Gari Melchers

CHRISTIAN BRINTON

An Estimate of the Man and His Art

WITH re-election as Chairman of the New Society of Artists, and the successful exhibition of his work lately seen at a local gallery, interest spontaneously focuses upon the art and personality of Gari Melchers. Despite the fact that Mr. Melchers is widely known both here and abroad, the memory of the average individual is so brief that it may no be superfluous to recall certain details regarding the rise to recognition and fame of this virile, robust painter.

With the exception of John Singer Sargent, none of our living painters has been so honoured abroad, and in certain respects the place Mr. Melchers holds in foreign art circles is more characteristically international than is that of Mr. Sargent. Gari Melchers early formed the habit of winning the highest professional distinctions in the leading Continental capitals. Leaving his native country at the age of seventeen to pursue his studies in Europe, it took him but a scant decade to place himself among the international prizemen at the Amsterdan Exhibition of 1887. His colleagues on thi notable occasion included such significant figures as Segantini, Israëls, Liebermann, Tadema, and von Uhde, and it is a matter of record that the name of Melchers headed the list as the artist who received the largest number of votes for one of the six medals of honour

The young American's actual professional début had, however, been made at the Pari Salon of 1882 with a freshly painted bit of domestic genre, and it was at Paris in 1889, or the occasion of the Exposition Universelle of the same year, that he was awarded the covetec Grand Prix. Only two other American painters, Sargent and Whistler, have ever achieved a like distinction, and for a man still under thirty his success was unprecedented.

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While Mr. Melchers's first Salon picture had been painted in Brittany, his most important compositions at Paris in 1889 and at Amsterdam in 1887 were the outcome of his sojourn in Holland. And it was with Dutch life and scene that his name became associated during the succeeding decade. Following his prentice days at Diisseldorf and Paris, it was the artist's intention to reside for some time in Italy, but owing to an outbreak of the cholera, he turned northward, pausing at Bruges and Ostend, and finally in the autumn of 1884 settled definitely at Egmond in Holland.

Fascinated, as I have elsewhere noted, by the unspoiled simplicity and fresh, vigorous tonality of the picturesque and industrious Dutch, the young American painter shortly acquired two properties at Egmond, one being his residence, at Egmond-aan-den-Hoef, the other, his studio, at Egmond-aan-Zee. Over the doorway of his studio nestled among the wind-swept dunes, with the lashing

sea on one side and the lazy waters of a broad canal on the other, the artist one day traced in crude, resolute characters the motto Wahr und Klar. And although it is nearly four decades since he first adopted this salutary device, jet those who have followed the progress of Gari Melchers still note the fact that the distinctive features of his work remain-truth and clarity.

Devoting himself with unremitting energy to his art, it was from this same seaside refuge that Mr. Melchers began sending forth into the world those sincere, straightforward, and frankly objective canvases that to-day hang in the leading galleries and museums of America. It was not through mere chance that Gari Melchers came to live and labour so long and congenially in the land of Rembrandt, Ruisdael, and Hobbema. It was not alone the homely picturesqueness of peasant or fisherman, the moist, mottled skies, or the play of subtly diffused light which attracted him to Holland. It was also the £esthetic heritage of the country itself. There was something in his own nature which reacted to that wholesome realistic impulse, which, since the seventeenth century, has proved the balance wheel of European painting. Instinctively the young American perpetuated and extended this same Nordic tradition. With more robustness, less sentimentality, and a vigorous, tonic color-sense, he pictured Dutch life and scene as the natives themselves had not dreamed of doing, The art of Gari Melchers began, and has continued, fundamentally realistic,

with distinct traces of latter-day luminism. Unclouded by personal bias, and utterly free from scholastic pretense, Mr. Melchers depicted local life in its most typical aspects. His canvases consisted mainly of figure compositions, definitely scened and faithfully recorded, After The Sermon came The Comrnunion; after The Pilots, which recalls Leibl's Village Politicians, came The Shipbuilder and The Sailor and his Sweetheart. Nor were his subjects always seen indoors, for here are a couple of flaxen-haired peasant girls, one carry-

ing a yoke and a pair of blue milkpails, the other a huge basket, while striding briskly over the crusted snow The Skaters hurry along toward the frozen canal.

The whole serene yet colourful panorama of Holland is pictured in the canvases which the young American placed to his credit at this particular phase of his career. Prim interiors are permeated with that hard northern glare which suffuses all things with a note of sadness and resignation. Exterior scenes reflect the shifting of season or the precise hour of day. This art is explicit and veracious. Its calm sanity of perception and the soundness of its technical procedure bespeak an ordered, balanced aesthetic endowment, And above all Mr. Melchers, even at this relatively early date, was painting air as well as light and colour. Without exaggeration or undue insistence upon a series of distracting dots, he managed to suggest the intervening aerial medium between the seer and the thing seen,

POSSESSING such a temperament and an equipment so manifestly broad and able, Gari Melchers has never been the exponent of any particular system or theory. His work is an exemplification of what may be termed straight painting. A persistent, conscientious craftsman, he has no set formula. Each subject in turn presents fresh difficulties and new possibilities. He may well say with Manet: "Every time I begin a new picture, it is like throwing myself into the water and learning how to swim."

That Gari Melchers, aesthetically speaking, did learn how to swim there can be scant question, and when, after several years' residence in Holland, with occasional sojourns in France or Germany, he finally returned to the land of his birth, he assumed a significant position in local art circles. The two important events in his professional career that overtop all others of recent date are the comprehensive one-man display

of his work at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, in 1918, and the Loan Exhibition held by the Copley Society at the Boston Art Club in 1919. Some two-score canvases were exhibited on each occasion, and together they constituted a striking and appropriate tribute to the sturdy, forthright painter whose art has of late become more familiar to his countrymen, and whose name has recently been added to our Academy of Immortals,

With his return to his native shores, with which he never indeed wholly lost contact, the art of Gari Melchers has undergone perceptible changes. A rigourous austerity of statement born perhaps of long association with the plodding, pietistic Dutch has given place to a lightness and freshness of touch that are distinctly local in spirit. In addition to several works belonging to the earlier phases of his development, one noted in the Washington and Boston exhibitions, as well as the recent metropolitan display, certain landscape and figure compositions which show that the painter's vision has reacted to that essential Americanism which gives native art its particular cachet.

The later work of Gari Melchers ineludes portraits, genre, interiors, and luminous studies of spring or summertime bloom and blossom. Faithful to the inner logic of his being, Mr. Melchers attacks whatever suits his particular mood. There is no faltering or lack of decision in these fresh-tinted canvases. Whether the theme be the nation's president or a sun-flecked garden in Old Virginia, the painter reveals that vigour of design and atmosphere irradiance which one instinctively associates with his production.

The art of Gari Melchers does not suggest a subjective or imaginative temperament. He belongs to the sturdy, positive race of observers, of those who devote their energies to the visible appearance of things, not their inner, abstract significance. His place in the pantheon of art is beside that of Sargent, Zorn, Edelfeldt, and the Frenchman Besnard.