ART WITH A BUSH.

Otago Witness, Issue 2303, 21 April 1898, Page 47

ART WITH A BUSH.

FBATS OF A HANDY ARTIST IN LIGHTNING BRUSH WORK.

IN ONE DAY PAINTED 150 PICTURES,

On every day of the past two weeks, Sundays barred, a crowd has filled the sidewalk in front of a Dearborn street store and watched a small man in the window painting pictures. They have marvelled at the celerity and correctness of the work, and then passed on to be replaced by others. The workman is Henry H. Engelhardt, a Chicagoan by birth, and now 34 years old. He says of himself, and his friends have money to back the statement, that he is the champion catch-as-catch-can painter of tho universe. Dollars go behind and reinforce this defiance. This is his special declaration :— " I can paint more pictures and better pictures in nine hours than any man that walks. lam willing to bet on this, though I am not so fast as I was before I married and settled down to the sober joys of matrimony." His record for nine hours, so far as his knowledge extends, is unequalled. It was made in Louisville, Ky. , five years ago, under these conditions : — He was making pictures in the window of a wholesale store, and one day the proprietor asked him what he supposed to be his limit of production. " I don't know," said Engelhardt, " but I think I can do 150 small pictures in a day's work of nine hours. By " small pictures "' ha meant landscapes measuring lOin by 16in. A REMARKABLE FEAT. ' I'll bet you lOOOdol that you can't," said the proprietor ; who, being a Kentuckian, was filled with sporting blood. This was a great deal of money for an errant knight of the brush to risk, but he was something of a sport; himself. " I'll go you," he said. The money was put up and the bet duly advertised in all of the local papers. Being after the nimble dollar, the merchant wanted to get some benefit out of it, even though he lost. On the appointed day Engelhardt began work at 9 I in the morning, and even at that hour the street was packed with people. It was one of the stipulations that he was not to be interrupted, and he painted steadily on in silence. At 1 o'clock he took an hour off for lunch, which was excluded time. At 7 o'clock that evening the timekeepers called a halt. Engelhardt had finished 152 pictures, done in his usual style. The merchant handed him the roll of 2000clol with a graceful bow and invited him to take a drink. He accepted.

PAINTING SINCE HE WAS 13.

Engelhardt began painting when he was 13 years old, and is entirely self-taught. He has been always Ms own draughtsman and his own mixer of colours. What he knows he has gained by experience and observation. He has painted in every principal city of the country, excepting only those in the far West. He made as much of a sensation in New York as he has done in Chicago since his return from his wanderings, and his pictures are in steady demand in that city. He is now preparing a shipment of 500 for a New York dealer, What becomes of them after they leave his hands he does not know. The chances are that they are given the signatures of some more or less celebrated men, and are sold at prices a hundred times greater than their original cost. The nomadic life he has led has made a man of the world of Engelhardt. He is a hall fellow well met, and likes nothing better than a crowd. Almost always there are men gathered around him while he is painting, and they do not seem to interfere with his worls in any way. Like some infrequent wiiterp, he can carry on two or three conversations while turning out his best product. He is a stockily-built fellow, with a wellgrown moustache and semi-humorous lace. He doss aot affect the long hair and velvet

jacket that have come to be recognised as the distinctive badges of the artist. He dresses much more like a common workman — a house painter, for instance — wearing a canvas jacket to protect his shirt from paint splashes. He has a dark shock of hair, innocent of the brush, and a generally coreless demeanour. He is distinctly Bohemian in type.

LANDSCAPES GENERALLY.

He works from 10 to 17 hours a day. The work is altogether in oils, and the rapid pictures are all landscapes. He completes a picture 22in by 3in in size in nine minutes. A small one is done in three minutes. Many of them are painted upside down for the amusement of the watching crowds. There is a large sign in the store which reads : — " One thousand dollars will be given to anyone proving that these are not genuine oil paintings." Being a sure enough painter, and not in any sense a fakir, he uses the best paints procurable, mixed with the best oils, and put on good canvas.

