Art Lecture.

Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith gave the last of his charming lectures last night before an exceptionally large audience in Sanders Theatre. His subject was "Half-way, a Middle Line in Art."

He said that there were two schools which are at the present time engrossing the thoughts of the artistic world,- the Realist and the Impressionist Schools. Realism is nothing more than detailism, the painting with the greatest possible technical accuracy of every feature of the subject in hand; while Impressionism is something not to be found in the sky above, the earth beneath, or the water below the earth; it is the generalizing, the expressing of merely the salient features of the subject.

It is difficult to tell which of these two methods of painting is the better, that is, which the more accurately expresses the effects and truths of nature. Art, we are given to understand, is the exponent of the true, the good and the beautiful, but it seems very doubtful whether either the Realist or the Impressionist gives us art in his paintings.

Take, for example, the spade and notice how each school treats it. For the Realist of the Ruskin type it is a tool of wood and iron, every fibre, every grain, every slightest characteristic of which, even the name branded in scarcely legible letters on the handle, must be painted with the most painful accuracy. For the Impressionist it is the symbol of labor, a mass of shadow against a twilight sky, suggesting peasant toil and suffering. Between these we must decide. We want neither a collection, a conglomeration of geology and botany, nor a vague, indefinite suggestion of a possible truth; it is something between the two which is the true representation of our ideal.

The general idea of nature is the most important. A picture, accurate in every detail of some scene in real life, is pleasing when we first look at it, because of the story which it tells, but it always tells the same story; it can tell but one story because of the care which has been taken to represent this one idea truthfully. A picture fulfilling our ideal gives the suggestion of nature with just sufficient accuracy to enable the outsider to put his own characters in the place of those on the canvas, so that the picture is a new story for every fresh individualism that sees it.

Extreme Realism is saying too much, and extreme Impressionism is saying too little, but saying the right thing is just as acceptable in painting as in society, and the impression of the real and the reality of the truth in painting is saying the right thing.