WOMAN IN ART
shouldering a pack and going afield, as do the men, for sketching. Mary Butler is one of the twentieth century young women who can and does face the sunrise, the freshening breeze, or the storm; she tramps the hills, the downs and bogs of Ireland, and gleans the picturesque and beautiful as her eyes see it and her soul feels it. She is a real nature lover, and hence a landscape painter. She loves the wind and paints it, and the glory of sunrise, and is up betimes to enjoy and paint it. She appreciates the silence and solemnity of uninhabited stretches of hill and vale, and interprets them on canvas.
Mary Butler loves to hark back to her Quaker grandmother's girlhood to get at the beginning of her own longing for the beautiful and her strong desire for art expression. It is one of those cases that may be illustrated by the florist who puts his greenhouse rose bushes in a cool, dark place for months, keeping them in a hibernating condition, as it were, and when brought into congenial warmth of sunshine he is rewarded with roses of remarkable strength and beauty.
The rosebud plucked surreptitiously and tucked in the edge of that grandmother's white kerchief was more beautiful because of the severe gray of her gown, and was more eloquent than words of her innate love of the beautiful.
The grand-daughter of today revels in depicting beauty as she sees it broadcasted in this munificent world of ours. She catches the characteristics of the country where she tarries to sketch. You could not mistake her presentation of "Gratfeld Mountain" for a scene in the New Hampshire mountains; the atmosphere and the lay of the land have their own individuality; the low-roofed cottages, almost hidden in the oasis of wild shrubbery at the foot of the bleak, barren hills, make a suggestive canvas, and anyone who has had even a glimpse of Hibernia would say at once, if looking at "Farm Lane," "That is a bit of Old Ireland!" Miss Butler paints with rapidity and strength, and there are instances when her work tells its story or gives its introduction to a country or locality almost better in black and white than in pigment, so telling are her values. The direct contact of brush to canvas, saying what she has to say and no more, recalls again the fact of her Quaker ancestry—the spirit she is heir to from people and principles that knew how to help in the building of a nation, and how to keep it.
Mary Butler has been very happy in representing light in "Early Morning—Monhegan." It is just the place with rock-formed seat where one would love to sit and watch the coming of a new day and breathe the refreshing air from across the sunlit water.
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