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Picture and Text 1893 By: Henry James (1843-1916) |
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By Henry James Harper And Brothers MDCCCXCIII
NOTE Two of the following papers were originally published, with
illustrations, in Harper's Magazine and the title of one of them the
first of titles has been altered from "Our Artists in Europe." The
other, the article on Mr. Sargent, was accompanied by reproductions
of several of his portraits. The notice of Mr. Abbey and that of Mr.
Reinhart appeared in Harper's Weekly. That of Mr. Alfred Parsons figured
as an introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition of his pictures.
The sketch of Daumier was first contributed to The Century , and "After
the Play" to The New Review .
BLACK AND WHITE [Illustration: Black and White Page Image] If there be nothing new under the sun there are some things a good
deal less old than others. The illustration of books, and even more of
magazines, may be said to have been born in our time, so far as
variety and abundance are the signs of it; or born, at any rate, the
comprehensive, ingenious, sympathetic spirit in which we conceive and
practise it. If the centuries are ever arraigned at some bar of justice to answer
in regard to what they have given, of good or of bad, to humanity, our
interesting age (which certainly is not open to the charge of having
stood with its hands in its pockets) might perhaps do worse than put
forth the plea of having contributed a fresh interest in "black and
white." The claim may now be made with the more confidence from the very
evident circumstance that this interest is far from exhausted. These
pages are an excellent place for such an assumption. In Harper they have
again and again, as it were, illustrated the illustration, and they
constitute for the artist a series of invitations, provocations and
opportunities. They may be referred to without arrogance in support of
the contention that the limits of this large movement, with all its new
and rare refinement, are not yet in sight.
I It is on the contrary the constant extension that is visible, with
the attendant circumstances of multiplied experiment and intensified
research circumstances that lately pressed once more on the attention
of the writer of these remarks on his finding himself in the particular
spot which history will perhaps associate most with the charming
revival. A very old English village, lying among its meadows and hedges,
in the very heart of the country, in a hollow of the green hills of
Worcestershire, is responsible directly and indirectly for some of the
most beautiful work in black and white with which I am at liberty to
concern myself here; in other words, for much of the work of Mr. Abbey
and Mr. Alfred Parsons. I do not mean that Broadway has told these
gentlemen all they know (the name, from which the American reader has to
brush away an incongruous association, may as well be written first as
last); for Mr. Parsons, in particular, who knows everything that can be
known about English fields and flowers, would have good reason to insist
that the measure of his large landscape art is a large experience. I
only suggest that if one loves Broadway and is familiar with it, and
if a part of that predilection is that one has seen Mr. Abbey and Mr.
Parsons at work there, the pleasant confusion takes place of itself;
one's affection for the wide, long, grass bordered vista of brownish
gray cottages, thatched, latticed, mottled, mended, ivied, immemorial,
grows with the sense of its having ministered to other minds and
transferred itself to other recipients; just as the beauty of many a
bit in many a drawing of the artists I have mentioned is enhanced by the
sense, or at any rate by the desire, of recognition. Broadway and much
of the land about it are in short the perfection of the old English
rural tradition, and if they do not underlie all the combinations by
which (in their pictorial accompaniments to rediscovered ballads, their
vignettes to story or sonnet) these particular talents touch us almost
to tears, we feel at least that they would have sufficed: they cover
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