Arts and Letters

George de Forest Brush was fortunate in his epoch. Born in 1855, he came to maturity in the seventies and shared in the spirit then promoted by the rise of leaders who were destined to give a new lease of life to American art. He was a contemporary of John La Farge, Winslow Homer, George Inness, and Abbott Thayer, to whom something like a golden age in our school of painting is due, an age remarkable for its pursuit of beauty and good craftsmanship. He followed that pursuit with intense devotion and it was inevitable that he should have been elected a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1910, entering as by a high prerogative an organization which fosters alike respect for tradition and the play of individuality. In the series of exhibitions which the Academy has held there is none to be recalled as more in harmony with its aims, or more distinguished, than the one of works by Brush which was arranged here in 1933. It illustrated the art of a man whose innate conservatism never quenched his creative fire.

Little biographical information concerning him is available. We know that Shelbyville, Tenn., was his birthplace and that he died at Hanover, N. H., in April, 1941. We know that like so many American artists he was trained in Paris, under Gérôme, and that early in his career he saw much of Indian life in the West, and painted it. We know that he travelled abroad, especially in Italy. We know finally that he lived a long life at his home in Dublin, N. H., and that he was evenly successful, the recipient of many honors. But on the whole personal details are scant. This may be regrettable but his true history is widespread, for all men to see. It is written in his works.

These had their origin in a decisively spiritual nature. Some words of his own, written on Thayer, give a clue to the point of view which he held in his time of pupilage and to which he was ever faithful. "Coming into that strange life of the Paris Latin Quarter," he says, "I know many of the young Americans, along with myself, were stunned by it. It seemed at first a great shock… Abbott was the influence that I know must have held many a young man up to an ideal of conduct. It was his stand as against the drift of the Quarter that endeared him to many of us. It is what attracted me to him." He was the more easily attracted to the white-souled painter implied in this passage, the painter who became his lifelong comrade, because his own wagon was spontaneously hitched to a star. Yet this involved him in no hazy dreaming. On the contrary he gave himself up whole-heartedly to the disciplinary admonitions of Gérôme. No remarks of his were ever more characteristic than those which he once made in a lecture: "A student learns nothing until he comes under a master…. We must not run after new things. We must find out what the masters knew."

Gérôme was a master of form, draughtsmanship, and composition and Brush was so responsive that his early drawing is a little hard, a little inelastic, like that of his teacher, and there is obvious emulation of the latter in one of the first of the American's works, "The Sculptor and the King." It is markedly in the manner of Gérôme. But Brush soon got into his stride, exercising an individualized and very beautiful kind of drawing and in certain of his Indian subjects, painted long ago, like "The Indian and the Lily" or "The Silence Broken," it was clear that he was already his own man. He was as clearly himself in portraiture, in his designs from pagan mythology and in the "Mother and Child" pictures which have done perhaps most to establish his fame. In these he was touched. to some extent by the old Florentine and Venetian schools, but it is significant that he was never moved to adopt the Madonna motive from them but left his compositions essentially American, essentially the expression of his own genius. They are lovely studies of their theme and, besides having tenderness, they reach an impressive plane in the matter of technique.

I have alluded to his draughtsmanship but must return to it for a moment. It tells exquisitely in his pencil studies of form and drapery. It might seem exaggeration to bring in at this point the illustrious names of Leonardo and Dürer. In the definition of form he is neither as sensitive as the one nor as powerful as the other. But I cannot help thinking of them as I remember his mastery over the figure or over the fold of a robe, the fineness and precision of his touch, and especially the beauty with which he invested his work, whether in black and white or in oils. It is as a great craftsman and a noble idealist, and, I may add, as a lovable man, that we must bid him farewell.