USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Fifty years of Boston; a memorial volume issued in commemoration of the tercentenary of 1930; 1880-1930, Pt. 1 > Part 44
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as chairman. In 1914 a joint faculty was formed with two co-ordinate schools, Architecture and Landscape Architecture, to be joined in 1929 by the new School of City Planning. The services of Mr. Olmsted and Mr. Arthur A. Shurcliff (then Shurtleff) in the early days of the work in landscape architecture developed the professional ideals enunciated by Olmsted, Sr., and Charles Eliot, and these have been kept in view to the present day.
During these years, an exceptional educational library in the fields of landscape architecture and city planning has been built up, so that today it is probably unequaled anywhere in the world, and, taken together with the Codman Collection at the Boston Public Library, makes Boston the natural center for research in the history of the landscape art. This rich library back- ground has combined with intelligent instruction and with close association with students of architecture and the fine arts to promote a broad and discerning view of the subject among the graduates of the Harvard School.
Scores of young men thus trained at Harvard have gone forth to take their part in the professional practice of landscape architecture all over the United States, and form not only a substantial proportion of the membership of the American Society of Landscape Architects, but also of the teaching staffs of the college courses for appreciation or professional training which have gradually increased in number in the last two decades.
The vicinity of Boston has also contributed largely to the education of women for the practice of the landscape art. In 1901 Mrs. Edward Gilchrist Low established Lowthorpe at Groton, which now has a good number of success- ful alumnae in professional practice and many more former students who have taken shorter courses or the special gardening lectures offered to amateurs.
Beginning in 1928-29, Simmons College in Boston established a School of Landscape Architecture under a co-operative arrangement with Lowthorpe, which enabled students in both institutions to work for a bachelor's degree in landscape architecture.
In 1916 two Harvard instructors, Henry A. Frost and Bremer W. Pond, established a professional school for women which in November, 1924, was incorporated as The Cambridge School of Domestic Architecture and Landscape Architecture. This graduate school, with Professor Frost as principal, is the only school to offer the two complete curricula to women under one faculty of architects and landscape architects working in close association, and, enjoying generous co-operation from Harvard instructors, it has sent forth many com- petent alumnae, now in active practice.
In the field of landscape architecture, Boston is thus seen to have carried on its tradition as a great educational center for both men and women, and to have made a living contribution to the teaching and practice of the art through- out the country.
In the history of landscape architecture in Boston, the year 1913 marks the organization of the Boston Society of Landscape Architects, which became in 1914 a chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects. The Boston Society numbered twenty-seven charter members, with James Sturgis Pray, president, Arthur A. Shurcliff, vice-president, and Fletcher Steele, secretary- treasurer. Among these charter members was John Charles Olmsted, a founder
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and first president of the American Society of Landscape Architects, established in 1899. Following Professor Pray, successive presidents of the Boston Chapter were: Herbert J. Kellaway, Arthur A. Shurcliff, Percival Gallagher, John Nolen, Loring Underwood, Bremer Whidden Pond, Robert Washburn Beal, Harold Hill Blossom, and again at the date of writing (1932) John Nolen.
Although the very existence of the Boston Society of Landscape Archi- tects and its frequent meetings were from the first stimulating to its members and numerous guests, its greatest service has lain in educating the publie to an appreciation of what the landscape architect is and does, and in its official concern with publie matters affecting landscape and civic amenities.
At the time of the Great War, when their technical services were required by the United States Government, members of the Chapter took their place as camp planners and designers, co-operating with architects, engineers, and realtors in the creation of the emergency towns and housing accommodations needed for war workers. As a contribution for the use of towns and cities in New England, the Boston Society of Landscape Architects joined with the Boston Society of Architects in a valuable, illustrated publication entitled "War Memorials," intended to suggest appropriate esthetic ideals unfortunately lacking in many monuments commemorating the Civil War.
