for the harmony of
hues is evident in her production as well as in the outline of her
simple and engaging conversation.

Thus the lady lives, in a world gently fervorous with lyric
delicacies, and her own almost girlish laughter is like a kind of
gracious music for the scenes she wishes to portray. I am reminded in
this instance to compare her gentle voice with the almost inaudible
one of Albert Ryder, that greatest of visionaries which America has so
far produced. It is probable that all mystical types have voices
softened to whispers by the vastness of the experience which they have
endured. These gentle souls survive the period they were born in, and
it is their clean and unspoiled vision that brings them over to us in
this hectic and metallic era of ours. They come, it must be
remembered, from the era of Jenny Lind and Castle Garden, though of
course in Mrs. Cowdery's case she is too young actually to have
survived that period literally. It is the grace of that period,
however, to which she has become heir and all her efforts have been
exercised in rendering of the graces of this playful and pretty hour
of human life.

We are reminded, for the moment only, of Monticelli, chiefly through
similarity of subject, for he also was fond of the silent park
inhabited with gracious beings in various states of spiritual ecstasy
and satisfaction. In the pictures of Mrs. Cowdery there is doubtless
greater intimacy of feeling, because it is a private and very personal
issue with her own happy soul. She has come out on the other edge of
the horizon of the world of humans, and finds the looking backward so
imperatively exquisite as to make it necessary for her to paint them
with innocent fidelity; and so she has set about, without any previous
experience in the handling of homely materials, to make them tell in
quaint and gracious accents the pretty story of the life of her
revivified imagination. In these ways she becomes a kind of
revivification of the spirit of Watteau, who has made perfect, for us
all, what is perfect in the classicized ideality of experience.

I think of Mrs. Cowdery's pictures as mid-Victorian fans, for they
seem more like these frail shapes to be wafted by frail and slender
hands; I seem to feel the quiet glitter of prisms hanging from huge
chandeliers in a ball-room, as I look at them; for they become, if you
do not scrutinize them too closely as works of art, rather as
prismatic memories bathed in the