ART at Home and Abroad

THE cabled news that the De Ridder collection of seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish art was to be brought here has aroused a great deal of interest in our inner and outer art circles. The late Herr De Ridder lived at the Villa Schönberg, at Cronberg, in comparative seclusion. His collection was purchased by François Kleinberger, the dealer of Paris and New York, by private treaty for a sum exceeding $2,500,000. It was through Mr. Kleinberger, coincidentally, that this collection was formed. It is to be placed on exhibition late in November or in the first part of the succeeding month. Definite arrangements for the abode of the exhibition have, at this writing, not yet been made, although it will doubtlessly be at the Kleinberger Gallery, 709 Fifth Avenue. The collecton comprises examples of the work of, with but very few exceptions, all the Dutch and Flemish masters of the seventeenth century. It is the collection of a connoisseur and not, as is true of so many collections to-day, gathered by money above knowledge. Dr. Wilhelm Bode, the famous German expert, wrote its entire catalogue. Which fact, say the wise in art, is enough to prove its worth; for Dr. Bode understands the art of the period it represents better, perhaps, than any other expert living to-day, and to this knowledge he adds a conscience.

HERR DE RIDDER collected pictures in preference to names, and, by happy chance, managed to gather around him good names as well as good pictures. There are but eightyseven canvases in the collection and scarcely one that could have been omitted and not missed. Indeed one feels in it the hand of an editor. Herr De Ridder may have begun practicing the art of collecting, at random, with little knowledge and less taste. He may at one time have bought or fought over finicky mediocrities with many brother collectors; he may have purchased, before discretion overtook him, Dutch Old Masters from the brushes of capable Frenchmen of the nineteenth century, or bad, though authentic, examples from the seventeenth. If this is true, then he has by means of a just and accurate system of weeding, absolutely hidden those early faults. There are few, if any, bald blemishes in his collection. It shows him to have been from the beginning to the end a man of discernment and taste.

MOREOVER it should prove the most important collection, outside of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ever publicly shown here. And it should prove particularly enchanting to Americans, because most of us arc slow to appreciate modern art — slow, indeed, to appreciate any art that is not stamped with ageworn honor marks, and quick to add glory to the already glorified. Further than this the attitude of the Dutch artists is one that makes a direct appeal to the Anglo-Saxon. In the seventeenth century especially, the Dutch and Flemish painters made everything subservient to the call of the heart. They were not, with the Frenchmen of their time, stylists. They reproduced aspects of the facts around them in instinctive, rather than sought, speech. So are we naturalists — when we arc not puritans — ready to portray truth with the exaggeration necessary to a realistic end in pictures that might otherwise be weak; ready to meet vulgarity with vulgarity; to show humanity in all its irregularity, in all its weakness and strength, instead of attempting to hide these with the measured order of the classicist.

THE men represented in this collection attempted to gain but one goal, the realization of self, and thus arrived at a variety equal to that of mankind. They reached from the sublime to the ridiculous, and omitted no station on the way from one to the other—no purely human station. They were Jan Steen and Teniers and drawn to humor, or Rembrandt and Rubens and dignified. Above everything we find in the record they have left a desire, at once powerful and sane, to put down honestly, bare of prescribed phraseology, the honest convictions that came to them. They lacked grace, tact, the ability to turn pretty or elegant phrases; stumbling upon truths, they blurted them out in the strongest terms at their command, as careless sometimes of composition as they were always of any superficial or stylish consideration. Here one must except Ter Borch, well represented in this collection, the classic Vermeer; Rubens, who had seen the Italians; and Hals, whose style, however, was born rather of instinctive love of good workmanship than of any aesthetical inspiration. They were of the bourgeoisie in everything; but of a bourgeoisie of freemen on whom no sort of subjugation, attempted or real, had any visible effect; a bourgeoisie that spoke its thoughts as boldly as the thoughts themselves were bold.

WHILE the Frenchmen in red-heeled shoes were affecting postures inspired by Valenciennes lace or bringing women and perfumery to the battlefield, the Dutchmen, at the other extreme, stood, ate, thought, and fought sturdily like men, and also, a little, like animals. They were a hundred years nearer to primitive man and they scoffed, rudely, bluntly, at the daintiness, the refinement of the French civilization. To them a spade was as it is to-day, nothing more nor less than a spade. It is for that reason, perhaps, that Rembrandt, the greatest of them all, gained immortality. He did not seek style, a method of talking, well balanced periods; he sought to become a man. And, perforce, the style that came to him, for style must come, was the creature of his thought and walk, the swing of the man. His work contains all the manly virtues; force, virility, dignity, and, finest of these, kindness. The religion of Rembrandt is the religion of Walt Whitman. He is blunt, sometimes even uncouth, but always kind and always dignified. He pays equal attention to beggars and to dignitaries. Embracing life fully, he never feels the prig's repugnance.