The educational activities of the Chapter have been principally directed toward exhibitions and toward attendant lectures and newspaper publicity intended to interpret the landscape architect's aims. The first exhibition of the Chapter was held at the Boston City Club in 1915, ineluding drawings, photographs and models. The Chapter exhibited jointly with the Boston Society of Architects for several years and in 1924 alone held a large and very successful exhibition in Horticultural Hall. Other particularly notable exhibits were that collected for the Centennial Show of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in Mechanics Building, and that held in Horticultural Hall in co-opera- tion with the Boston Society of Sculptors, besides the most recent (1932) display of landscape work at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In connection with several exhibitions of the Chapter and also with the flower shows in Horticultural Hall, Boston landscape arehitects have taken part in several series of illustrated lectures, which drew audiences interested in the larger aspects of landscape work, as well as in garden arrangement and the beauties of colored representa- tions of examples by the novel Lumière slides, first brought before the garden public by Loring Underwood. In 1929 the Society published its first Yearbook.
Today the Boston Society of Landscape Architects has a total membership of forty-four. Its monthly meetings give opportunity for soeiability and discussion of professional affairs, and its committees, often eo-operating with sueh organizations as the Massachusetts Federation of Planning Boards or the New England Trail Conference, continue the active interest shown since the beginning in public projects involving landscape considerations and in public education for landseape improvement.
Ineomparably the greatest works of landscape architecture in the Boston region are the elements of the park system elsewhere described. Franklin Park, with many still sylvan passages, the quiet charin of Jamaiea Pond's enframement, the winding Riverway with miles of beauty in small space, the
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metropolitan woods and beaches, all testify to the skill of the Olmsteds and of Eliot, and many newer features of parks and playgrounds have been created by Mr. Shurcliff to meet modern deinands for more diverting recreation.
We can see nearby examples of Charles Eliot's work at Fresh Pond and Longfellow Park, Cambridge. Examples near Boston of designs from the Olmsted firm are too numerous to mention and, indeed, its thousands of clients - private, institutional and public - make a selection of the firm's work for notice here well-nigh impossible. A record of its important work since 1880 is part of the history of the landscape art,- the grounds of the World's Fair at Chicago and subsequently the development of the Chicago South Parks as modern recreation centers; the magnificent estate of the Vanderbilts at Biltmore, North Carolina, Roland Park, Baltimore, Forest Hills, Long Island, and Palos Verdes, California, embodying new and constantly growing ideals for residential subdivisions; and in addition, F. L. Olmsted, Jr.'s service for our National Capital at Washington, from the time of the Senate Park Commission in 1901-02.
Carrying on the Olmsted tradition, the work of Warren H. Manning, too, is spread far over the country. The park system of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the Finger Lakes State Park, New York, the Cyrus McCormick estate at Lake Forest, Illinois, Richmond College, Virginia, extensive land subdivisions for the Jemison Company in the vicinity of Birmingham, Alabama, and regional studies for the whole Upper Peninsula of Michigan for the Cleveland Cliffs Iron Com- pany, suggest the great variety of his long practice.
The improvement of the river in the heart of Winchester, Massachusetts, offers a pleasant suburban example of Herbert J. Kellaway's work, in addition to playgrounds and playfields in other parts of the state. Boston parks and Metropolitan planning, town plans for Newton and Norwood, as well as advice to other nearby towns, and Fall River, Massachusetts, and Newport, Rhode Island, exemplify the work of Arthur A. Shurcliff; and his interest in colonial art has found particular opportunity during his recent service as landscape adviser on the restoration of Williamsburg, Virginia.
Perhaps the chief planning accomplishment of John Nolen is Mariemont, Ohio, a successful new town of modest homes; and scarcely less significant is the development of Walpole, Massachusetts, representing years of town planning advice. The widely separated cities of San Diego, California, and Roanoke, Virginia, also possess town plans developed by Mr. Nolen over more than twenty years, and his native region of Philadelphia has had his constant advice in its enterprise in the newer science of regional planning.
Limits of space prevent the mention of the work of the many younger Boston practitioners of landscape architecture, who by their designs for private estates and gardens, grounds of institutions, land subdivisions, parks and playgrounds, and other elements of town and city plans, in Massachusetts and many other states, have created examples of the landscape art commensurate with its ever widening opportunities.
