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She has been incautiously heralded so often since that it pleases her to ponder a question which few painters would be brave enough to frame: "What do they think about these things when they go home to supper?" The people who stare at her pictures of apples, pears, eggplants, leaves, stalks, high buildings, rivers and tremendous flowers, interest her enormously. She, like George Bellows and unlike almost every other U. S. artist, has never gone abroad and doesn't want to; she paints all day on the 30th floor of the Shelton Hotel, Manhattan; her face is austere and beautiful; she does not own a fur coat.
The show at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in Philadelphia, was not exciting, but it was large and, for a good number of fine paintings and a few excellent sculptures, worthwhile.
The portraits, all in all, were the most interesting pictures. One Feodor Zakharov's which took the $300 Lippincott award, foolishly titled Reverie, showed a woman in a black dress leaning against the back of a sofa; in her right hand was a book she had been reading five minutes before. Since then, the furiously traveling train of her consciousness had rolled down a steep, delicious scenic railway of thoughts and remembrances. Now this train was coasting slowly toward a standstill; the lady's eyes were closed with enigmatic pleasure; her smile would surely have annoyed a clever husband.
Abram Poole's portrait of Katharine Cornell was hung near the top of the main stairway, so that nearly everyone looked at it once when they came in and a second time when they went out. The first scrutiny was the more satisfactory. Artist Poole had put the actress against a dark background, wrapped her in a black cape, painted her hands brown, thin and nervous. Her face looked out from all this gloom with the terror of a child's half-dream in the dark. Nonetheless, the characterization was too taut and theatrical.
Philip L. Kale's Aphrodite of the Sea Gulls, a large canvas and well hung, was possibly the most striking picture in the show, not for its originality,: so much as for a brilliant and airy prettiness. The surprising tangle of branches streaked with light in Ross E. Draught's Dead Chestnut gave the tree as much character as a face. William M. Paxton had sent in three portraits, for one of which he got the Beck Gold Medal.
The sculpture was limited, for the most part, to small and decorative bronzes. There was the usual abundance of birdbaths and fountain figurines. Albert Stewart's Polar Bear got the Widener Memorial Medal, which it well deserved. Katharine W. Lane's heavy, proud horse was small but complete in its effect, and Canova would have liked C. P. Jennewein's Coral.