His pictures range in price from 79c to 25d01, including the frames. It must be understood that they are not daubs in any sense. The work, although done with wonderful rapidity, is clever. Light and shade are excellently managed. Colouring and drawing are good. The grouping is always artistic, and frequently is remarkably effective and graceful. One of his landscapes may be selected as a type. It is '22in by 36in in size. There are rocks and trees reflected in the bosom of a deep still lake. A cottage nestles at the foot of the cliff. A small white-sailed yacht lies at anchor. One or two birds of the gull family sail overhead. There are massive light-tinted clouds in the upper Lack-ground. Tho waters of the lake are almost transparent, and the reflection of objects in it is sharp and clear. In the left foreground, high up on the cliff, grows a clump of oaks. Not ; one man in a thousand could tell whether : this picture was worth 25d0l or 250c101. It was painted in just 11 minutes while a reporter held the watch. Its price is Idol,. 78c, with a gilt frame and a hook to hang' it.

Engelhardt of course has more work than he dan do. Orders have poured in on him until he is away behind. His output is so remarkable, for price, that picture dealers keep him* swamped. He threatens to raise the price of his higher class paintings to 24d0l a dozen. " I must do something to protect myself," he says, " against those fellows who have gone mad over art. There is no passion that is more dangerous and absorbing, and unless it is checked they are liable to come to harm."

HOW THE CLEVER FELLOW AVOItKS.

Englehardt stands in his window, and in front of him is a small easel. A bit of canvas stietched upon a frame faces him. At his right hand is a palette, with the colours that he will need, ready mixed. A dozen or two of brushes, of the same quality as those used by landscape painters ordinarily, but larger, lie within reach. He seizes one of them, and with half a dozen rapid strokes puts in his clouds. Another is grasped and the lake is clouds. Trees grow upon the banks at the rat 3 of one tree to every two seconds. A huge grey-coloured brush is dabbed at the canvas and the massive frowning rocks appear. A small white brush is waved around, and the cottage stands near the water. Three strokes more and the yacht swings idly at her moorings. Another half-dozen swipes and the reflected shadows are put in. Perhaps, having plenty of time, he may make a ruined oak, lightning-smitten, or an additional clump of waving grasses or a faint circle in the lake caused by a leaping fish. 'J'he possibilities in this way are endless.

When a countryman comes in Englehardt at once engages him in talk about crops, meadowland, the price of pork, the acreage of wheat, how the winter sowing is progressing, the advantages of a thorough harrowing after the broadcasting, and so forth and so on. This man of many cities and many experiences knows many things. In a little while the farmer, who has seen two handsome landscapes turned out while lie was thinking what to say next, concludes that one or two or three of them would look well on the walls at home. The result of ie almost always is that he leaves with a huge bundle under his arm. He has bought probably three pictures at a total cost of 4dol, and the heart o- the wife will be glad within her when she looks at them in the long winter evenings and thinks how bare the room would have been without them.

HIGH PRICES WON'T GO,

Englehardt has of course paintings that he values much more highly than those which are turned off in bunches to satisfy the demands of commerce. He has works upon which he has spent much time and labour, and he holds them at lOOOdol each. There is no demand for them, he says. People these days are not buying expensive paintings ; the times are too hard. A picture worth 250d0l is likely to remain on the walls for three yea/s, but his pot-boilers are snatched up as fast as he can grind them out. A remarkable thing about his work is that hn makes no preliminary sketches. He does not touch his canvas with a lead pencil in tracings to guide the subsequent brush. It is done, as he says, "straight off the reel." This is a faculty not possessed by one painter in a thousand.

He is a charitable fellow, and goodhumoured. Frequently beggars, who know him, entei while he is driving hard upon a landscape. Always his left hand finds its way into his' pocket and fishes out a nickel ov a dime or a quarter — he never stops to see what it is — while his right hand continues to smear on the paint. He has a ready jest for anyone who speaks to him, and a laugh for anything he finds amusing. He seems thoroughly satisfied with his lot.

UPLIFTING THE MASSES,

"' I am educating and uplifting, the people, " ho says ; " carrying art mto their homes, teaching them how to understand the true and beautiful and good, and doing it more cheaply than any other man in the world. No harm can come from uiy pictures ; I diaw only Nature. There is nothing morally obnoxious in anything I turn out. Sometimes I shake hands with myself as being a sort of benefactor of my species — for a consideration, of course. All benefactors benefit for a consideration, and in my case it is 1 a very small one." — Chicago Record,

enough.