One of the many definitions suggested for city planning is "the allotment of the areas in a city each to its best use, with an eye to beauty." Since this type of design is the normal work of the landscape architect, it is not surprising that the instruction in city planning at Harvard first sprang up in connection.
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with the School of Landscape Architecture, and that throughout the country many of the best known names in city planning have been and are those of landscape architects.
The work of Mr. Nolen and Mr. Shurcliff has just been mentioned. Arthur C. Comey has rendered important public service, first to the Massachusetts Homestead Commission, then in securing our City Planning Act of 1913, and in the subsequent work of the Massachusetts Federation of Planning Boards. The Olmsted firm, in the design of such land subdivisions as Roland Park at Baltimore, set an example which has inspired a very large amount of the more expensive residential development of communities throughout the country. The logical and practical study participated in, as we have seen, by many Boston landscape architects, of the esthetic and economic factors of the low-cost home, made for the Government during the World War and now principally recorded in the report of the United States Housing Corporation and in the actual con- structed examples of war housing, has liad a very real influence on subsequent developments of this type, and so on the planning progress of many cities.
From the beginning, the publications issuing from the library of the Harvard School of Landscape Architecture and prepared by teachers in that school have been as much contributions to city planning as to landscape architecture. It was a logical growth, not a change, which led to the establishment in 1925 of the magazine, "City Planning," under the editorship of the present writer, first a landscape architect by profession, and to the series of City Planning Researches conducted by the Harvard School of City Planning, dealing largely with the forces influencing from the outside the developments which depend on the landscape architect for their interior design.
This country has reached the end of an era. There is no more frontier, no more land to be had for the asking. We must use what we have, and we must use it beautifully as well as economically if we are to make any real success of our living. And we must preserve, for the inspiration of future generations, sufficient samples of the natural landscape beauty which we found on this continent, which is on the point of destruction and which, once lost, can never be regained.
The landscape architect of the immediate future has great opportunities,- for a reasonable living, for esthetic satisfaction and expression, and for public service. Many fine and costly gardens and estates will be created throughout the country. Public parks, municipal, state and national, will be developed, calling for the utmost sensitiveness to natural beauty in design. Perhaps the most important service of all - as President Hoover's Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership suggests - will be the planning of the lower- cost residential neighborhoods in order that the many thousands of small homes to be built in the next decades may be so designed, and so related in regional design, that the ordinary wage carner may enjoy in his living not only the necessities of food and shelter but also the necessities of self-respect and amenity and beauty.
PAINTING AND ETCHING
By PHILIP L. HALE*
People from other places may not think much of Boston art but we of Boston know that it is good. That is, in spots. Katisha, in "The Mikado," said that she had a left shoulder blade that people had come miles to see. We have somewhat the same feeling about our art. Boston is by no means one of the largest eities in the world, but it would be hard to find a town that has more painters to the square ineh, and good ones at that. At least some of them are good - others, perhaps, not so good. Still the average of exeellenee is remark- able, especially when one contemplates the faet that few people buy any pie- tures. Boston painters paint well merely because they like to.
THE BOSTON TRADITION: EARLY ARTISTS
In Boston, to speak of Copley in anything but hushed, muted. tones of reverenee is like blaspheming the Holy Ghost. It simply isn't done. Never- theless, Copley had some of the defeets of a provineial,- stiffness, dryness, tightness. He probably was not a very great painter, but he had his qualities and very good qualities they were. He had a poignant sense of eharaeter and astonishing sineerity.
Gilbert Stuart, on the other hand, was really a great artist. His way of enveloping a head in light and air is as good as anyone had done since Velasquez. His grip on charaeter was adequate, though his method of modeling in a head like an egg and then putting in the features did not eonduee to poignant analysis of eharaeter. He was very fond of using vermilion to get a ruddy tinge to the complexion. If the original complexions were sallow, so much the worse for them. It makes one think of Procrustes' bed. Washington was a man of a bilious habit, but Stuart painted him of a sanguine complexion, and as such he will go rocketing and bumping through the halls of history. But Stuart was a great painter in just the right place. Without him we should not know all we do about the worthies of Boston, not to speak of Philadelphia.
