T

J. FRANCIS MURPHY-PAINTER

HE general public is prone to overlook the fact that painters must go through long years of effort in work of the most exacting kind, that brain and hand must both be trained, and that little praise and, too often, less money or centre-of-the-stage privilege is apt to come to one during these years of probation. Modern life moves too fast to endure this youth is too eager. An easier way in these modern days of all sects, of new isms, is to sweep aside all such old-fashioned notions as the need of knowledge of drawing, of color. Color, it is said, does not exist-anything will do, and of composition and design the less we know the truer and more direct we are. To interpret life as one sees it, regardless of any preconceived or long-tried canons, is all that is necessary to constitute one an artist, if his work but reeks with the verities of his own distorted soul.

Over against all this may be set the work of the distinguished artist whose name is

written at the head of this article-work which has lived and is still living without hurt throughout all the changing fashions of art, fancy, or foolishness.

More than thirty years ago the Salmagundi Club used to have exhibitions of work done in black and white only. If one had a keen and sensitive eye, the treasures of these exhibitions were the delicate, yet very firm and strong, pencil drawings of J. Francis Murphy. A growth of weed forms against the light-a cluster of slender birchtrees at the edge of a meadow-the slant of an old barn-these were the things; but the beauty and the interest lay in the way a pencil perfectly pointed had been made to render explicitly truth of form, and one realized that here was a man who was studying, studying closely, and laying up for himself a perfect mine of knowledge-knowledge that was one day to make him a veritable master. If we turn to the pictures of that day, whether in water-color or oil, we see the use he made of his information

And how sincerely he has held his course! Year after year he added to his abilities and enlarged his study-the drawing of cloudform, the study of foliage masses, the understanding of meadows and of rocky hillsides all these were gathered into the golden sheaf of truth which has been the mine from which advancing years have been able to draw unfailingly.

And the point I make here and I think Murphy's work proves-is that painting is not a haphazard affair, to be entered into lightly or unadvisedly by any one.

We would never say of Mr. Murphy that he is a great imaginative or dramatic artist. He probably never was troubled with a vision in his life. The approach to his art is through the tenets of the Barbizon school. Tone and color are beloved of him, and the rightness of his form is never questioned; therefore one may say his art is based on beautiful seeing. He does not ask us to imagine anything rather he says simply: "I was walking across the fields to-day-the

brought it all home to show to you." And we are glad that this was and is his mission.

We must not forget, either, that this beautiful seeing has also the plus sign after it-plus the man himself there is the seeing and the doing.

No man has worked harder or longer to express himself than Murphy. When he used to do water-colors he spoiled sheet after sheet of paper to secure the clear beauty of a wash in some work that interested him, and many of his canvases have been finished only after long effort to secure the right quality of tone, the proper balance of air or texture. He is, we may say, a worker of infinite pains, and he has never been afraid of his work.

An artist told Murphy one day of his difficulties with the proper rendering of foliage, that he had to paint out and paint in, and his trees never seemed possible. Murphy's advice was quick and to the point. "Make a lot of drawings from nature with a sharp pencil," he said.

Here,

then, is at least part of his secret-a willingness to go back to nature and to take pains. It's a sermon that all great artists have preached ever, must ever preach, to themselves, and not fear.

The eminent sanity of Murphy's art has always endeared it to artist and public. He is logical and he is trained.

For kinship he is nearer to Wyant than to Inness or others of the older group, and yet, like them all, he is practically selftrained, and it is curiously interesting to note that these men are almost altogether self-taught or taught at home. They are American painters, painting in America, and were we searching for an American landscape we should find it in Murphy's work, done in any one of the years he has practised his profession. Some day some one must write a chapter or two on the home training of these great painters and add to them the names of Winslow Homer and George Fuller.

I am far from meaning to say that a passing glance will give one an understanding of Murphy's message in the world of art. There are many qualities that lie too deep for glances and come to those only who will pause and study. Nor is his gamut so limited as one might believe by what he chooses to give us to-day. In other years there were some wonderful green studiespoems, if you will-done in magical tones of gray and green, and long ago I can remember sunset things where the horizon edge burned in living fire and the world was shrouded in the mystery of nightfall. And he has felt the weather and the season's range particularly he has loved and painted the spring and the autumn. The warm haze of autumn and Indian summer is often evident in his work and greatly loved for the mystery of half-revealed forms.

The technic, so far as one may say who has not watched the process of development in a canvas, is very direct, very painter-like and honest. If one means by directness the overevidence of paint-andbrush handling, then another meaning must be attached to the word here, for we are never troubled by the pigment in Mr. Murphy's landscapes-on the contrary, the loving care in the use and beauty of pigment is a characterístic in the pictures. The earlier ones showed us plane upon plane of

meadow or hillside, with every inch of the space most delightfully drawn and painted, each object receiving its just amount of color and tone and accent, and if the artist used glazes they are not apparent in the finished work. As time has passed, Mr. Murphy has become, as most thoughtful artists do, more and more synthetic. His pictures are broader, less worked out in detail, but big and calm, the envelope of atmosphere beautifully adjusted.

