WOMAN IN ART
costume, insisting that arrows, feathers, and tomahawks were the natural accoutrement of the American Indians, and he could not paint them in helmets with spears, nor would he accoutre the Colonial army in Roman togas and bareheaded, but in the remnants of colonial buff and blue and the tattered, war-worn garb of the earlier settler.
In revolution from such artificial and untrue methods, influenced greatly by West, artists began painting things as they saw them, painting slavishly from nature, every leaf and stone, and such work merited the term realism. This was naturally characteristic of the early Flemish masters. "A Market Window" by Gerard Dow displays cabbage with dew drops on the leaves, and a snail drawing his slimy line along the polished counter. The teal duck lies limp, but his exquisite feathers are painted to the life. Thanks be, man is a creature of change and progress. Slavish copying, keeping to distinctness of line and minuteness of detail, was hard on the eyes, requiring a magnifying glass, and in large subjects produced a hardness of outline and flatness of color.
Thus painting lacked light, air, and tones of atmosphere; so purple shadows began to appear, loosening the object from the canvas; light and air surrounded the figure; wind was in the trees; it lashed the waters into foam, it blew the gowns of the peasant women walking the dunes with anxious gaze to seaward; it toyed with the hair of little children, sun-crowned with a halo, and with the happy girl dancing over the grass in pure joy of life—all became symbols of joy in the caprice of wind and sun.
So came action to canvas. The painter from life had to work rapidly with broad brush or knife, a stroke here, a spot there, blue for a shadow, yellow for a streak of sunlight, a dab for a high-light—presto! Impressionism was born.
There comes a time in life—as we all have known—when building blocks stimulate activity and imagination in a child, they fill a need in his development. In this twentieth century art reached that period for a few, who colored their blocks and built up a tardy cubism.
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