Page:Mexico of the Mexicans.djvu/109

Rh Carrasco, Pablo Valdes; while artists showing meritorious landscapes were Ygnacio Alcarreca, Cleofas Almanza, Luis Coto, Carlos Rivera, and José Velasco—those by the last-named being over twenty in number. Art inspired by Mexican history was well to the fore also, able pictures in this category being those of Rodrigo Gutierrez and Leandro Yzaguirre; while "The Aztec Baptism" of Manuel Ramirez justly evoked much eulogistic comment, as too did José Jara's "Episode of the Founding of Mexico City," a big canvas, wherein are shown some fifteen Indians grouped in a finely eurythmic fashion.

But although, to repeat, this Chicago exhibition was a memorable one—doubly so, inasmuch as it enlightened many people, almost oblivious, previously, to the existence of a lively Mexican school of art—it would be quite unjust to maintain that these paintings in oils and water-colours, these prints, drawings, and pieces of sculpture, constituted a really adequate symbol of contemporary Mexican artistic prowess. As George Eliot observes in one of her novels, it is by "hidden lives" that the great things in the world are achieved; and there is literally no branch, perhaps, of all human activities, concerning which the novelist's acute words hold good, more essentially, than of artistic creation. Men living in very humble circumstances, strenuously busy for sheer love of their art, gaining no official laurels, their works and very names unknown save to a small band of shrewd people—it is from such that great work usually comes: it is mainly works wrought thus which emerge with honour from the great sifting carried on by Time, arch-arbiter in all aesthetic matters. And no doubt there are many fine artists, working in this quiet fashion in Mexico to-day, responding year by year, to their country's almost unique incentive to art.

Like all Latin peoples, the Mexicans are exceptionally musical, and the Government long ago discovered that a