e, and faces in which
individuality is strongly marked and from which conventional beauty is
absent. Occasionally, as in the picture shown at Philadelphia in 1904,
and in the fine painting owned by Sir William C. Van Horne, we have a
face charming in itself and modeled in a way to bring out its
refinement, but in the greater number of instances the rather heavy and
imperfect features of our average humanity are reproduced without
compromise, with even a certain sense of triumph in the beautiful
statement of sufficiently ugly facts and freedom from a fixed ideal.

Nothing, for example, could be less in the line of academic beauty than
the quiet bonneted woman in the opera-box shown at the Pennsylvania
Academy in 1907. She has her opera-glass to her eyes and her pleasant
refined profile is cut sharply against the light balustrade of the
balcony. Other figures in adjoining boxes are mere patches of color and
of light and shade, telling, nevertheless, as personalities so acutely
are the individual values perceived and discriminated. The color is
personal and interesting, the difficult perspective of the curving line
of boxes is mastered with amazing skill; the fidelity of the drawing to
the forms and aspects of things seen gives expression to even the
inanimate objects recorded--and to painters who have tried it we
recommend the subtlety of that simply modeled cheek! The whole produces
the impression of solid reality and quick life and we get from it the
kind of pleasure communicated not by the imitation but by the evocation
of living truth. We note things that have significance for us for the
first time--the fineness of the hair under the dark bonnet, the pressure
of the body's weight on the arm supported by the railing, the relaxation
of the arm holding the fan, and very clever painting by artists of less
passionate sincerity takes on a meretricious look in contrast with this
closeness of interpretation.

This, perhaps, is the chief distinction of Miss Cassatt's art--closeness
of interpretation united to the Impressionist's care for the transitory
aspect of things. She follows the track of an outline as sensitively if
not as obviously as Ingres, and she exacts from line as much as it is
capable of giving without interference with the expressiveness of the
whole mass. She takes account of details with an unerring sense for
their appropriateness. She selects without forcing the note of
exclusion, and she thus becomes an ar