Travels in Philadelphia/Claud Joseph Warlow
CLAUD JOSEPH WARLOW
Some days ago we were passing the new office of the Philadelphia Electric Company at Tenth and Chestnut streets, when our eye was caught, through the broad plate-glass windows, by a shimmer of blue at the back of the store. Being of a curious disposition, we pushed through the revolving doors to investigate.
On the rear wall of the office we found a beautiful painting representing Philadelphia seen from above in the twilight of a snowy winter evening. It is a large canvas, about twenty-five feet long by ten high. Now we are totally unfamiliar with the technical jargon adopted by those who talk about art; we could not even obey the advice given to us by an artist friend, always to turn a picture upside down and look at it that way before passing judgment; but this painting seemed to us a mighty fine piece of work.
As we said, it shows the city as seen from some imaginary bird's-eye vantage, perhaps somewhere above the Girard Avenue Bridge. The bending course of the Schuylkill is shown in a ribbon of deep blue; the broader and paler stretch of the Delaware closes the canvas to the east; the whole city from Cramps' shipyard down to Hog Island lies under the gaze, with the brilliance of the evening lights shining up through the soft blue dusk. The prevailing tone of the painting is blue; but examined closely the white of snow-covered roofs and the golden glow of street lights sparkling upward from the channels of the city, together with the varied tints of the masonry, lend a delightful exuberance of color, though always kept within the restrained and shadowy soberness of a winter twilight.
This painting seemed to us so remarkable an achievement that we were immediately interested and made some inquiries to find out who had done it. The story is interesting, as any story of achievement is, and it also has a touch of poignant tragedy.
In the bitter snowy days of the winter of 1917-18—and there is no Philadelphian who does not remember what that winter was like—a young artist of this city spent the daylight of almost every snowy day out on the streets with his paint box. He climbed to the top of high buildings, he haunted the Schuylkill bridges with his sketchbook, and with numbed fingers he sat on ice-crusted cornices or leaned from giddy office window-sills noting down colors, contours and the aspect of the city from various viewpoints. Time and again watchmen and policemen took him to the station house as a suspected spy until his errand was explained to the city authorities and he was given an authoritative passport. But his passion for painting snow scenes and his desire to crown handicapped years of study by a really first-rate canvas spurred him on. He had spent the previous summer in getting the topography of the city by heart, mapping the course of various streets until he knew them house by house. Then, when the bitterest winter in our history came along, the snow that bothered most of us was just what he had yearned for. He revelled in the serene sparkling colors of the winter twilight, when blazing windows cast their radiance across the milky whiteness and the sky shimmers a clear gem-like emerald and blue and mother-of-pearl.
Even those who know the city through a long lifetime of street wandering will admit the difficulty of representing the vast area as it would be seen from an imaginary gazing-point high in air. Infinite problems of perspective, infinite details of accuracy and patient verification must enter into such a work. But the artist never wavered through his long task. The sketches he had made through that long blizzard winter were gradually put on his big canvas through the hot days of last summer. Undoubtedly it was a happy task, working on that broad snowscape in the hot drowsy weather, with the growing certainty that he was doing something that measured up to his dream of portraying the city he loved, picturing it with the accurate fidelity of a map and yet with the loving eye of an artist who lingers over the beauty that most of us only intuitively suspect. The painting was finished early in the autumn and the ambitious young artist looked forward eagerly to the triumphant day when it would be hung in the new office of the Electric Company, which had encouraged the work and made it possible.
Then came the influenza epidemic, and the artist was among the first to be carried off by that tragic pestilence. He died without seeing his painting put up in the place of honor it now occupies. In his modesty he did not even put his name on the canvas—or at least if he did it is written so minutely that one hunts for it in vain.
It is good to know that the Philadelphia Electric Company is going to erect a bronze tablet in his memory beside the splendid painting on which he worked for a year and a half.
The name of the artist was Claud Joseph Warlow, well remembered at the Academy of the Fine Arts as one of its most promising pupils in recent years. He was born in Williamstown, Pa., March 31, 1888, and died in this city October 6, 1918. His skill as an artist was apparent even as a boy; chalk drawings that he made on the blackboard at school were so good that they were allowed to remain on the board for months after he had done them as an incentive to other children. After leaving school he started a sign-painting business, sketching in oils in his spare time. Owing to his father's death, about 1906, he had to postpone for some years his ambition to enter the Academy classes, finally attaining that desire in 1911. At the Academy he was awarded several prizes, notably the Cresson traveling fellowship, which he was not able to enjoy on account of the war.
We hope that all lovers of Philadelphia will take occasion to step into the office of the Electric Company to see this beautiful painting. There are no words competent to express the tragedy of those who have worked patiently for an ideal and yet die too soon to see their dreams come to full fruit. Yet it is good to remember that those pinched and bitter days of last winter, when we were all bemoaning Black Mondays and ways clogged with snow, gave Claud Warlow his opportunity to put on canvas the beauty that haunted him and which made his life a triumph. And a civilization that is wise enough to beautify an electrical office with so fine a mural canvas, that builds railroad stations like Greek temples, puts one of the world's finest organs in a department store and a painting of mosaic glass in a publishing plant, is a civilization that brings endless hope to birth.