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WILLIAM GLACKENS' FLOWER-PORTRAITS
by
Mary Fanton Roberts

If you know the fringe of Greenwich Village in New York, that point which is more Fifth Avenue than Bohemia, you may recall a fine old Victorian house on Ninth Street, which still has the high stoop with rich iron hand-rails. And perhaps you have met the owner of the house, the wife of the celebrated painter, William J. Glackens, who dies in 1938.
Mrs. Glackens' idea of a memorial to her husband's work is to bring together some of his paintings and drawings once a year, showing them in the drawing rooms of the beautiful house in which he lived. For a month, these connecting rooms form an art gallery, with the paintings all hung on the line, and lighted by a man of wide understanding of art, who always makes a special study of the original light in a picture and intensifies this by his mechanical contrivances.
Mr. Glackens' pictures, shown in this memorial exhibition, are not for sale. Mrs. Glackens' sole purpose is to keep her husband's memory alive in a world so prone to let greatness sink into oblivion. The recent annual exhibition presented a collection of nudes and flowers, the nudes handled with rare perspicacity as to color and form, and the flowers done with an insight and sensitiveness that places William Glackens as one of the foremost painters of the modern world.
A quality of sure insight into beauty I find preeminent in the Painting of W.J. Glackens. Whether he is doing an audacious crown on a shining summer beach on Long Island, a gay party on a flower-bordered river in France, women in bright colors shopping from open wagons on Grand Street, or a bouquet of anemones and phlox against a vivid secondary