Identifier: americanartamer01mont (find matches)
Title: American art and American art collections; essays on artistic subjects
Year: 1889 (1880s)
Authors: Montgomery, Walter
Subjects: Art Artists Art
Publisher: Boston, E.W. Walker & co
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Smithsonian Libraries

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hepherd is apainted poem, and to appreciate it one must feci. There is a small etching of this picture, byCourtry, but it does no sort of justice to the original. Nature, it seems to us, is looked upon by Jules Breton much in the same manner as Milletregards it, despite the great apparent difference in the methods of the two artists. Breton,as a painter, is the most perfectly rounded and symmetrical now living. He does all thingswell; nothing could be added, no improvement made, to any picture that comes from his easel,while the simplicity of his work renders description difficult. The Potato Harvest, probablyknown to many of our readers from the etching by Bracquemond, is simply an episode in thedaily life of a peasant, — a woman emptying a basket of potatoes into a bushel-bag held forthe purpose by one of her co-laborers. And yet these two real ideal women, these potatogatherers, elevate the whole sex. They are not painted above their station, but in their station; u6 AMERICAN ART
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Landscape and Cattle. — By Troyon.Pen-and-Ink Sketch by James U. Smillie. — From a Photograph. not with delicacy and gentle grace, but teeming with strength and vigor and robust health.The painter thus gives them their own idea of perfect beauty, and by this idealization of naturehe excites admiration and reaps the rich reward of his unrivalled art. It has been well said ofJules Breton, that his pictures are rich in truth, yet not without the elevating ideal element;and its ideality is of that genuine kind which is in perfect harmony with reality. If Bretonexcels in any one particular, it is in his wonderful painting of hands and feet, — the most diffi-cult part of the human figure to render satisfactorily. His technical qualities are very high, hismanner broad, and his coloring unsurpassed. Constant Troyon was a capable artist, but he seems to us to have been somewhat overrated.His work bears too much the appearance of labor, of hard work; an effect which may arisefrom the fact

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