Page:Woman in Art.djvu/157

WOMAN IN ART any and all excite in the spirit of the beholder the thing each expresses or stands for.

Aside from self-preservation, the dominant faculty in the human is the creative faculty. A very young child wants to do something, to make something, is in perpetual motion because of life, superabundance of life. Whatever powers of spirit man uses mean life, for life demands activity.

Appreciation is the recognition of some spirit expression often akin to your own spirit, even if you are not able to express it in the same way. The non-use of man's powers produces atrophy of those powers. Barring accident, neglect or epidemic, the human is bound to live to a good old age. All things being normal, hard work does not kill a man be he a farmer, mason, or artist. Some few of the Renaissance masters reached great age, also a few American painters. Being an artist does not prolong life, but the love and desire for beauty, the ability to appreciate it on canvas, the longing to depict and the thrill of the developing ideal under your hand, the spirit ever reaching higher and for truer beauty, these are the powers that enrich and prolong life.

When an art critic says of an artist's work that it is just what water colors ought to be, "bright, crisp, light, and spontaneous, with a well-developed handling value, and a right method of work," he has made as gratifying and satisfying a statement as a critic may. When a writer of culture and taste confesses to "know little of art with a big A, and likes a thing because she likes it and enjoys it, and finds it good to live with," one may put down that artist as a worth-while factor in the progress of art.

Mrs. Susan H. Bradley, who was a Boston child, is also eminently a worth-while woman of character. Her social and artistic careers have commingled since the days of her girlhood, when, with Mrs. Laura (Howe) E. Richards, they gleaned knowledge at Miss Wily's School in Boston. Susan Hinckley married the Rev. Leverett Bradley in 1879, assistant to Phillips Brooks at Trinity Church, Boston. She found time, even while bringing up a family of four children, time that was her own, to carry on her art study and work. Wherever her summers brought her in contact with artists of note, she studied with them; now with Abbott Thayer, again it was William M. Chase and Twachtman who aided her art education. She was a member of the Water Color Club of Boston, also of the Water Color Club of New York, and when they moved to Philadelphia in 1889, Mrs. Bradley formed the Philadelphia Water Color Club. Her numerous trips abroad have been 121