over the bow of the boat to catch a deer | Indeed, we rather regretted this facility of that he had wounded; whereat Raut transmission, for the report of the excellaughed so consumedly that he almost fell lent sport on Little Tupper brought more overboard. At this a hoot-owl, sitting people there than we cared to see. But unseen above our heads, startles us with a there was room enough for all, and, as it derisive Hu-hu-hu-whoo-oo-oo! And this happened, game enough. And our posireminds Gad of the time when he ran into tion at the head of the lake was thorougha nest of them, when night-hunting, and ly secluded. was frightened almost out of his skin. Thus one story suggests another, and the fragrant smoke wreaths curl away into the night, until the white disk of the moon shines like an oriel-window through the branches of the trees, and climbing higher, sheds a flood of light into the camp. We made many excursions from our camp: to Rock Pond, a wild and lovely sheet of water; to Charley Pond; to Smith's Lake, beautiful despite its name; and often in the evening we manned a boat with double sculls, and ran down to Robbins's cozy hostelry to get our letters and hear the news. It is strange how fast news travels in the wilderness; and by news I do not mean the stock quotations and the foreign telegrams, but the report of what is happening from day to day in the woods. If a bear was killed on the Raquette, or if some one shot a huge buck at Big Wolf, or if some scoundrel poisoned a lot of dogs on the Saranac, or if they had a fortunate day's hunt at Smith's Lake, or if some one caught a monstrous trout at Big Clear, we were sure to hear of it within forty-eight hours. During the last week of our stay the air was filled with smoke from distant forest fires. The effect was strange and beautiful. A gray luminous haze came floating down, filled with the faint odor of burning pine. The high mountain far beyond the foot of the lake grew first purple, then misty and indistinct. The nearer hills were covered with a mysterious veil. The long ridges became more dim and distant. Every vista was prolonged, and the islands seemed to recede and float mirage-like in the air. At sunset the sun was a glowing ball of fire, deepening as it sank into rosy mist, which spread and darkened into purple, and at last into the gloom of night. Under this veil of smoke we could dimly see that the autumn colors were beginning to glow on the hills; and when, on the morning of our last day, the west wind, blowing fresh, made the air as clear as crystal, every hard-wood ridge was glorious with gold and scarlet leafage. Thus our woodland home never seemed so fair as when we turned our faces away from it, and went out again into the busy world. OUR good-natured foreign critics, while admitting that there are American artists, ask insistently where there is such a thing as an American art. The ensuing notes are dedicated to a young painter who, without manifesting such originality and authenticity of invention as would constitute him the leader of a new national school, has reached high position in that classical and eclectic treatment of scholarly themes where all mannerisms merge, and where idiosyncrasies of personal style are almost refined away in the attainment of style itself. It was my fortune to watch the European career of Mr. Bridgman from its beginnings, and to have forced upon my notice the disadvantages and the privileges that are peculiar to the Western republican in earning the consideration of the world of culture which exists on the other continent. That world of culture, a without meaning to do so, constitutes itself a close corporation. If the republican aspirant acquires some traces of that accent of civilization which is the freemasonry of the educated circles, his accomplishments are his reproach. He is asked, if a painter, why he does not bring into the world's art some national flavor, like the passion of Munkacsy, or the embroidery of Fortuny, instead of emulating the faded perfections of traditional art. He is charged to remain provincial at his peril. If he insists on falling into the line of art-progress in its classical development, every merit he assumes is liable to be imputed as a fault, and the suavities and accomplishments he may acquire, such as would be recognized as perfections in the European, are apt to be blamed upon him as the little hypocrisies of the renegade. That the subject of this paper has conquered a marked place, not by in of going out for milk and soap, used respectively as a varnish and a brush cleanser. The freshman also replenishes the fire, and acquires a baneful intimacy with the secrets of the wood closet. As his accession also stands for the addition of a new easel and rush stool to the common stock, battered to pieces in a hundred school fights, and as he will contribute a sum of money for the next student breakfast, his entrance is the signal for an ap sisting on his foreign accent, but by com- | in office, who passes over to him the task peting in those pure classical themes where all contestants are equal, is so much the more to his credit. It is a harder success than are the common successes of what may be called dialect art, where only half the merit is in the hard, uncompromising test of quality, and the other half is in the piquant strangeness which excites wonder, where the award of popularity is given