fessorship of that department-to Frank Eugene Smith, that exquisite and sensitive photographer whose work, it has been finely predicted, will be handed on to the future beside the choicest oils produced of our day.

Copyright, E. P. Dutton and Company

IT IS STRONG PROOF OF HOW FAR THE SPIRIT OF EFFICIENCY HAS TAKEN POSSESSION OF OUR ARTISTS WHEN EVEN, AS IN THIS SERIES BY JOHN DENT, STUDIES FROM THE OLD MASTERS CAN BE UTILISED COMMERCIALLY

Culminating with this professorship, the career of Frank Eugene-as he is known professionally-seems in a way to summarise this entire movement of which he has formed so striking a part. Beginning as a painter, he took up photography merely incidentally at first. But he brought to it all his scrupulous

knowledge of design and chiaroscuro, his fastidious sense of selection and proportion. Being genuinely an artist at heart, he "saw naught common on Thine earth" simply because he looked through a lens. And presently Frank Eugene found himself obtaining, through his respectful manipulation of the medium, effects and statements which eluded him when he tried to put them on canvas.

He continued with his painting, but all the while the camera was absorbing more and more of his attention and love. In portraiture, landscape, and figure work he was tirelessly experimenting, innovating. His photographs became instinct with that rarest of all prizes, personality. They were as unmistakably recognisable in their way as a Rubens or a Botticelli. But he did not utilise them commercially; and meanwhile, through painting, he fared not well financially. Perhaps the time he devoted to photography may have had a little to do with that.

Finally, though, when his fortunes were in direst straits, he decided to try exhibiting his photographs instead of his paintings. That was in Munich, where critics are swift in appreciation and "art theatres" have quickened public sensibilities. The result was that Frank Eugene enjoyed the not altogether unparalleled experience of waking to find himself famous. From that time forward he undertook to earn his living through photography. After the first brilliant acclaim, however, it proved difficult work.

People of sound taste recognised his worth and lauded it. Stupid critics, though, continued to transmute into mockery their own bewilderment at the apparition of pure beauty in a new guise. But slowly, inevitably, appreciation spread; solid worth and dauntless sincerity made themselves felt. To-day even a person who secretly did not care for them would not audibly admit lack of enthusiasm for this man's photographs. Which is a test of standing. And now the last academic stronghold has capitulated, and, serene, he sits among the pundits as one of them, an

the founder of what may be called the "art tradition" in photography. But in his time printing had not realised the subtleties it now can boast, and the influence of Hill as an active force lapsed altogether until Steiglitz-dominated by the same worship of pure form which has led him more recently to champion the cause of the plane-ridden anarchists of "modern" art-waxed militant on behalf of the camera's possibilities.

It was in Europe that his photographic crusade first made itself widely felt among the laity; and they were, one must admit, European galleries that first opened their doors to this "eighth art," as some one has called it. Americans dominated the exhibitions in those early days, however-Americans, with

Courtesy of "Harper's Bazar"

ΤΟ DRIAN MUST PROBABLY BE GIVEN CREDIT FOR HAVING FIRST DEMONSTRATED UPON ANY CONSIDERABLE SCALE HOW FULL AND PERSONAL AN UTTERANCE FASHION WORK MIGHT BE MADE

honoured member of their assemblage. -Such is the story of Frank Eugene Smith; such is the story of the advance of that compelling thing which has come to be known by the impossible name of "art photography."

But if Frank Eugene summarises the movement, Alfred Steiglitz created itand then went forth as his own St. John. Through the wilderness of the academies he chanted the new message. And the burden of his refrain was that a camera was in nowise ignoble simply because it is a machine; that a machine handled with loving comprehension may become a thing as personal as an embrace, as true as sunlight or the laughter of children.

The principle had been proved long before Steiglitz, of course, in the splendid work of the old Scotch master, David O. Hill. But Hill had been lost, to all intents and purposes. In his day Whistler-incredible though it may seem-actually wrote laudatory articles. on this man's work; the discriminating few responded to his spell, and photographers will always pay him homage as

IN THIS DRAWING OF GABY DESLYS M. DRIAN HAS SUGGESTED THE POSSIBILITIES OF AN ALMOST UNTRIED PHASE-THE COMBINATION OF FASHION WORK WITH PORTRAITURE

Steiglitz in the forefront. And it was in America that the culminating and definitive triumph came, in the middle 'nineties, at the famous photographic show of the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. Then were brought forward such exponents of this medium as Joseph B. Keiley, Gertrude Kasebier, Charles H. White. Then was the way made easier for unquestioned acceptance of such an artist as E. J. Steichen, who for the last fifteen years has been associated with Mr. Steiglitz, and whose distinguished photographs of the Rodin drawings are probably the finest specimens of pure appreciation this medium has yet to show.

The fight these men were forced to make has been so far overshadowed by their later accomplishments that few who were not actively involved in it can understand, at this late date, what a merry war it was. Impressionism it

Copyright, E. P. Dutton and Company IN OPENING UP A FIELD FOR DRAWINGS WHICH COULD NOT VERY EASILY FIND OTHER PROFITABLE APPLICATION, CARDS HAVE BEEN OF INESTIMABLE VALUE TO PICTORIAL GRUB STREET

IN THE FACE OF SUCH WORK AS MISS HELEN DRYDEN IS DOING FOR "VOGUE" IN THE CAUSE OF THE MODES, IT IS BECOMING MORE AND MORE DIFFICULT FOR MODISTES ΤΟ INSIST UPON THAT STATISTICAL LITERALNESS WHICH USED ONCE TO RENDER ALL FASHION WORK A THING OF HORROR

self-which, incidentally, was of course the basic means of making such photographic apotheosis possible-had not encountered more scathing opposition. For a little while even after the Philadelphia show, from a few quarters, such epithets as "muzzygraph," "fuzzytype. and similar terms that sounded like misquotations from Lewis Carroll continued to be hurled at the new prints. Today, though, all that is very ancient history. Even so confirmed a mystic as Maurice Maeterlinck now extols the camera as an "instrument of thought," while George Bernard Shaw, who has constituted himself a sort of intermittent Ruskin for the movement, says, speaking, in the person of Trefusis, from the pages of An Unsocial Socialist: "The artists have still left to them invention, didactics, and (for a little while longer) colour. But selection and representation, covering ninety-ninehundredths of our annual output of art, belong henceforth to photography. Some