Arts and Letters

When Edwin Howland Blashfield was elected to the Academy, in 1908, the organization received into its fellowship an artist peculiarly dedicated to its spirit. He was an embodiment of tradition. What is tradition? Nothing is more foolish than to think of it as a dogma, a formula. It is simply the tribute which the genuine artist pays to the wisdom of the finer souls in the art of all ages. "Painting," John La Farge once said, "is, far more than most people think, a matter of brains." Blashfield was true to the pith of that axiom. He mixed brains with his colors, enriched his art by all the elements which flow from culture, from really enlightened travel, from the adventures of the imagination as well as from the trained exercise of the hand. "The old masters grow bigger and bigger to me," he wrote to a friend not long before the end. He was born in New York in 1848. Thus when he died at his summer home on Cape Cod, on October 12th, 1936, he had lived a long life. From the beginning it had been formed by high thinking, by devotion to an elevated ideal.

He took such an ideal with him when he went to Paris in 1867, intent upon studying under Gérôme but presently enlisting, instead, under the banner of Bonnat. He could not have encountered a more sympathetic master. Bonnat was a rigid disciplinarian and strengthened the young American in the draughtsmanship which was thenceforth, through all his days, to be characteristic of him. Moreover, while Bonnat held his disciple to a severe standard of the painter's craft, he gave him the stimulus emanating from a rare intelligence. The Frenchman was a connoisseur and collector, a lover of tradition. His influence made not only for the betterment of Blashfield's drawing and design but for an enlargement of his horizon. All the conditions of his time abroad were conducive to the broadening of his outlook. The sway of the romantics and of the Barbizon school still endured and men like Manet, Monet, and Degas were coming into view. Blashfield was caught up into a stream of artistic energy and ideas. He steeped himself in it for considerably more than a decade, painting historical subjects, exhibiting at the Salon and at the Royal Academy, and seeing much of Italy as well as of France and England. When he came back to the United States it was as a mature painter of carefully thought out easel pictures. His traits in that character will be remembered from the exhibition of his works which was held at the Academy in 1928. But it was not as a painter of easel pictures that he was to win his fame.

That was to come to him in the field of mural decoration. The subject was already active here at the time of his return from Europe. La Farge had decorated Trinity Church, in Boston, in 1870, and his superb altar-piece in the Church of the Ascension in New York dates from the '80s. Long after that La Farge was still dominant, the unique leader. But Blashfield in his tum became a leader, a pioneer, when mural painting in America received a special impetus at the Chicago Fair in 1893 and in the Congressional Library at Washington. From the rather tentative work that he did at Chicago, when a new movement, essentially experimental, was launched, Blashfield rapidly emerged as an expert in the solution of the problem of filling a given space upon a wall so that it became part and parcel of an architectural fabric. A long chapter would be needed to describe the art, the dignity, and the beauty with which he adorned public buildings all over the country. It is sufficient to say here that Blashfield made a memorable contribution to the art of his time, a contribution teeming with historical and allegorical ideas, marked by great distinction in the painter's conception of form and color, noble in composition and altogether expressive of that regard for tradition which was mentioned only a moment ago.

It is important to recognize the play of ideas in Blashfield's work, the flowering of his life-long experience in the world of great achievement. Whatever his theme, whether an episode from the career of Washington or the symbolization of the state of Minnesota, he rose to it with equal imaginative and technical power. Allusion is not inappropriate at this point to the fact that Blashfield was elected to the Academy on literary as well as artistic grounds. One of his most notable achievements—in which he had the collaboration of his first wife, the late Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield, and A. A. Hopkins—was the editing and publication in four volumes of seventy of Vasari's Lives. One more evidence, this, of his alliance with tradition. And with that alliance there persisted one of the warmest, most engagingly human influences known in the art of our day. In sympathetic encouragement, in helpful criticism, he was the comrade of every young artist with whom he came into contact. With his personality and his wisdom he was a force to be remembered, a tower of strength to mural decoration and to all the arts in America.

One word more must be added, in appreciation of his long service to the Academy. In 1916 Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield established a fund at the Academy "to assist in an effort to determine its duty regarding both the preservation of the English language in its beauty and integrity, and its cautious enrichment by such terms as grow out of modem conditions." In 1918 Blashfield substantially increased the fund. Annually the addresses delivered under it recall both her name and his, a name synonymous with good will for the things of the mind.