by those who can have no competence, merely because they are tickled, and not because they can judge of felici-proval quite independent of his personal ties and fidelities. qualities. The picture presented by the school-room on the advent of the latest American must have been to him memorable. A barn-like interior, with the peculiar Rembrandt lighting conferred by a single lofty window, so that the derisive voices proceeding from every corner belonged to bodies at first invisible; rows of students arranged about the model's dais on the principle of the Indians around William Penn, the first semicircle squatting on the floor or on color boxes, the next row sitting, the next standing, and the outside ranks climbing upon high stools; a tympan over the doorway into a small hat-room covered with large and very gross caricatures of the more notable students of this and preceding generations; under the wooden pedestal of the plaster Mars in the vestry-room, a prisoner (this hostage, either at the epoch of Bridgman's admission or directly after, had complain Frederick A. Bridgman was, I believe, among the first American students who entered the atelier of Gérôme, in the Beaux-Arts school at Paris. The little group who succeeded in obtaining admission at the date of Bridgman's entrance had been rebuffed and refused time and again. Minister Bigelow had asserted that he could solicit no more, and the news from the school was always the convenient news that it was full. At length, one summer day, the present Professor Eakins, of the Philadelphia Academy, then a slender and not unprepossessing boy, bearded Count Nieuwerkerke in his den, having obtained access by the device of complete ignorance of French, combined with a successful deafness whenever a refusal was pronounced by a lackey; this effectual champion soon wearied the minister of the Emperor's household into signing a pass for the whole list of Ameri-ed at the bureau of being interrupted at can aspirants; and Bridgman, on a foggy autumn morning, entered as of right into the crowded school where some of the rest of us were already working and watching with interest the embarrassment of our fellow-countryman. his work, and was forced daily into the wooden box for about a week, until he recalcitrated one morning, and fought out his liberation)-such were the spectacles that greeted our Brooklyn youth as a freshman in the most unruly art school of Europe. Armed with an immense portfolio filled with "Ingres" paper, he fell very quietly to work, and a kind of chiv I remember his entrance pretty distinctly. The last of a series of bleak rooms, whose doors stud a long corridor painted with Raphael's Bible, is the atelier of Gé-alry extended to his foreignership exemptrôme. At the head of the entry, and near- ed him, as in the case of all Americans, est to our door, a man dressed like a gen- from the wood and soap fetching—from darme sits, eternally twisting up little tor- every tax, indeed, except the initiation tillons, or paper stumps, to sell to the stu- breakfast fee. He was also spared the dents; and the proper direction being easi- usual and sufficiently brutal ordeal of ly got from this Cerberus, the admission hazing, which he could watch with greatinto the largest and most disreputably er interest exemplified in the persons of noisy of the government art schools is others. The native students are usually achieved. Bridgman, like every fresh- made to pose as nude models, to sing songs man, was greeted with cries of sarcastic joy to the accompaniment of mock choruses, from about thirty throats. The youngest to dance, and to perform any gymnastic apprentice is always received with delight, feat within their compass. He had early by none more so than by his predecessor | opportunities of witnessing the sickening punishments devised for tale-bearing, such as the forcing of one prisoner daily into a narrow box, and holding him there for hours, or the "bucking" of another with sticks and ropes, and painting his body completely with English Winsor and Newton colors. The more genial diversions of the studio succeeded in their usual order. From the little lofty window in the hat-room communicating with Cabanel's atelier-visits between the studios being forbidden-dropped from time to time aerial callers, out of the ken of the guardian, consisting of students with finger on lip, or of more attractive and elegant-looking naked models. In the recesses classical games of very French complexion were organized. Choristers, wearing their shirts externally, and holding lighted matches for tapers, would wind through the studio, singing ribald songs to sacred airs, and circulating among the wet paintings precariously and not always safely. Or the fight of Romulus and Tatius, from David's picture, would be enacted-in costume-with easels and portfolios for shields, or "the metopes of the Parthenon" would be imitated, with a solemn collision of two forces riding quadrupedal stools, in a very measured and Phidian manner. Of this pandemonium Bridgman became a tolerant but hardly a participating member, saving his reputation by smiling at every turbulent jest, but being always too busy at the moment to mix in the louder demonstrations. He had a knack, never before equalled, of being industrious with a disengaged and Bohemian air; he would plunge into the labors of the ants, all the while laughing at the