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It is curious how the familiar object becomes the most illusory, the least prescient. So often it seems that custom makes for blindness and close contact deadens sensitiveness; and though propinquity, we are told, awakens love, surely experience tells us that it does not engender intelligent appreciation. We know that application may increase understanding - that is different - but so many of us live thoughtlessly and casually, without appreciation, that the familiar things about us are being seen through a glass darkly, and it takes surprise, a sort of spiritual cocktail, to stimulate our threadbare emotions. 
Only for the artists, those eager spirits, the poet, the painter, the musician, does life open her Pandora box of mysteries and lavishly show her jewels of scent, color and form. And through his specialized technique the artist presents his ever varying conception of beauty. Of course the artist is occasionally a victim of his personality and therein lies the difference between Rembrandt and Dali, but fortunately forever there will be men of curiously intensive vision who penetrate to the very heart of beauty, the surface of which surrounds us all in our daily routine of life. 
This quality of sure insight into beauty I find preeminent in the painting of W. J. Glackens, whether he is doing an audacious crowd on a shining summer beach at 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 background. He never seems to startle or shock. He never had a box office mind. I am not sure he was even conscious of any definite purpose. He wished only to paint what he saw in any phase of life and to see down into the very core of it. He found inspiration in a sailboat dipping in the wind, a little girl asleep behind a bunch of