Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/138



THE school of fine arts, on the other hand, the Academy of San Carlos—which was to celebrate with a special exhibition the one hundredth anniversary of its foundation—produces, both in its collections and the ability of its directing professors, a most satisfactory and agreeable impression. You enter galleries which carry you back again to the Louvre and Uffizi. They used a great deal of bitumen, the old painters here. In its darkening it has left now and then only isolated lights upon a face or bits of drapery to glimmer out of a midnight gloom. It is an artificial taste, no doubt, to like it, and "caviare to the general;" but like it one does, at its most artificial, after a long absence from anything of the kind.

The walls recall such galleries as that of Bologna in the liberal scale of the works displayed. With such models before them, there is no reason why students should fall into a niggling and petty style. As a matter of fact, they do not. They seem to excel in a bold, large composition and the rendering of grandiose ideas. This, rather than color, is their strong point. If our New York schools of art are able to equal the portfolio of drawings I saw as the result of a fortnightly exercise, they are certainly not in the habit of doing so. Nor were they at all equalled by those of the prize competition of the students