Amusements 29 



every winter and spring sees painters of note 

 studying these desert landscapes, so fascinatingly 

 different in their problems of conception and 

 handling from anything that commonly comes in 

 the artist's way. It looks more than likely that by 

 ten or fifteen years from now a school of painters 

 will have made Our Araby their province, just as 

 now there are the Marblehead and Gloucester men 

 in the East and the Newlyn men in England. A 

 forerunner of the group I forecast has already been 

 working for many years with Palm Springs for his 

 headquarters, Mr. Carl Eytel, whose knowledge of 

 his field has been earned, as it were, inch by inch 

 and grain by grain, and whose conscientious work 

 gives a truer rendering of the desert than do sen- 

 sational canvases of the popular Wild West sort. 



The person must be very insensible to natural 

 interests whose curiosity is not aroused by the 

 markedly distinctive vegetable life which the desert 

 offers to the view. From the moment that your 

 train or auto begins to run down-grade on leaving 

 Banning the fact is plain that you are, botanically 

 speaking, in a new world. Gray, the livery of the 

 desert, largely takes the place of green; stunted 

 forms and bizarre shapes notify you that wholly 

 different conditions here reign. Though you may 

 have no leanings toward botany as a science or a 

 hobby you will hardly fail to be interested by the 

 novel objects that surround you, and are likely to 

 find yourself botanizing mildly before you know it, 

 if only to the extent of learning the name of the 



