Page:Our Philadelphia (Pennell, 1914).djvu/416

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
396
OUR PHILADELPHIA

machinery that made the wheels of the new movement go round:—Mr. Leslie Miller, the director of the School of Industrial Art from which promising students were emerging or had emerged; Stephen Parrish and Blanche Dillaye and Gabrielle Clements, whose etchings were with the Whistlers and the Seymour Hadens in the international exhibitions; Alice Barber full of commissions from magazines; Margaret Leslie and Mary Trotter in their fervent apprenticeship; Boyle and Stephens the sculptors; Colin Cooper and Stephens the painters. What a rank outsider I felt in their company! And how grateful I was for my talent as a listener that helped to save me from exposure!


II

I saw another side of the revival at my Uncle's Industrial Art School in the eagerness of teachers and pupils both to know and to learn and to practise—an eagerness that had, I fear, an eye to ultimate profit. That was the worst feature of the booming of art in the Eighteen-Eighties. Gain was the incentive that drove too many students to the art schools of Philadelphia as to those of Paris, or London, and set countless amateurs in their own homes to hammering brass and carving wood and stamping leather. Art was to them an investment, a speculation, a gentlemanly—or ladylike—way of making a fortune. An English painter I know told me a few years since that he had put quite six thousand pounds into art, what with studying and travelling for subjects, and he thought he