledged Neapolitan youth did it on his own authority. He is the first, as far as we know, to have manifested the craving to get away from roofs, walls, and theories, to seek the face of God's sunshine and observe its play himself. The word "impressionist " did not exist at the time and Morelli did not find the color in shadow; he painted his shadow brown, but an impressionist he was and an impressionist absolutely fearless. He discovered extraordinary phenomena of unadulterated light and the sharp contrasts of clair and tone. He painted them with unquestioning sincerity. The man and the workman in him. were vigorous and at one wherefore the thing he undertook must inevitably prevail. Perhaps to fully understand how far the young painter was in advance of his compeers one should state that Rembrandt and Velasquez, the great gods of nineteenth century painting, were his favorites at that early date. Palizzi, too, before Morelli, was for a return to nature and Morelli may owe him something; but Palizzi was a classicist at heart, Morelli a realist to his finger-tips. Steadily and studiously pursuing his own way, there came a day when Morelli found the Academy and he had drifted miles apart; he may not have been able to see this other result so clearly yet, nevertheless, it was accomplished; he had revolutionized Italian painting. And now, quite in cold blood, even as flattery, he is styled a pagan. He was a pagan who read the Gospels assiduously and the majority of whose pictures are religious. "Christ Walks on the Water," "Christ Mocked in the House of Pilate." "Christ Agonizing," the

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"Descent from the Cross," the "Three Marys on their Way to Calvary," and numerous Virgins culminating in that glorious vision, amber and rose-glowing, the focus of all the light Morelli had been accumulating in a life-time, the Madonna della Scala d'Oro-an apotheosis of the Woman and Child at the Summit of a Golden Stair. The only one of Morelli's pictures we should take any exception to on the score of realism is the "Christ Agonizing," in which he has painted a peasant; not an ignoble one either, but still a peasant. The other pictures are all original on the score of composition, direct work from nature and peculiar lighting with problems of unusual shadow, but, if weird, they are wholly reverent. Only in the Temptations of St. Anthony," a powerful study of a man in poignant mental agony, has the painter, in the detail, been somewhat indecorous. For the rest Morelli was no pagan, but a veteran of life as to his theories of life; and as to the beauty of created things, an artist. Take his "Nun " as an illustration of Morelli's point of view. We have many "Nuns" in painting; they are angelic creatures unvaryingly sad, absorbed soul and body in their office or their beads, and so remote from this world it would be unutterable to suggest they might once have been mortals. Morelli's "Nun" is a girl of fifteen, a country-girl, too, with a rosy, dimpled face and a veil and habit that sit awkwardly upon her. She is full of innocence and a devout simplicity; the choir-book in her hands looks as if it did not belong to her she and the religious life have been put in juxtaposition. Is Morelli irreverent? Not at all; for all its apparent incongruousness he is true to life in his painting-he is even true to certain monastic ideals of childlikeness. But the main point with him was that here was a living, human being-not a frock on a sawdust doll. Here is a life in the bud of womanhood, not an unhappy angel. She is so fresh, so natural, you would ask her about the brothers and sisters she left at home, the red apples in the orchard, and that funny, fluffy new yellow brood in the yard behind the farm house-which would surely make her laugh.

In the "Madonna del Bacio," our starting point, we have the same adoration of pure life; of broad, beautiful, serenely holy, human things. One might have distractions in trying to pray before it—but how one loves the painter! The Mother stands upright against a mere cloud background with the Infant lifted highly and joyously in her arms and her face strained to reach Him in a kiss. Madonna veil and robe are drawn freely and picturesquely, the

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