Page:Our Philadelphia (Pennell, 1914).djvu/427

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PHILADELPHIA AND ART
407

than the sea; Glackens, Thornton Oakley, Elizabeth Shippen Green, Jessie Wilcox Smith with the illustrators; McCarter, Redfield with the group gathered about the Academy; Grafly with the sculptors; Clifford Addams, Daniel Garber with the winners of scholarships. Architects have not lagged behind in the race—after the Furness period, a Cope and Stewardson period, a Wilson Eyre period, to-day a Zantzinger, Borie, Medary, Day, Page, Trumbauer, and a dozen more periods each progressing in the right direction; with young men from the Beaux-Arts and young men from the University School, eager to tackle the ever-increasing architectural commissions in a town growing and re-fashioning itself faster than any mushroom upstart of the West, to inaugurate a period of their own.


IV

I am not a fighter by nature, I set a higher value on peace as I grow older, and I look to ending my days in Philadelphia. Therefore I chronicle the change; I do not criticise it. But a few comments I may permit myself and yet hope that Philadelphia will not bear me in return the malice I could so ill endure. I think the gain to Philadelphia from this new interest has, in many ways, been great. If art is the one thing that lives through the ages—art whether expressed in words, or paint, or bricks and mortar, or the rhythm of sound,—it follows that the pleasure it gives—when genuine—is the most enduring. This is a