Woman's Club Work and Programs Part 12

3. _Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Romney_--The portrait painters of the eighteenth century. Well-known pictures of women and children: the d.u.c.h.ess of Devons.h.i.+re, Cherry Ripe, The Strawberry Girl, etc. Reynolds'

school for painting. Readings from his Discourses.

4. _Raeburn and Wilkie_--Subjects from humble life. The sentimental story as a theme. Scottish emotionalism in art and in literature; Wilkie's Blind Man's Buff and The Blind Fiddler.

5. _Constable_--Great painter of English landscape. Intense sympathy with his subject. Appreciation of the artistic value of mists, clouds, and showers. Effect on modern French landscape painters. Great commercial value of Constable's pictures to-day. Paintings in the National Gallery, at South Kensington and in the Metropolitan Museum.

6. _Turner_--Greatest English landscape painter. Strange story of his life. His eccentricities. Style of his painting. Comparison with Claude and Poussin. Unfortunate choice of pigments and consequent fading of his pictures. Readings from Ruskin's Modern Painters.

BOOKS TO CONSULT--Gleeson White: Master Painters of Britain. Spielmann: British Portrait Painting to the Closing of the XIX Century. Allan Cunningham: Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters and Sculptors.

Horace Walpole: Anecdotes of Painting in England.

This program is so full that it may easily be divided between two meetings. Notice beside the artists mentioned those of less distinction: Sir Thomas Lawrence, the portrait painter belonging to the Reynolds school; Blake, the mystical and symbolical artist who influenced the later pre-Raphaelites; and Landseer, the painter of animals (who may be compared with Rosa Bonheur). Ill.u.s.trate the paper with photographs as far as possible.

IX--ENGLAND (PART II)

1. _The Pre-Raphaelites_--Their origin and principles: sincerity and truth to nature. Holman Hunt: Light of the World; The Triumph of the Innocents. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Ecce Ancilla Domini; Beata Beatrix.

Photographs of these pictures may be shown, and those who have seen them may give their impression of them.

2. _The Academicians_--Sir Frederick Leighton, Sir J. E. Millais and his desertion of the Pre-Raphaelites, G. F. Watts, Sir Alma Tadema, Frank d.i.c.ksee, Sir E. J. Poynter, Sir Luke Fildes, Sir Hubert von Herkomer, Sir W. Q. Orchardson. In this connection there may be a reading from Herkomer's memoir.

3. _The Independents_--Sir E. Burne-Jones. Solomon J. Solomon. Maurice Grieffenhagen. Mortimer Menpes. J. Byam Shaw. The influence of French painting on England is interesting to trace.

BOOKS TO CONSULT--Ruskin: Modern Painters. Holman Hunt: History of Pre-Raphaelitism. Gleeson White: Master Painters of Britain. Cosmo Monkhouse: British Contemporary Artists.

Ford Madox-Brown, who has not been mentioned in the program, should be mentioned if there is time. The articles in various current magazines by Ford Madox-Brown Hueffer, dealing with the men of the Pre-Raphaelite school, are full of incident and humor. The poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister, Christina, should be noticed and several of them read. Rossetti's wife was the model for many Pre-Raphaelite pictures. She might be described and the story told of her death and the burial with her of her husband's poems, subsequently exhumed and published.

X--AMERICA

1. _Early Painters_--Copley, Gilbert Stuart, West, and Trumbull.

2. _The Hudson River School_--Kensett, Cropsey, Church, Bierstadt.

Influence of Dusseldorf and Munich on these painters.

3. _Whistler and La Farge_--French influence on American painters.

Whistler's portrait of his mother. Controversy with Ruskin. Story of the libel suit. Why is Whistler's appeal not more popular? La Farge's picture of the Ascension of Christ. j.a.panese and oceanic sketches. Mural paintings in public buildings. La Farge as a colorist and decorator.

4. _Sargent and Abbey_--Sargent's style. Famous portraits. Decorations for Boston Library. Abbey's ill.u.s.trations of Shakespeare. Story of the Holy Grail. Coronation picture of Edward VIII.

5. _Characteristic Groups_--Landscape: Inness, Troyon, Wyant. Marines: W. T. Richards, de Haas, Rehn. Figures (genre): Winslow Homer, Abbott H.

Thayer, Geo. de Forest Brush. Portraits: Eastman Johnson, W. M. Chase, John Alexander, Cecilia Beaux.

BOOKS TO CONSULT--C. H. Caffin: American Masters of Painting. Samuel Isham: History of American Painting. J. W. McSpadden: Famous Painters in America. H. T. Tuckerman: Artist Life (1847).

