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CHARLES HENRY PHELPS
JOHN P. EAST

TELEPHONE BROAD 778

PHELPS & EAST
COUNSELLORS AT LAW
30 BROAD STREET, NEW YORK

Art Exhibitions
Pictures by the Late Henry W. Ranger, and Oriental Antiques on View
By ROYAL CORTISSOZ

A collection of one hundred and sixty-four paintings, left by the late Henry W. Ranger, was yesterday placed on view at the American Art Galleries, where it will be sold next Thursday and Friday evenings. About thirty-five of these works are from various American and European hands; the rest are all Ranger's own productions. his busy and successful career is quite adequately illustrated. Though some of the Canvases are carried to a lesser degree of finish than others there is hardly anything here of a fragmentary nature. There is no suggestion- such as is often given by a posthumous exhibition- of our being admitted to an artist's workshop, where we may surprise him off his guard and obtain new insight into his personality and methods. The show is rather of the kind which Ranger himself might have determined upon if he had lived to make one of his usual appearances before the public. We note the fact with the more emphasis because it bears significantly upon the character of his art.

It is doubtful if he was ever off his guard. One does not figure him as at all an impulsive collector of impressions, but as a maker of pictures, an artist not precisely insensitive to nature for her own sake, but so professional in his habit that the natural world did not fully exist for him until he had put it on canvas. The point is the more puzzling, too, when we consider his origins as a painter.

In one brief biographical notice we find him bluntly designated as "self-taught." The sketch of him in "Who's Who," the materials for which must have been supplied by himself, contains a fuller and yet no more illuminated statement: "Studied art, outside of academies, and during several years' residence in France, England and Holland." Whatever that may mean, it hardly serves to bring the secret of his professionalism to the surface. On the other hand, it leaves the way open to what seem to us a reasonable conjecture.

Training in art means supplying a painter with a language which he may then use in his own way, imposing upon it his own accent. Deprive him of it and he is driven, consciously or unconsciously, to imitation, and the odds are all in favor of his developing a formula instead of a method, a manner instead of a style. Something of this sort, we are persuaded, must have happened to Ranger. Years ago he made his first exhibition in New York and we well remember the instant impression it conveyed. Here was a man who had been seized by the influence of the Barbizon school and whose natural affinity was Rousseau.

As time passed, the natural gifts he possessed asserted themselves with ever increasing force, and the alien influence, if it did not subdue, was at all events got a little more under control. But the essential fact remaining was that Ranger had not got his inspiration from nature, that he had got it from pictures, the pictures of the Barbizon school, and that is the fact brought home to us again in the present exhibition. Staying outside academies in his younger days may have involved his staying outside galleries, but we doubt it.

The gift that betrayed him was the one that ought to have saved him, a gift for the fluent and accurate definition of landscape forms and atmospheric phenomena. The rough modulations of the earth's surface, the character of the trees as it is expressed in the very shape and gesture of bough and leaf, the play of light through foliage and on tremulous waters, the form and movement of clouds- all these things he could bring into his picture with extraordinary ease; and as he had,besides, not only a rich sense of color but a good deal of tact in the exploitation of it, it is no wonder that he was, as we have said, remarkably successful. A pleasant if not at all original faculty of composition gave the last touch to his performances. When he has got through with a canvas he had turned it into a very handsome picture.

Going carefully through this exhibition we have not found a single dll landscape or marine. on the contrary, we have found it from beginning to end endued with a certain vitality. Why, then do we say that the facility at the bottom of it betrayed him? Because it smothered whatever originality there may have been in him, left him a maker of pictures rather than a creative artist.

What is it, after all, that gives the Barbizon masters their immortality? Sharing in common the romantic naturalism that is their special stamp, they painted pictures which have, if you like, a certain family likeness, but each man in the group turned the new idiom to his own purposes. There is no mistaking a Rousseau, or a Diaz, or a Corot. These were men of genius, and genius is an isolated phenomenon. It may take part in a movement, but it stays a personal force. That is what we miss in Ranger's works. it is curious to observe the point as it comes out in some fo those canvases by his contemporaries, which he loved to have about him. They are not "full dress" examples. These souvenirs of Inness, Twachtman, Bunce, Wyant and a few of the modern Dutchmen are not at all important, in the usual acceptation of the word. But they are so like the men to whom they are attributed, they bring back so many memories of individual achievement. if the painters in questions were not in all cases prodigious exemplars of style, something like style was, at any rate, lurking in the art of each one of them.

Ranger, who, without any training, could meet them on equal terms in the rudiments of technique, nevertheless failed to get as near as they got to the roof of the matter. Style was denied to him, fresh, strong gesture which places an artist apart from his fellows, making him the unquestioned master of his own domain. He could observe and report; he could not dream and invent. He had no depth of vision. He could paint, we had almost said, superlatively well. But that judgement would apply only to his craftsmanship. 

He could not fuse craftsmanship, emotion, truth and beauty into the new and strange and unforgettable designs. Only a great artist can do that, and he was not a great artist. under the merciless east of this exhibition he emerges, instead, simply a man of talent.

The space at the American Art galleries which is not occupied by the Ranger collection is given over to a quantity of Oriental antiques belonging to Emile Tabbagh & Co. It embraces many beautiful pieces of Greek, Saracenic and Persian faïence and glass, a notable group of Persian miniatures, Turkish and Persian rugs and other objects. The sale will take place next Friday and Saturday afternoons. At the Anderson galleries a further installment of the objects brought from China by Mr Frederick Moore is exhibited, prior to a sale to be held Thursday, Friday and Saturday afternoons of next week. this section is composed of old Manchu jewelry, jades, snuff bottles, enamels and furniture.