| | 1 | Author: | Eaton, Walter Prichard | Add | | | Title: | The Painter of "Diana of the Tides"  | | | | Published: | 1997 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | GIVEN nearly three hundred
square feet of blank
wall space, and it takes
something of an artist to
fill it up with interesting
paint. Probably you
would not pick a miniature
painter for the task.
Yet, curiously, John Elliott, creator of "Diana
of the Tides," the great mural painting which
adorns the large gallery to the right of the
entrance of the new National Museum at Washington,
also paints on ivory. He works, likewise,
in silver point, that delicate and difficult
medium; he draws pastel illustrations for
children's fairy tales; he works in portraiture
with red chalk or oils. And, when the need
comes, he has shown that he can turn stevedore,
carpenter, and architect, to slave with
the relief party at Messina, finally to help
design and build, in four months, an entire
village for the stricken sufferers, including
a hotel, a hospital, three schoolhouses, and
a church. The too frequent scorn of the
"practical man of affairs" for the artist and
dreamer, the world's sneaking tolerance for
the temperament which creates in forms of
ideal beauty rather than in bridges or
factories or banks, finds in the life and work of
such a man as John Elliott such complete, if
unconscious, refutation, that his story should
have its place in the history of the day. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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