Take up the consideration of the leading art galleries of America, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Corcoran Gallery in Was.h.i.+ngton, and the Art Inst.i.tute in Chicago; also the new galleries in Detroit, Buffalo, Dayton, and other cities. Notice the famous mural paintings in State capitols, city halls, and the high schools of New York and those of the Congressional Library in Was.h.i.+ngton.

CHAPTER IX

TEN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

INTRODUCTORY

This popular program is given for those clubs who wish something light and attractive for their year's work. The subject is taken up topically, and the leading writers only are given; to those names may be added as many more as are desired. To enlarge the field, add the names of women poets, essayists, and miscellaneous writers, and take Woman in American Literature for the subject. See R. P. Halleck's recent book on American Literature. Or use the one topic of Our Short-Story Writers, and have that cover as many meetings as programs are needed.

I--HISTORICAL NOVELS

Jane G. Austin used the theme of Colonial days most successfully. She was saturated with the spirit of the time, and no one can read Standish of Standish, or Betty Alden without feeling in sympathy with the Puritans, their romance and hards.h.i.+ps. Read from either of these, or from David Alden's Daughter.

Maud Wilder Goodwin writes, in a delightfully breezy style, of life among the Colonial Cavaliers, and her White Ap.r.o.ns and The Head of a Hundred are fascinating; they follow well the books just suggested for the first meeting. Read from either of the two named.

Amelia E. Barr, though born in England, belongs among American writers.

She has no less than sixty novels to her credit. Her theme has been largely of the early days in New York, and The Belle of Bowling Green, The Maid of Maiden Lane, and The Bow of Orange Ribbon are all excellent.

Among her other books are Jan Vedder's Wife and The Black s.h.i.+lling. Read from The Bow of Orange Ribbon.

Mary Johnston has covered a large historical field. Beginning in the early days of Virginia, she took the settling of Jamestown in Prisoners of Hope and To Have and To Hold; both these are of absorbing interest, and have remarkable pictures of the Indians of the time. Then comes Lewis Rand and the settling of the Northwest, and then The Long Roll, about our Civil War. All her work is done in a careful painstaking way, and is distinctly dramatic. Read from To Have and To Hold.

Add to these the books of Mary Catherwood, about Canada, and those of Beulah Marie Dix, who has used the wars of Cromwell largely as her theme; both writers are among our best.

II--STORIES OF ROMANCE AND MYSTERY

Bertha Runkle's The Helmet of Navarre may perhaps stand at the very head of our romantic novels, for its wonderfully vivid representation of life and adventure in Paris under her famous hero. It is all the more remarkable because it was the author's first book, and written when she was only a girl. Read the closing chapter.

Amelie Rives, now the Princess Troubetzkoy, has several romantic novels, notably The Quick or the Dead and A Brother to Dragons, both written in an intense, dramatic way; her Virginia of Virginia, while different, is no less fascinating. Her books have the setting of the South. Read from the last.

Molly Elliot Seawell has written a great number of books, all carefully done and of great variety of subjects. Her Sprightly Romance of Marsac, which took a three-thousand-dollar prize and is as gay as its t.i.tle indicates, has for its foils the more serious The House of Egremont and Mids.h.i.+pman Paulding. Read from the first.

Anna Katherine Green has many books about the detection of crime, with complicated plots. Her The Leavenworth Case is her best book; others are The Mill Mystery, Behind Closed Doors, and The Filigree Ball. Read from The Leavenworth Case.

III--STORIES OF LIFE PROBLEMS

The greatest problem novel ever written by a woman was Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Clubs should give at least one meeting to this book, studying the times, the character of the author and her training, as the causes which led to its writing; notice also the effect of the book upon the nation. It has pa.s.sed into many other languages than ours, and has a world-wide fame.

Mrs. Stowe also wrote another book with a great theme, The Minister's Wooing, of early Colonial days and the power of Calvinism in the lives of the people. Read from both these books.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Mrs. Ward) began her work at nineteen with The Gates Ajar, suggested by the sorrow of the Civil War; this had a phenomenal success. From that time on she wrote steadily, and each novel had a problem to present, set out with strong emotion. A Singular Life is one of her best, and The Story of Avis, Doctor Zay, and The Confessions of a Wife are all deeply interesting. Read from the first two.

Margaret Deland has taken up the problems of life in her books with sympathy, humor and a certain wise and tender philosophy. Her stories of Old Chester, its delightful people, with their strongly marked characteristics, and the rector, Dr. Lavendar, who is one of the most charming delineations ever drawn, are all known to-day to women readers.

Her best novels follow the lines of her other stories, but there is a power in The Awakening of Helena Richie and in The Iron Woman not in the short stories. Read from Old Chester Tales.

IV--STORIES OF SOCIETY AND ITS PROBLEMS