Against the skies such tree forms as he uses are as delicately feathered as anything that Corot ever did, and with no likeness to that painter. A Murphy is always a Murphy, whether it be a work of years ago or of to-day, and this sterling honesty is a direct expression of the man. He has seen all the schools and all the isms come upon the board, speak their little piece, and go. He has listened and has observed—perhaps he has found qualities which in the silence of his own studio have been helpful, but no great revolution has shown itself in his work. Yesterday, perhaps, he accented more fully with darks, while in the works of to-day the accents are reached in the lights, making his canvases a trifle less heavy and just the breath of a tone higher in general value.

Quite as fully as the artists, the public has become keenly alive to the qualities in Mr. Murphy's work. It has received his pictures as authoritative coinage of pure gold is ever received, and the artist in the height of his powers has the pleasure and privilege of knowing that he is popular while still alive, a reward seldom meted out to painters, and won in this instance by a sturdy adherence to those ideals which have led him on.

And yet this popularity has not spoiled him or his work. It's a very delightful thing that we have not had to kill him, or break his heart, or sour him with long waiting in order to enjoy his work.

What the future will do with his fame we cannot tell, but if we may make an estimate built on experience in the lives of other artists his place is secure.

This serene calm seldom comes to an artist either here or abroad, and it is, of course, rarer here than there.

It has been said of Murphy's landscapes that they are deficient in design, that he cares nothing for pattern, and that composition to him is a valueless consideration.

These opinions are empty and without due knowledge, for in his earliest works the balances of composition were beautifully felt; in his later things, as has been said, he follows synthetic expression and cares for very little elaboration of form. Always, it appears to me, he has cared little for the silhouette, that thing which so dominates the observation of the Japanese and which is an essential to the decorator; but Murphy is not a decorator-his terms are three-dimensional, and nowhere are you left unconscious of the substance, nowhere obsessed with the pattern, as with Blakelock. In Murphy you feel the firm earth under your feet-the sky is neither paint nor putty-it is air in its just understanding of sky structure and cloud-form, and, if we are to be insistent upon the weakness of pattern, let us observe and feel the compensation in his rendering of that most exquisite feature of landscape and landscape

art, the sky-line. Not many painters observe it, and few give it to the observer with the beauty of a reverent touch. Murphy does! If we choose to be severe in our strictures, the thing which may be said against most modern effort is the lack of reverence, and yet it is a demonstrable proposition that there is no great art without it. I have no intention of dwelling upon this, but wish only to draw attention to this quality which abounds in Murphy's landscapes and is one of the great beauties to be seen there. Technically, also, his works are fine, and while I do not know his processes, the result ennobles the canvas.

An ultimate opinion, therefore, places Mr. Murphy safely in that great company of painters who have made American landscape art as significant as the work of the men of 1830 and with a virility characteristic of our people. ELLIOTT DAINGERFIELD.

AN

A New Form of

last week of November brought into animated discussion several as pects of this country's financial situation. Following several large loans to France and England, for which American and forBorrowing eign stocks or bonds were pledged as collateral security; also two loans of $50,000,000 each to Russia, not thus secured, and also four "unsecured" loans to the French cities of Paris, Bordeaux, Lyons, and Marseilles, aggregating somewhat over $100,000,000, another form of European borrowing was announced. The British and French Treasuries, so the New York fiscal agents of those two governments announced, had "each authorized the sale in this market of a limited amount of their short-term bills, running at various maturities from thirty days to six months."

These "Treasury bills" have long been familiar in the London money market, where the Exchequer raises money on them to pay governmental expenses in advance of the large tax collections. During the war they have been issued in much greater amounts than usual, and in anticipation less of tax collections than of the floating of another large war loan. The proposal for their issue in America stipulated that the bills would be made payable in American money at New York and would bear interest adjusted to the current money rate.

THE

Board and Withdrawal

HE Federal Reserve Board, which exercises general supervision over the national banking system, opposed the taking of these notes by American banks. It did not question their intrinsic soundness, and it passed no criticism on of Federal Opposition American loans in general Reserve to Europe. The fact was well known to the Board that English Treasury bills of this character have for many years been discounted by banks of the European Continent, and that Canadian banks. have taken them in large amounts during the present war. But the Board discussed the question purely with reference to the position and policies of American banks at the present juncture. These bills, it thought, might come to be taken in such amounts "that liquid funds of our banks, which should be available for short-credit facilities to our merchants, manufacturers, and farmers, would be exposed to the danger of being absorbed for other purposes to a disproportionate degree." Therefore the Board announced to the banks that it "does not regard it in the interest of the country at this time that they invest in foreign Treasury bills of this character."

Clearly, this warning was based on the assumptions that the amount of such issues could not be controlled, that the banks would be tempted to lend on such bills in larger sums than would be prudent from the standpoint