ART AND ARTISTS. 



Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, the poetess, 

 pays, in the Providence Journal, the follow- 

 ing beautiful tribute to the memory of Jauies 

 Morgan J^ewin, one of our resident artists, 

 who died at Lis home in Milton, Sentomber 

 12: "Mr. l.owin, though born in Swanzey m 

 Pi «' a » f roin 1848 until VitA a resident or 

 Providence, and was associated from his 

 schoolboy days with some of our tnost accom- 

 plished artists. IIjb intellectual gifts and his 

 line social qualities endeared him to a lar<*e 

 circle of fnendB, to whom his presence was 

 an inspiration and a delight, ev en when his 

 erratic moods seemed to hold him aloof as 

 they sometimes did, from any conscious par- 

 ticipation in their pleasure. In his more ge- 

 nial momenta his talk with his friends had 

 the , effervescence and sparkle of champagne. 

 His character was one of marked originality 

 his moods variable and capricious, butalways 

 generous, affectionate, am 1 exquisitely sensi- 

 tive. His literary tastes atd estimates were 

 essentially his own, uniuuirmeed by popular 

 standards, and were always »f a rare and rec- 

 ondite quality. He was not ■inly a reader or 

 choicest literature, but a wfoer who had 

 published anonymously in sVyeral of the 

 leading periodicals articles of a\kuowledgud 

 value, the credit of which he caivj not to re- 

 ceive. One of his poems, published anony- 

 mously in the Providence Journal went all 

 over the country, to the silent deliiht of its 

 Teticent and eccentric author— a satisfaction 

 betrayed only to one of his most iwimate 

 friends. It is needless here to speak of his 

 reputation as an artist. His slightest and 

 most unstudied sketches had in them a 

 charm not easily analyzod, a subtile, inef- 

 fable beauty, wholly characteristic and singu- 

 larly ideal. He had the artist temperament— 

 the poetic temperament in perilous perfec- 

 tion. He was constitutionally indifferent to 

 popular success or professional notoriety, 

 ne cared little for the market value of his 

 beautiful creations. He had intense vitality 

 of thought and feeling and imagination; but 

 with him, as with Shelley and Poe, this 

 intense vitality was offset by a vein of 

 "other worldliness," a profound sense of the 

 mystery of life, a shuddering susceptibility 

 to what is called "a belief in the supernat- 

 ural," a quality of which his friends were oft- 

 en startlingly reminded. One hears much 

 in this eminently practical age of whatis sim- 

 ply technical in art, much of ^'clever manip- 

 ulation" and "good work," qualities worthy 

 of all commendation, but having to do rather 

 with the body than the soul of art. It is re- 

 freshing now and then to find that genius is 

 not altogether superseded by talent and 

 "good work." James Morgan Lewin was in- 

 disputably a genius, and Providence will be 

 proud to olaim him as one of her most gifted 

 artists. He completed his forty-first year on 

 the Oth of duly, and his fame was rapidly in- 

 creasing among the most competent art crit- 

 ics of the Boston studios. At his pleasant 

 home ill Milton, with his wife and his young 

 daughter ever at his side, watchful for his 

 comfort and ministering to his varying moods 

 of mirth or melancholy, he passed, perhaps, 

 the happiest years of his life— the years bo 

 soon to be followed bv its untimely close. 