One does not hear mueh of Washington Allston nowadays, though a town has been named after him, but he was a man who knew a lot. Perhaps he was not always able to express this knowledge in his work. Some of his smaller works - portraits, for choice - have a quality. When he essayed a larger subject (such as Belshazzar's Feast at the Boston Art Museum), he was, it may be, less sueeessful.
* Owing to the untimely death of Mr. Hale on February 2, 1931, his article, while in no sense unfinished, did not have the benefit of the final revision which he evidently intended to give it. Under the circumstances the editors have felt justified in transposing certain paragraphs, which seemed out of their proper place, and in omit- ting a few sentences of little consequence. Except for this slight rearrangement and these minor omissions, made for reasons which Mr. Ilale would probably have approved, the text stands substantially as he prepared it, though not, perhaps, in the shape it would have assumed if he could have added the finishing touches himself.
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GUIDING INFLUENCES
After the death of Copley, Stuart and Allston, Boston art may be said to have beaten time for many years. The arrival of William M. Hunt, the brilliant artist of the 70's, was perhaps the event that precipitated action. He had a class, chiefly composed of the daughters of Unitarian ministers, that produced some remarkable work. Mr. Hunt also taught a number of young fellows in an evening class, of whom perhaps the best known was Frederic P. Vinton. From Hunt's teaching he got the idea of going across to better his art in the academies of Paris and Munich. Here he worked for some time in the atelier of Bonnat, one of the three Beaux Arts studios supported by the French gov- ernment. It is to the credit of the French people that these classes have always been free to any citizen of foreign lands who showed ability enough to warrant his entering them. Vinton's portrait of Thomas Gold Appleton, the famous "Tom Appleton," is one of the strongest portraits that have appeared in America.
While abroad, Vinton saw a good deal of the Barbizon group. Among these was "Old Babcock," a quiet recluse who lived in Barbizon. He had been the friend and comrade of William M. Hunt. By the time Vinton and his friends got to Paris, Barbizon had ceased to be an important sketching village. There were painters in Boston who never got there but who showed its influence strongly,- such men as Tom Robinson, too early dead, and Appleton Brown, one of the most delightful of men, who had a charming, though rather anæmic, talent. Foxcroft Cole also did good things and Marcus Water- man was one of the men whom Mr. Downes, critic of the Transcript, used to swear by. There were flashes of talent in Waterman, muted by a rather inad- equate technique. His art was a Yankee virgin, soiled by contact with French ideals.
Besides the men who went to the Beaux Arts studios there was a countless horde of American art students who went to the famous Julian Academy,- a sort of feeder for the Beaux Arts schools. Among all these the present writer recalls offhand Tarbell, Benson, Paxton, Page and how many others. Some were winners, others also ran. To the men of thirty years ago a three years' sojourn in Paris seemed an absolute necessity. Nowadays many of our younger artists have not been abroad at all. One speaks with cordiality of the new, but of the older generation one speaks with respect. The simple-minded bourgeois likes to have his portrait painted in a sound existent way and that's just the sort of painting that these Julian-trained men can do. As Chardin said, "Good painting is a mighty good thing," and to paint "good" was what they learned. Some of them still do it.
While not failing to absorb the academic atmosphere of the place, Julian students were alive to the merits of Bastien Lepage, one of the strongest influences of the school. Lepage was a sort of "Short Introduction to Impress- ionism." He advocated certain of the Impressionists' ideas, though it is to be doubted if he really understood their method. They resented his approach to their methods, and Degas bitterly said of Bastien that he was "Bouguereau with modern improvements." While this is unjust, there is enough of truth in it to make it witty. Many of the Boston men of that day, Pierce, Weeks, Davis and others, showed something of his influence. It was a good influence --- sound, serious, self-contained.
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To mention the Impressionists is to remind ourselves of another influence which was beginning to make itself felt. Alinost all the present leaders of art in Boston came back from Paris thirty years ago full of enthusiasm for Impressionismn. Mr. Tarbell's "Opal" made a great sensation when it was first exhibited, though to our blasé modernists it would seem too beautiful to be desired. Mr. Benson, the late Joseph De Camp, Mr. Paxton, and many others at one time or another, have shown traces of the Impressionist influence. Indeed, who has not in the last thirty years? Only,-the best Boston men have managed to learn the lesson of the masters without aping the mannerisms of their teachers. That's easy to say but hard to do.
