Arts and Letters

Kenyon Cox passed from us at a moment when we specially needed him. In these strenuous days of world-wide disputation, such clarity of mental vision as his, accompanied by such a high order of mental endowment, is invaluable—in the arts as elsewhere, for in such a time the arts will be modified with all else. His perception was almost crystalline, enabling him to see straight through to the core of a puzzling question, and his honesty in stating what he saw was absolute. More than once in a committee of artists who had argued long over which of two lines of action was the better to pursue, Cox quietly remarked that it was impossible to arrive by either line, and convincingly showed why! Such a mentor and guide is at times invaluable among a class of men to whom impulsiveness is attributed as a part of their temperament.

Cox was a veritable bulwark of directness in art, of sanity, of culture. In his technique, as was natural to one to whom directness was a passion, he loved best, among media, the point, whether of pencil, crayon, or charcoal; but whenever he took up his palette, he thought first and last of the Venetians. The artists of the full sixteenth century were those with whom he liked to live in communion. Among colorists, Paul Veronese was his divinity—Veronese with his simple, clear statements. When it came to line he loved Michael Angelo. In composition he remembered Raphael, Paul Baudry, and his Parisian master Gérôme. He painted large mural panels, little genre panels, and many portraits. He was fond of ornament, and frequently gave landscape backgrounds to his figures; and he modeled at least one statue in heroic size for the New York Custom House.

Cox's literary talent and charm of style, as marked as his pictorial gift, his wide reading, his clear-sighted observation and his honesty combined to make him a most admirable and discriminating writer on painting and sculpture. He held high offices in many societies of artists, and might have held many more had his health permitted. His passing from among us cannot fail to be deplored by every one who has at heart the true interests of culture and of art in America.