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R Madison Sq. 
Intended for [[?]] ARGUS
"O wad some power the giftie gi'e us
To see oursel's as ithers see us.
ARGUS PRESS CLIPPING BUREAU
Establishes: Paris 1879
O, SPENGLER, M'gr. 
Cable Address: "ARGUSCLIP" NEW YORK. 
352 Third Avenue, New York. 
SCRAPBOOK MAKING A SPECIALITY
for memorial or business purposes
TERMS
$35 for 1,000 clippings
$20 for 500 clippings
$11 for 250 clippings
$5 for 100 clippings
Special rates for yearly contracts. 
NEW YORK
Clipping from.....................................................
Address of Paper  18 OCTOBER 1908.......
Date........................................................................
Back Numbers of N. Y. City dailies for Sale. 
"MNEMOSYNE - THE LAMP of MEMORY" by
ROSETTI. COURTESY OF THE BLAKESLEE GALLERIES. 
OBVIOUSLY Europe still is the treasure house of old masters. Their frequency of acquisition by American collectors is more apparent than real, the impression frequently being due to the enterprise of American newspapers in obtaining and publishing the facts. This shows in itself that the securing by an American of a genuinely great example of early art still is regarded as an "event." Probably there are in Europe private houses, to say nothing of the public galleries, any one of which contains more great paintings by old masters than are to be found in all the museums and private collections of this country put together. An encouraging circumstance, however, is to be noted. In their acquisitions of old masters American collectors are being guided by an ever higher standard. When, for example, Mr. P. A. B. Widener secured three and Mr. Henry C. Frick one of the Cattaneo Van Dycks from Genoa Europe lost and America gained a corresponding number of art treasures. There was genuine reason for the excitement caused in the art world, the story of which, however, has been told too recently to require repetition. An American art firm, Messrs. Knoedler & Co., was an important factor in rediscovering these pictures in the obscurity of the Cattaneo Palace, in Genoa, while the photographs taken by the Messrs. Braun have made admirable reproductions of these masterpieces accessible to the public. 


The Cattaneo Van Dycks date from about 1624, having been painted during the artist's second stay in Genoa. The full length portrait of Elena Grimaldi, wife of Niccolo Cattaneo, shows, in the opinion of Mr. C. J. Holmes, as expressed in the Burlington Magazine, how unsurpassable Van Dyck was as a painter of state portraits, and he considers that the pride of life in a refined and luxurious age never was more luxuriously set forth. The color scheme he describes as a full dark green for the woman's dress, with vivid scarlet lace at the neck and wrists, the head been accented still further by the glow from a rose colored parasol. The negro attendant is in a golden brown costume, "contrasting well with the cool stone work that rises against the sky behind, and the sky itself is no ordinary convention of deep blue or gray, but an expanse of sharp blue and orange such as one hardly finds elsewhere in art before the time of Tiepolo. Of the majestic sweep of the landscape, of the delicacy and distinction of details, such as the hands or the sprig held in one of them, it is needless to speak; they are the work of a master, but here they are trifles compared with the majestic structure of the piece, a structure unique even among Van Dyck's monumental creations." 
— [[red ink]]: #134


MR. FRICK'S Van Dyck is an oval portrait of Canevaro and "an excellent illustration of the balance and modification with which Van Dyck uses his power in works of moderate size." But if the "Elena Grimaldi" is painted in the artist's "grand" style, he has put the man on canvas with a vigor that immediately arrests attention. Canevaro looks out from the portrait with wonderful seriousness of mien. In fact, it is this serious, thoughtful aspect that impresses the beholder. Here is a thinker—possibly lost in reflection upon that very luxuriousness of the age which the artist so sumptuously sets forth in his portrait of Elena. Size counts when in two portraits inspiration and technique go equally hand in hand, and the "Elena" is the more improtant. Yet in the "Canevaro" there is an air of intellectual distinction not to say aloofness, that cannot fail to exercise a potent attraction. 


The Cattaneo Van Dycks and "countless others in their way hardly less remarkable" were executed by Van Dyck before he was twenty-seven years old. That circumstance Mr. Holmes considers perhaps the greatest part of the marvel, at [l]east for all who have any conception of [t]he long and laborious exertions by which [t]he science of painting is mastered, even by those who are fortunate alike in the hour, the country and the physical and mental gifts of their birth. "If we consider for one moment the mass of portraits painted by Van Dyck before his thirty-fifth year, and then compare them with the output of any other portrait painter during a similar period, be he whom he will, the comparison will no[t] be to Van Dyck's disadvantage," writes Mr. Holmes. 
—


THE writer in the Burlington does not fail to consider the charge brought against Van Dyck that he gave his sitters a universal air of good breeding. This charge he thinks may be overstated. But a real fault with disastrous consequences to subsequent art was developed by him when he arrived in England and when commissions crowded upon him from people in all ranks of life. What, from his work done at that time, became the established method of portraiture in England was to flatter the sitter. One would say from the portraiture developed in England from Van Dyck on that the standard both of manly and of feminine beauty, as well as of refinement, had been extraordinarily high. But there are at least some truthful portraits which show that this standard by no means was as uniformly attained as might be judged from the work of Van Dyck, and those many English masters who followed his method of flattery. 


In Genoa his sitters came from the highest ranks and in these a courtly bearing was natural. In England, where his sitters were more promiscuous, he nevertheless turned every man he painted into a great gentleman and every woman into a great lady, "and this fashion has prevailed so consistently ever since that it is only here and there, by the malice of a caricaturist or by the incompetence of a dullard, that we can really guess what our forefathers looked like."


One may question, however, whether the value of these old portraits would be as great in American eyes and fetch the prices Americans are willing to pay for them if they were not good to look at. When Mrs. Newrich induces Mr. Newrich to purchase an ancestor—on canvas—there must be fine raiment and an air of high breeding in the portrait or the purchase will fail of its purpose. Of what use to Mrs. Newrich would be Rembrandt's "Old Woman Paring Her Nails?" It might recall paring potatoes or some other early family chore. No! Mrs. Newrich wants the 'Hon. Mrs. Somebody" or the "Tenth Earl of Somewhere," and so Rembrandt and his "queer" subjects may be left to the real connoisseur or to the museums. 
—.—
PORTRAIT OF CANEVARO, by VAN DYCK in THE COLLECTION of MR. HENRY C. FRICK FROM THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE.