He is, I
think, as a painter, a shade too much preoccupied with this material, he
is a little too philosophical in regard to it, his pathetic struggle for
existence exaggerated his sentimental affiliations with it somewhat, he
made it too exclusively his subject, perhaps. We gain, it may be, at his
expense. With his artistic gifts he might have been more fortunate, had
his range been broader. But in the main it is his pictorial handling of
this material, with which he was in such acute sympathy, that
distinguishes his work, and that will preserve its fame long after its
humanitarian and sentimental appeal has ceased to be as potent as it now
is--at the same time that it has itself enforced this appeal in the
subordinating manner I have suggested. When he was asked his intention,
in his picture of a maimed calf borne away on a litter by two men, he
said it was simply to indicate the sense of weight in the muscular
movement and attitude of the bearers' arms.
His great distinction, in fine, is artistic. His early painting of
conventional subjects is not without significance in its witness to the
quality of his talent.
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