WOMAN IN ART
characteristics. This fact increases world interest in every showing of international art.
Art is a large drawing factor in any world's fair, and such grouping of art works proclaims the advancement of the world; each recurrence of such assembling of art and architecture has proved a potent influence for nearly half a century. But we need to keep in mind the artists and their art, the craftsmen and their craft that glorified the preceding exhibitions, whereby to measure the advance of the world.
The art of Mme. Breton continues. She married M. Adrian Demont, the landscape painter, but retained her name in connection for the sake of her art work. Her summer home is on the Brittany coast, and her heart and hand have always gone out to the fisher-folk in her neighborhood. Illustrative of her painting in that environment, is "Her Man Is On the Sea," full of pathos that fills the lives of hundreds of the wives of the sea-faring folk,—the mother by the pitifully small embers, her sick baby on her lap, waiting—waiting.
In that bleak, barren Northland of France, in the extreme West of North, stand the mystic Cromlechs and Dolmens of the French Stonehenge, which, for more centuries than history records, have been attributed to certain rites and ceremonies of pre-historic Druids or Celts. Tradition and Cæsar's diary are responsible for our knowledge of some of their religious beliefs.
Mme. Breton has added interest to fragments of such beliefs in a painting she has called "Le Gui." (The Mistletoe.) The oak was considered sacred by the Druids, hence the mistletoe, a tenacious parasite of that tree, was supremely sacred in their esteem. For certain ceremonies the mistletoe was necessary; it must be cut by a priest, robed in white with a golden girdle. It was cut with a sickle of gold. A priest was chosen from childhood for his office, his education covering twenty years, and never must his hair be cut.
The artist has condensed all this in her painting, and art visualizes for us what tradition hints at.
Pathos seems to have come to the human world on the storm-clouds that met our first parents on their downward way from the gates of Paradise. Sorrow and Regret are the twin sisters that accompanied the souls of the first humans from Eden, and Pathos, their shadow, stays only at the door of the tomb. You will find Pathos shadowing humanity from Genesis to Revelation and ever since. Here is a Bible story in point, Mme. Breton's brush giving her expression of it.
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