THE

HE remarkable thing about the young talent in art of this country is its rapid growth and early maturity. Perhaps we are inclined as a people to be intuitive rather than ratiocinative, to jump at conclusions instead of overtaking them with a stolid tread. Perhaps we are easily satisfied with an indifferent standard of maturity and performance. Perhaps, too, we are perky and vain about what elsewhere might be deemed promise rather than achievement. But when I compare the early work of artists here and abroad, or contrast living careers with dead, I am justified, I think, in generalizing that, whether for ultimate good or ill, our youngsters in art arrive earlier and with shorter cuts in doing so than the best abroad.

Here, for instance, is Violet Oakley. You see a slender figure, whose seasons must count but few compared with her intellectual grasp and active performance. She has been at work with brush and pencil for about eight years, sufficient time for the plodding offspring of a South Kensington, for example. to acquire rudi

ments alone, and of these scanty years she has spent half in school. Yet I venture. to judge that if her work in the several mediums she uses was brought forth in company with the laborious results of Continental training or even placed beside finished pictures and designs of artists long arrived, it would deceive the critic with its mastery as it would win him with its charm and freshness.

While Miss Green and Miss Smith, of whom I have had the pleasure of speaking in previous numbers, have devoted themselves to illustration, Miss Oakley has done less of this and has gone farther afield in the pathways of mural decoration and stained glass. She runs to color, so to speak, and her sense of harmony in tones. is keen and poetic. This is always a strong reinforcement to a designer. It gives subtle beauty and reach to conceptions otherwise obvious. It acts as sunlight does in landscape, each giving and taking elements for common betterment.

Yet, after all, her whole survey of the world as a subject for the interpretation of art is that of a designer. This she has

form it into Noah's ark, trees, and gardens too delectable for common clay, or bend it into grotesque lines and angles that belong to no man's land, yet are expressive of some mood which inheres in the out-doors and yields to no other solution. But it takes high gifts thus to grasp nature and render it into color and form. It takes sympathy, training of eye and hand, simplicity. And such gifts I find in these young designers who are bringing in to the fireside elusive truths which have escaped the wider meshes of older crafts

men.

Turning observations thus acquired into the channel of mural design, or sometimes into that of the magazine or book cover, Miss Oakley has shown talent which outruns her seeming strength, as her performance outstrips her years. I have seen her stand beside the enormous decoration for the chancel of the Church of All Angels, in New York, lesser in size than many of the figures she had painted, and indeed. these huge canvases were so unusual in dimensions that she was compelled to lift the roof of her studio to admit them. Her work in stained glass begets the same irreconcilable conception of painter and performance, and were it not that the finished work stands forth a very complete achievement, demanding no extraneous needs for its appreciation, the artist might well appeal for admiration on the inequality of body and spirit.

Miss Oakley had some early instruction (as ridiculously far back as 1893-94!) from Carroll Beckwith at the Art Students' League; but she went abroad without much application to these studies, and worked in the Académie Montparnasse under Raphael Collin and Aman Jean. This was not for long, as she spent the following summer with Charles Lasar, at Rye, Sussex. The next winter she was in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy, where she had her first full working

MISS VIOLET OAKLEY.

year under Miss Beaux and Joseph De Camp: the strong combination then prevailing at the Academy.

But what she turns back to at the Academy with especial sentiment is the instruction of Henry Thouron, under whose guidance she first dared attempt to compose. And this is the story with so many, many of the new band who have gone into the great world of American art to be more than mediocrities, that the modest, tactful, sympathetic spirit whose uplifting influences have stimulated fancy and developed imagination at the expense of his own beautiful work, who lives the selfabnegating life of some frater of old, sacrificing all things that others should achieve, will perforce be found out in his seclusion and brought to accept the gratitude not only of his loving students, but of those who have at heart the highest ideals for American painting.

After the thorough training in the prin

ciples of drawing which tradition as well as practice provide at the Pennsylvania Academy, Miss Oakley took a studio, and before long repaired to Mr. Pyle, whose technical knowledge of illustration supplied the requisite link between study and commercial production. His enthusiasm, too, and his inspiring character and example have added much in the equipment of the new generation, for which it will always be grateful.

It was due to his genial criticism upon some color illustrations that Miss Oakley was first led to try stained-glass design, and as a result she produced in 1899 the

window devoted to "The Epiphany which was built by the Church Glass and Decorating Company, of New York, through whose genuine admiration of her work came the more important commission for the chancel decorations and four stained-glass windows in the Church of All Angels in New York. These decorations, already alluded to, consist of an altar piece and two curving sides of heroic proportions representing the angel hosts, while the small glass windows fall into a harmony rarely possible where such work is entrusted to many hands. This task, the most important she has yet done, and,