Eunice Tietjens

Paris, the iridescent dream of every struggling art student on the round world; Paris the sophisticated, the most provincial of all cities—as provincial as Athens of old in the sense that she is complacently sufficient to herself and all the world else may wag as it will, since she cares for nothing that does not happen on a few square miles of soil beside the Seine; Paris the proud, the difficult;—Paris has recently done the one thing that could be surprising from her. She has laid aside her prejudices and her pride and has awarded to a foreigner—and that foreigner an American—the most coveted prize in the whole realm of painting. She has given to Lawton Parker of Chicago the first medal at the Old Salon.

Hitherto it has been an unwritten law that the first medal was not to go out of France. The most ambitious American student, dreaming in his little atelier high up among the pigeons, over fifty centimes’ worth of roast rabbit from the rÔtisserie and a glass of vin ordinaire, never has dared even to dream of a first medal. A second has been the height of his wildest hopes. Ten times only since the foundation of the Old Salon has a second medal, of which more than one is given each year, been awarded to an American. Sargent had one. Mary Green Blumenschein, H. O. Tanner, Manuel Barthold, Robert Mac Cameron, Aston Knight, the son of Ridgeway Knight, and Richard E. Miller are among the others so honored. Gari Melchers and Frederick MacMonnies have had a third medal.

Now Lawton Parker has carried off the first! Even for a Frenchman this is an extraordinary honor. It is kept for paintings of most unusual merit, and often no work of the many thousands submitted is considered worthy of the honor. At least four Salons have passed without the award being made at all.

The painting with which Mr. Parker has enchanted Paris is called Paresse, or Indolence. It is a picture of a nude model resting on a couch. She lies perfectly relaxed, her body twisted a little and one arm raised behind her head. The delicate flesh tones are outlined against pale draperies, mauve, gray, and light yellow. The whole composition is in a very high key, the red hair of the girl being the strongest note in the picture.

But it is the lighting which seems most strongly to have impressed the French critics. More than forty reviews in Europe have contained favorable accounts of this painting, and they have been unanimous in their praise of the effects of lighting. Indeed, they have almost exhausted the vocabulary in their efforts to describe it. It is the light of a gray day filtered through a Venetian blind, and the picture’s most puissant charm lies in the way Mr. Parker has caught the delicate and subtle values of this lighting. “Delicate, nebulous, pale, sifted, intimate, tender, harmonious”—these are some of the adjectives used by the French reviewers to describe it.

All this is, however, built on a foundation of solid knowledge. Mr. Parker is an excellent draughtsman and understands thoroughly the possibilities and limitations of his medium. He has long been known among the artists in the Quarter as the most scientific of them all. The chemical composition of the colors, their action and interaction, and the result of time on their brilliancy—these Mr. Parker has studied minutely. It is a subject with which the old masters were thoroughly familiar, but which painters of today too often neglect.

Sanity is one of the chief characteristics of Mr. Parker’s work. This is a day of extravagance, of cutting loose from all ties that bind us to the past. In Paris the academies are virtually emptied of students, that the young men may search for individuality in their own little ateliers. The Cubists and the Futurists are the flowering of the tree of experimentation that has thrust its roots even into the most academic of sanctuaries. Many a promising young man has lost his head entirely. But Lawton Parker has succeeded in keeping his.

He has gone forward with his day, but not blindly. He has carefully tested each step as he came to it, and has stopped short where sanity stopped. The old virtues of draughtsmanship, composition, and color he has kept. But he has added thereto the modern discoveries in the treatment of light.

He and his colleagues, the little group of painters called the Giverny school, are already known as Luminists. Frederick C. Frieseke, Richard E. Miller, and Karl Anderson belong to this group. During the summer months they paint at the beautiful little village of Giverny. They experiment with light in all its possible manifestations. Frieseke and Parker have an open-air studio together, a “water-garden” traversed by a little brook. Here on warm days they paint beautiful opalescent nudes in the sunlight, among the shimmering greens of the leaves or beside the luminous water surfaces. All who have followed the exhibitions in France or even in America during the last few years are familiar with this “nymph pasture,” as it has been wittily called. It was here that the prize picture was painted—but not on warm, sunny days. A year ago it rained all summer, and in desperation Mr. Parker resorted to an indoor canvas, executed in the house adjoining. It was painted with extreme care. One comparatively unimportant part of the canvas, a bit of wall space, he painted over twelve or fifteen times to get just the precise shade he wanted. This painting is now on exhibition in this country.

Lawton Parker’s canvases in his Giverny style are interesting technically. On a foundation of very careful drawing they are handled with great freedom of execution. The brush work is loose and vigorous, the paint being laid on thickly, especially in the background. The flesh is painted more closely, always with great subtlety in the values. A nude body in the shade flecked with spots of brilliant sunlight is a favorite and very difficult subject, in which this subtlety is well shown. The color is excellent, at times, as in the prize picture, very delicate and carefully harmonized; at times dealing successfully with great splashes of autumn leaves or the vivid green of spring foliage. The composition is pleasing.

Mr. Parker is not by any means limited to this style. Indeed, it is in another and quite different character that he is best known in this country. As a portrait painter his work has for a number of years been gaining steadily in popularity. Many prominent people have sat for him, including President Harry Pratt Judson, Judge Peter S. Grosscup, Martin Ryerson, Mrs. Leonard Wood, and Mrs. N. W. Harris. This portrait style of Mr. Parker’s is very different from his Giverny style. He developed it much earlier in his career, but still uses it on occasion. The difference is one of psychological viewpoint rather than of technic. A portrait, he feels, should be a livable presentation of the subject. It is not a picture to be looked at casually and passed by, but a work to be lived with intimately for long spaces of time. The exceptions are, of course, those portraits of well-known men and women which are to hang in public places. Generally speaking, he paints his portraits in color schemes that will wear well, in a rather low key, with neutral backgrounds. These likenesses are solid, dignified, and simple. To catch the individuality of the sitter is of more importance to him than to paint a striking canvas. That his portraits are successful technically is proved by the fact that he has taken a number of prizes with them, both here and abroad.

Lawton Parker was born at Fairfield, Michigan, in 1868, but spent his early youth in Kearney, Nebraska. When he took up seriously the study of painting he moved to Chicago, which has since remained his pied-À-terre in this country. He studied and taught at the Art Institute there. Later he went to New York, where, in 1897, he took the “Paris Prize” founded by John Armstrong Chaloner: a five years’ scholarship abroad. In Paris he studied under Gerome, Whistler, and Jean Paul Laurens. In 1899 he took the “Prix d’atelier” at the Beaux Arts. In 1900 he received honorable mention at the Old Salon with a nude; in 1902 a third medal, on a portrait. Four years ago he missed by three votes a second medal, which was fortunate for him, since the first cannot be awarded a painter who has received a second.

He has also received medals from the Chicago Society of Artists, the St. Louis Exposition, and the International Exhibition in Munich in 1905.

All lovers of art in this country, as well as the painters themselves, should thank Mr. Parker for having opened the way in Paris for so unprecedented an honor.