PAINTINGS OF GREENLAND ESKIMO 211 



These books lie open at their title pages and, covering the time from the 

 work of Sir John Ross to the present, invite further investigation. 



As a whole, the exhibit has a note of triumph in it. There is triumph 

 in the discoveries to science of lands and waters, in the improvement 

 in life for the Eskimo through the intervention of civilized man, in the 

 final direct route that Peary made and the American flag floating above 

 ''the top of the world" in the map on the floor. The visitor reads also 

 a greater triiunph than these, for one who has heard accounts from the 

 lips of northern explorers or has felt a choking in the throat over the 

 experiences recorded in some of the vivid writings of these same men, 

 realizes the hardship involved in Polar exploration, the years of privation 

 and physical distress, of sacrifice of all that to ordinary mortals makes 

 hfe worth living. He knows that there has been set before the world an 

 example of what above most things makes life worth li^dng, — the in- 

 domitable courage and perseverance that ends in accomplishment. 



THE MURAL DECORATIONS OF THE ESKIMO HALL. 



THE mural decorations at the northern end of the Eskimo Hall have 

 been painted by Mr. Frank Wilbert Stokes, an artist, who, as mem- 

 ber of the Peary Relief Expedition of 1892 and of the Peary North 

 Greenland Expedition of 1S93 and 1894, has made careful study of the 

 Eskimo people and their frozen country. 



Ranged about the hall below are the weapons, the articles of dress, the 

 boats, the sleds, while above them in this painted frieze these same 

 o])jects are seen put to use in the daily activities of the Eskimo, revealing 

 his ada})tation to an environment of months' long days and nights among 

 glaciers and icebergs. The combination of the scientific exhibits below 

 and the artist's work above, brings home to the observer not only the 

 ethnological facts involved, but also other facts, such as the austerity of 

 Eskimo life, its enforced simplicity and the limitations set upon civiliza- 

 tion for the people of the Arctics. ]Much of the interest of these pictures 

 rests in the fact that many of the scenes represent localities actually visited 

 by the artist. Mr. Stokes established his studio at Bowdoin Bay, 77°4-P 

 X. latitude, and worked there during fourteen months, with the primitive 

 life of the Eskimo and the glowing colors of the northern land under con- 

 stant observation. As William Walton has said in an aritcle in Scribner's 

 Magazine for February, 1909, Mr. Stokes has here succeeded, despite the 