Degas was always counted as one of the Impressionist group, but his whole style and individuality was so different from the rest that he had his own followers and his own reclame. While Mr. Tarbell's work is always original and personal, it may be said that he has been a profound student of Degas' work. So indeed were Mr. Vinton and Mr. Paxton, -indeed most of the Boston artists of ability. Mr. Kronberg too. Degas, indeed, with all his modernité is so classic in style that no serious artist can ignore his work. He says trivial things in the noblest way and in the most subtle of accents. He used to say himself that he found motifs in the subjects that other men threw away.
One hears mnuch nowadays of the influence of Vermeer on younger American art, but this influence has developed in the last ten years. All the younger men swear by him, even if they do not take the trouble to paint with his science and probity. A cheery spirit has said, "A near-Vermeer is a mere veneer," and the jest is good, even if its intention is not wholly amiable. There are not many "near-Vermeers" however. They are too hard to make. The born swiper prefers to imitate men like Cézanne and Van Gogh, who lay them- selves open to caricature. To paint like nature is to paint like Vermeer and in this sense many Bostonians were and are his followers. But it's hard to paint with the probity and simplicity of Vermeer. Perhaps that's why there are so few who get even near him.
WINSLOW HOMER
As there were great men before Agamemnon, so among the Bostonians of the 70's and 80's who distinguished themselves was Winslow Homer, the famous artist and illustrator. Homer first attracted attention when he helped to record the tragedies and comedies of the Civil War. After the war he lived in New York for a while and then retired to the Maine woods, so that one hardly thinks of him as one of the citizens of Boston; rather, he seems to us a citizen of the world. Yet some of his qualities appear eminently Bostonian - a certain grim directness of approacli, a bleak statement of fact, a very consider- able sentiment resolutely concealed. His pictures are better than they look, and what better description of a Bostonian could one have?
GEORGE INNES
Another former Bostonian was George Innes, the landscape painter. Innes left Boston early and is generally regarded as one of the glories of New York and one of the extravagances of the Chicago Art Institute, which has or
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had a room full of his paintings. But the fact remains that he was for a time a Bostonian. There is a certain grim rectitude about an early Innes which suggests nothing so much as a late Bostonian. Afterwards Innes worked somewhat in the Italianate manner. Later still his pictures may have held some hint of Barbizon, and toward the end of his life there were distinct sug- gestions of Impressionism. But Innes was a big man. He took his goods where he found them and remains original whatever he painted. Nowadays it's rather the fashion to admire most his earlier work, but one remembers 'as well many lovely works of his mature life and when old age crept on.
JOHN S. SARGENT
Again, the family of John Sargent were originally Bostonian, although his father was first a physician in Philadelphia and later a citizen of the world, who wandered in search of health over much of Europe. This sort of upbring- ing was one of the things that gave Sargent's art that polyglot (so to say) manner of speaking and rendering which has been so much admired. Sargent in later years came to be fond of Boston and spent a great part of his time here. Some- thing of its cold aloofness may have soothed his fevered spirit. One doesn't think of the Pope Building as the home of art, but there Sargent lived and labored for several years; and, of course, Boston and Cambridge are full of his work - the decorations at the Public Library, those at the Art Museum, the Widener Library panels, and portraits galore.
ABBOTT THAYER
"Early figures - Abbott Thayer." How strange it is to hear these words and realize that oneself was of the company. For these early men are not so very far back in the past. Yet already they are spoken of as early figures in American art. Certainly Abbott Thayer was one of the most remarkable and interesting figures in our art. Unfortunately for Boston he went away from here as soon as he could, a thing great men often seem to do. New Yorkers say the best thing about Boston is her five o'clock train for New York. One hardly blames artists for occasionally taking this train, but one dimly regrets it when they don't come back. At all events Thayer was a big man. At times he painted strangely well, at other times it may be not quite so well. His work will always remain interesting and stimulating.
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