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HE sixteenth annual exhibition of the Art Club of Philadelphia, which has just come to a close, fed a hungering multitude, if one could judge from the interested groups that clustered about the canvases. The very first feature that impresses a visitor to the gallery is its catholicity. Here are the works of the older men (Sword, Becker, Weber and the Morans, who, though they may not always attain their heart's desire, have ever been faithful in their ardent and most commendable quest of the beautiful) and here the first shy, shrinking effort of the novice. The $6000 "Peasant Family" of Herr Blommers (the highest-priced canvas ever shown in this gallery) breathes the same air with the ten-dollar accumulation of paint destined for some unfortunate's Christmas gift. Here are the well drawn portraits by Eakins,-a tribute to his fellow artist, the champion picture

seller, Mr. E. Taylor Snow-and the illdrawn nude "tied up in a bow-knot" under the glow of vulgarizing lanterns, by a painter capable of more creditable work. Guerin's impressionistic river, so intense that, as a barbarian remarked, clothes washed in it would need no bluing, divides the honors with Redfield's dim, dreamy "Moonlight," in which nothing more material could be bathed than the

silent souls of spirits. Gruppe's tender landscape that sinks softly into the consciousness elbows a sharp, geometrical crudity that digs into the sensibility like a pick-axe. Janet Wheeler's "Portrait of Clarence H. Clark, 3d," veiled to a ghostlike immaterialism, laid on with the soft pedal in thinnest films of transparent color, affords a contrast to Cullen Yates's fortissimo stratifications of opacity reaching back to the tertiary period; and Brauner's "Study," so dull in finish that it resem

bles crewel work, retreats before a highly varnished, glass covered, shiny framed elusion that becomes invisible under gaslight. The ebon-framed, gloom-haunted "Reverie" of Bertieri shares a wall with the brilliantly scintillant "Venice" of Thomas Moran. Elsa Koenig's life-size group that fills the whole space over the broad lintel is in line with Mary Smyth Perkins's thumb-nail creation, Whistlerlike and exquisite, skied in the corner. There is the conventional holy family and the unconventional ballet girl.

Divergently interesting as is the collection as a whole, not less so are the individual canvases. Peter Moran won the gold medal. He is one of three famous brothers, the other two being the late Edward T., a marine painter, and Thomas, whose two large canvases in the national capitol cost the government $20,000. All three are English by birth, the family having come to this country in 1844. The present exhibitor,-etcher and illustrator as well as painter,-was for many years a disciple of Landseer; yet, strange to say, he reflects this English artist, unapproachable in the portrayal of animal character, less distinctly than he reflects the seventeenth-century Paul Potter.

The award to Mr. Moran will puzzle the up-to-date critic who, with his up-todate monocle, surveys the show in a brief half-hour. He will object to the cow's holding the middle of the field, to its haunch which projects like a huge boulder against an unoffending sky, to the iron tail, the lack of relationship between Cow No. I and Cows Numbers 2 and 3, to the absence of poetry and of atmosphere. He will compare the picture with the modern work of Glenn Newell across the room, emphasizing the fact that "Near the Sea" is not a collection of sky and grass and cow painted with finical detail, but an unified whole in which earth and air are background for the animal as the animal is foreground for earth and air. Or he will point to H. P. Poore's canvas, that has in a slight measure caught the feeling of Trovon. But he will be obliged to confess that, though Mr. Moran has failed to convey the tang of the beast, he has given its weight, the solidity of its bones, the warm moisture of its cowey nose, the

sleek black sheen of its neck, and to yield the point that, dear as must have been the standards of an earlier day to this artist, he has with surprising agility adapted himself to the changes and chances of the newer school. And, after all, Peter Moran's name is made.

Carl Weber, another of the older men, received his first gold medal in 1873 from the hand of the Prince of Wales, and has since been a familiar figure in American art circles. He also comes of an artistic family, his cousin, Philip Weber, being a frequent exhibitor, and his father, Paul Weber, now well past eighty, being still a winner of laurels on the continent.

Paul Weber's canvases are large, low in key, romantic in spirit, saturated with Teutonic sentiment, and treated with a comprehensiveness that comes only to the traveled artist. They usually depict broad stretches of sky and mountain, with a narrow, trampled path symbolizing man and man's little affairs threading their insignificant way through the Everlasting. The younger Weber turns also to landscape, but with but with a difference. Low hills and meadows are pictured in place of vast mountain reaches, wayside flowers in place of thick, heavy mosses crusting the undated strata of ages. The trampled path is here, but it leads not from mystery to mystery. Paul Weber's vistas are ever far away and foreign; Carl Weber's fields are within trolley distance. In short, the elder is to the younger as the Old World to Young America.

"October," which is here reproduced, has in the original several features not noticeable in the black and white. Though the season is autumn, a first glance suggests spring. The young lush grass, the sky unknown to passion, the branches lithe and sappy, all deceive the eye. One misses the weariness of autumn as one would the wrinkles of the old.

Carl Weber has had the misfortune to please a buying public, and he has gone on pleasing them. As a result, "a roomful of his pink orchards and blue skies affect one as a beauty show where all the women are pretty and all blonde. But the artist does not show nature in frills when he has time to rest from making money. He can paint a willow better than

Lockman's "Corner of the Studio" is charm. There is an interest attaching to the slender, flat-chested, black-gowned woman that reminds one in some subtle way of Tanner's madonnas and Rossetti's "Annunciation." The canvas, rather crowded, is low in key, pervaded with soft tones of gray and black and rich, dull red. The background recedes admirably. The painting is distinctly of the new school, without being radical or bizarre.

Miss Genth's landscape has been purchased by the Art Club, which is shrewd enough to know the kind of canvas that will rise in value. This young artist--she is in the twenties-has met with success from the start. She left school with a fellowship that enabled her to work for a year in Paris under Whistler. Return

ing, she won the Mary Smith prize from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her pictures have been frequently solicited for exhibition, and they have found. purchasers of note. "In Normandy" is one of the quietest effects in the room, its chrome greens and grays and vermilion. melting into a beauty which asserts itself slowly, but of which one would not soon tire. There is not a sensational note. The scene could be nowhere but France, a secluded spot that lends itself readily to romance. The work is mature and strikingly individual. It is reserved, dignified, poetical and full of the lusciousness of the South. It possesses the something with which Rossetti's Italian blood enabled him to inspire his verse, and it omits precisely those qualities which a student like Pater would exclude from his writings.

While these separate canvases have their mission, the exhibition as a whole possesses a value further than being educative and instrumental in circulating works of art. It points the way the wind blows. Of the entire number of exhibitors 85 per cent. are from New York and Pennsylvania, this proportion being almost equally divided between Philadelphia and New York City. No foreign artists (except Herr Blommers, who is not contesting) are booked, though several are aliens residing in America, and four are Americans residing abroad. Of the 165 names, 30 belong to women, and these contribute 47 of the 255 canvases. One-sixth of the paintings by men and one-third of those by women are figure studies, the former including two nudes and the latter none.

About two-thirds of the men's work and three-fifths of the women's is devoted to out-of-doors (landscapes, marines, street scenes, etc.). The ratio of animal painting from the masculine and feminine brush is 14 to 1, still life 3 to 1, narratives II to I. Symbolic pieces and flower studies, but six in all, are confined to the men.

Do these signs indicate that women are coming to the fore in the field of art and that their favorite subject is portraiture: that there is a strong tendency, both among men and women, toward landscape painting; that animal pictures are on the decline; that still life and flowers and the nude are already out of fashion; and that there is a reaction from the impulse which a few years ago produced the sort of canvas that, to be popular, had but to tell a story?