REMBRANDT presents the best picture of Dutch art that could be drawn. It is strong when it is not in the ordinary sense refined. For example Jan Steen, Teniers, and Van Ostade, the humorists of Dutch art, committed many vulgarities in painting with honesty and truth incidents of daily life; the dentist's chair, an inn whose occupants have sinned in the name of greed, a surgeon at work, the doubtful humor to be filched from the odd contortions forced by pain. Hogarth in England drew morals out of the same themes. The Dutchmen were not moralists; they were children, plain speakers of plain truths, actuated by a love of life which they attempted neither to regulate nor to hide. Even to-day we can hear them laugh with reckless abandon, and we must feel the infection; we must, because we also are human, laugh with them. In Rubens, while we do not forget the man, we find the suave courtier, the man who has learned to talk, to select words and ideas and to present these fluently and gracefully. Hals is again the bourgeois, but one to whom has been given the faculty of incisive speech, of economy and brilliancy in expression.

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HE is represented in this collection with two examples, portraits of the good and homely women of his race and period, that in their justness of value, their dry accuracy, and their brilliancy of speech, remind one of those in the Morgan collection. Of the three Rembrandts the most important is said to be the signed portrait of a gentleman of the Rattan family, which, discovered comparatively recently, bears the date 1634.

AMONG others of the more prominent painters of the period represented are Rubens, with two examples; Ter Borch; de Hooch, examples of whose work is rare in America; Cuyp, Keyser, Bol, Van Coppel, the two Ruysdaels, Soloman and Jacob; Steen, Teniers, Van Ostade, and the elegant Van Dyck. The pictures are mostly of cabinet size.

THE art season has at last awakened from its summer sleep. Painters are back in town executing the landscapes the lazy pastoral atmosphere failed to draw from them, and the skippers are back at the helms of the merchant ships. Very soon the critics will be decrying or admiring the consistency of the national art and the fevered inconstancy of the art from art's hub, Paris. Meanwhile dealers are beginning to make good with definiteness promises that in the summer had been vague. The Montross Gallery is to begin this season, as it did the last two, with a section of the Bahr collection of Chinese antiquities. The Macbeth Gallery in November is to hold its annual exhibition of the summer work of the Society of Painters of the Far West and to continue to prove thus the painter possibilities of the national landscape.

PICTURES by Bryson Burroughs, Curator of Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jonas Lie, Dewitt Parshall, Henry Golden Dearth (not in the new manner), John F. Carlson, and Howard Russell Butler are to be seen, any time, at the Folsom Gallery. Mr. Burroughs with cool classicism, a conscientious manner, descriptive details, facts, is reminiscent of the antiquarian who is ever ready to place age before beauty and tradition above truth. His pictures are the "Hippocrene" and "Garden of Venus." Admire them as technical accomplishments, academic but not commonplace, and also as documents in proof of the just conscience of the good historian. Mr. Dearth shows a moonlight to which tall poplars and a rich sky lend the grace and luxuriance, born in the studio without a doubt, always to be associated with his art. Mr. Jonas Lie is here, as is often the case, too clever; a juggler or an orator interesting to watch or to hear for a moment, a minute, or an hour, but assuredly not longer, not up to the time — it must come — when we begin to link words to ideas. We find in Mr. Butler the genius of the commonplace, a knowledge of or symapthy with the public taste, a twin mind to that of Ben Foster who shows one or two landscapes at Macbeths. Mr. Carlson is a young man whose promise may die with the ever increasing dexterity of his brush. He has found a picture, his own, a picture of trees in a snow covered ground that silhouette shapes, graceful, never formidable like those of Rousseau for example, against a tame sky. He has repreated that picture often now.

CADWALLADER WASHBURN, pupil of H. Siddons Mowbray, William M. Chase, Sorolla, and Albert Besnard, opened the season at the Keppel Gallery with an exhibition of his etchings. They are additions to the Mexican and New Jersey series which have been seen in this gallery during the past two seasons. Mr. Washburn deserted the brush for the needle not long ago. His success in the new medium was immediate. He is one of the economists of art, a miser of line. His landscapes, and he is essentially a landscape etcher, are scantily clothed, in some cases to the point of bareness or barrenness. In these prints one feels that he knows the masters too well and nature not well enough. The descriptions become mere plans in which masses and planes are mapped or blocked out, to use the painter's expression, and distinguishing details left to be supplied by the eye of the spectator. Elsewhere, in the successes, one. must feel the justness of his method, and admire his attitude toward his subject. He is sincere and reverent and sometimes, as in the "Fisherman's Return," concise and strong.

MARTIN BIRNBAUM, who for some years has arranged exhibitions at the gallery of the Berlin Photographic Company, promises this season to outdo the lively character of his past seasons. With very limited space he has given us I peeps at the trend of the intellectuals of modern European art which could be got nowhere else in this city.

HIS present programme is as follows: the work of Leon Bakst in November; the graphic arts of AustriaHungary and Bohemia in December, a group of works by the members of the New York Society of American Etchers, the first show by this society, in January; and a collection of examples of Mohammedan art in February. The works of the Englishmen, Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts, are to be shown in March.