Potter Palmer, the Chanler sisters of
New York, and many more. He has painted landscapes, as well.
Professor Barrett Wendell possesses a charming example. Most
recently he has been engaged on a large mural decoration, best
fitted, perhaps, for a music room, showing Pan seated on a tree
trunk by a lake, making into a pipe the broken reeds in his hand
after Syrinx eluded him. No horizon line shows. Pan and his tawny
leopard skin (his automobile coat, the artist calls it) tell
against the high purple banks across the lake. The god is making
the best of his loss--making music of it, in fact. He was the
eternal boy, before Mr. Barrie rediscovered him and surnamed him
Peter.
And there is something of the eternal boy about John Elliott. He
plays with a paint box on a fifty-foot ceiling or a twenty-seven-
foot end wall, turns aside to paint a miniature on ivory, drops
all his paints when a great national calamity comes and is
converted into an architect overnight, building a whole town in
four months and making it as beautiful as he can in the process,
though the "practical" man would say that utility alone was
demanded; and then, when this work is over, turning blithely back
again to make pictures for a fairy book.
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