When the Tile Club was formed in New York it consisted of a group of men (I
was its scullion for seven years, its entire life, and, being thus an honored
servant, was familiar with its many affairs) who represented at the time the
leading spirits of the different schools: William M. Chase, Arthur Quartley,
Swain Gifford, A. B. Frost, George Maynard, Frank D. Millet, Alden Weir, Edwin
A. Abbey, Charles S. Reinhart, Elihu Vedder,paintings for sale, William Gedney Bunce, Stanford
White, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and one or two others. The club was limited to
eighteen members, there being twelve painters and six musicians. If I am not
very much mistaken, not a single painter of this group had ever drawn upon a
wooden block, and yet each one of them, as the records of our periodicals have
shown, was admirably qualified for illustrative work. At the time, the illustrations in
Harper's and Scribner's, compared with the illustrations of
to-day, reminded one of the early primers of the New England schools, with their
improbable trees and impossible animals. canvas paintings for sale
I remember distinctly the first meeting of the Tile Club, in which the
subject of drawing for Scribner's Monthly was first mooted, and I do not
believe I overestimate the importance that the position of the club, taken at
that time, has had and still has—not as a club, for it was dissolved some years
back—in the influence its personal art has wielded upon the printed pages of the
day.
The first magazine article was the account of a trip that we made down on
Long Island, illustrated by the club, entitled "The Tile Club Abroad," each man
choosing his own medium—oil, charcoal,oil paintings on canvas for sale, water-color, etc.; the results of which
were published in the then Scribner's Magazine, and engraved by a group
of men who
afterward placed the art of wood-engraving in America side by side with the best
efforts ever obtained by the English and German periodicals, and one of whom,
Yuengling, took the gold medal of excellence both in Paris and Munich.
With this difference in textures, the difference between a drawing in
charcoal and one made in oil, it became necessary to invent new modes of
expression with the burin. A simple line which might express the round of the
cheek or the fulness of the arm, and which would answer for the uniform drapery
of the old school, would not serve to explain the subtle quality of one of
Quartley's moonrises or the vigor and dash of one of Chase's outdoor figures
sketched in oil.
So it came about that in searching to express these new qualities, never
before seen upon a block, the technic of the new school was developed. flower oil paintings on canvas
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