vagaries of the butterflies so heartily that they thought in good faith he was of their party. With a beaming face of good-nature turned on the escapades of the idle apprentice, he would be found perpetually doing the work of the industrious one, absorbing the nutriment of the school with his whole heart while appearing to laugh school study to scorn. When he seemed only intent on learning the amusements of a student's gaudy nights, he was really dreaming amorously, like good Paolo Ucello, of the tender mysteries of perspective, or cultivating a mathematician's liaison with curves of the higher orders. In this way he became technically learned without being unpopular, correcting the obvious superiority of his drawings with | the saving trai. that he never seemed to care anything about them. His compatri ots, Eakins and Humphrey Moore, bot became known afterward, but Bridgmai obtained honors and rewards in an almost surreptitious way, when he could scarcely be said to be remembered, or recollected only as that particularly good-natured fellow. At the old town of Pont-Aven, in Brittany, he made that summer the acquaintance of Robert Wylie, the regretted American, whose personal magnetism began about this time to draw around him a colony of artistic tourists in the pretty little hamlet and chain of water-mills he had discovered dreaming on the Aven River. It has become a sort of university town for artists since, owing to the impulse Wylie gave it. An agreeable and harmonious party of American and English students bore down upon the village in that first year of Bridgman's residence there, swamping the Hôtel des Voyageurs, putting Madame Feutry to strange devices to feed and bed us, overflowing into the adjacent house of Tanguy, the notary, and surprising the inhabitants on fair days with a totally new line of purchasers of Breton costumes. The jolly notary, who fairly moped when he could not have the society of the artists around the tavern table, was custodian of the keys of a rotten old country house, the Château de Les-Aven, and readily let us open studio there, among the delights of a garden run to seed, and of salon walls from which were dropping old canvases badly painted with Watteau subjects. Studio hours were instituted, the villagers were trained as models, and a healthful and improving system of work organized. Marie Mower, possessed of a waxen complexion and a fine red petticoat, was probably the first model whom Bridgman studied in this academy. A good man, with black hair reaching to his waist, but without any family or Christian name that we ever discovered, was another favorite with the fraternity; and this quaint old fellow I discovered one morning at sunrise, leaning against a wall in a smuggler-like attitude, with Bridgman painting away from him for dear life, having surreptitiously bribed him to posture between hours for his private and special benefit. What chance was there for the others against a comrade who worked so unfairly as this? Bridgman positively enjoyed making the rest of the artists feel good for nothing. Painting was his dram, and his dram between drams. He perforated the neighborhood in every direction; he discovered delicious or characteristic models; he found the beautiful boy Grégoire Canivet, praying at a pardon at Scaer, and brought him home in triumph and in the odor of sanctity, somewhat as Titania did her little Indian henchman; he found wonderful trees, pollard oaks, and lost chapels with rusty bells. The studio of Les-Aven became a bric-à-brac fair, full of Breton embroideries, spinning-wheels, crucifixes, and knee-breeches. Of this artistic revival Bridgman was largely guilty. He had a blamable gift of perpetual work without fatigue, and a most miserly habit of stuffing occupation into odds and ends of time. There would be, perhaps, a twilight hour of utter vacancy, and then, with the window of a very small inn chamber thrown up for ventilation, he would coax a violin, worn to the wood, but rather mellow of tone, to tell him the fugitive secret of Art. In the evening there would be talk from wandering sailors, a grandmother's reminiscences of the Vendean war, sporting news from Tanguy the notary, or more cultivated con versation from the Marquis du Montier, a modest nobleman who formed a romantic attachment with Mr. Wylie. This gentleman's daughters, handsome girls, who were seen promenading by all of us in the village lanes, avoided our acquaintance with the usual French delicacy, but during Bridgman's second summer, as the American party were swimming in the Bay of Biscay, not far from where the Marquis's carriage-load of guests were also bathing, the life of one of the high-born girls was saved by Bridgman, with considerable risk of his own, and he and his violin were afterward made welcome at their home. Fate, in fact, seems to reserve these pieces of luck for those unobtrusive people who are always on hand. Bridgman appears to me to have secured during his lifetime a reprehensible share of the goods of fortune by the mere needle's trick of having an eye always open. Meanwhile the artist visitors became the lions of Pont - Aven. Beggars used to gather around the door of the château-atelier just as if it had been a church. Tourists visited the studio as the museum of the place, and the studies made by Bridgman, Wylie, Moses Wight, Benjamin Champney, Howard Roberts, Martin, Lew |