Still another new and far more bewildering world was opened to Oliver the night that he entered the cast-room of the School of the National Academy of Design and took his seat among the students.
The title of the institution, high-sounding as it was, not only truthfully expressed the objects and purposes of its founders, but was wofully exact in the sense of its being national; for outside the bare walls of these rooms there was hardly a student's easel to be found the country over.
And such forlorn, desolate rooms; up two flights of dusty stairs, in a rickety, dingy loft off Broadway, within a short walk of Union Square--an auction-room on the ground floor and a bar-room in the rear.
The largest of these rooms was used for the annual exhibition of the Academicians and their associates, and the smaller ones were given over to the students; one, a better lighted apartment, being filled with the usual collection of casts--the Milo, the Fighting Gladiator, Apollo Belvidere, Venus de Medici, etc., etc.; the other being devoted to the uses of the life-class and its models. Not the nude.
Whatever may have been clone in the studios, in the class-room it was always the draped model that posed --the old woman who washed for a living on the top floor, or one of her chubby children or buxom daughters, or perhaps the peddler who strayed in to sell his wares and left his head behind him on ten different canvases and in as many different positions.
The casts themselves were backed up against the walls; some facing the windows for lights and darks, and others pushed toward the middle of the room, where the glow of the gas-jets could accentuate their better points. The Milo, by right of divinity, held the centre position--she being beautiful from any point of sight and available from any side. The Theseus and the Gladiator stood in the corners, affording space for the stools of two or three students and their necessary easels. Scattered about on the coarse, whitewashed walls were hung the smaller life-casts; fragments of the body--an arm, leg, or hand, or sections of a head--and tucked in between could be found cheap lithographic productions of the work of the students and professors of the Paris and Dusseldorf schools. The gas-lights under which the students worked at night were hooded by cheap paper shades of the students' own fashioning, and the lower sashes of the windows were smeared with whitewash or covered with newspapers to concentrate the light.
During working hours the drawing-boards were propped upon rude easels or slanted on overturned chairs, the students sitting on three-legged stools.
A gentle-voiced, earnest, whole-souled old man--the one only instructor--presided over this temple of art. He had devoted his whole life to the sowing of figs and the reaping of thistles, and in his old age was just beginning to see the shoots of a new art forcing their way through the quickening clay of American civilization. Once in awhile, as assistants in this almost hopeless task, there would stray into his class-room some of the painters who, unconsciously, were founding a national art and in honor of whom a grateful nation will one day search the world over for marble white enough on which to perpetuate their memories: men as distinct in their aims, methods, and results as was that other group of unknown and despised immortals starving together at that very time in a French village across the sea--and men, too, equally deserving of the esteem and gratitude of their countrymen.
Oliver knew the names of these distinguished visitors to the Academy, as did all the other members of the Skylarks, and he knew their work. The pictures of George Inness, Sanford Gifford, Kensett, McEntee, Hart, Eastman Johnson, Hubbard, Church, Casilaer, Whittredge, and the others had been frequently discussed around the piano on the top floor at Miss Teetum's, and their merits and supposed demerits often hotly contested. He had met Kensett once at the house of Mr. Slade, and McEntee had been pointed out to him as he left the theatre one night, but few of the others had ever crossed his path.
Of the group Gifford appealed to him most. One golden "Venice" of the painter, which hung in a picture-store, always delighted him--a stretch of the Lagoon with a cluster of butterfly sails and a far-away line of palaces, towers, and domes lying like a string of pearls on the horizon. There was another of Kensett's, a point of rocks thrust out like a mailed hand into a blue sea; and a McEntee of October woods, all brown and gold; but the Gifford he had never forgotten; nor will anyone else who has seen it.
No wonder then that all his life he remembered that particular night, when a slender, dark-haired man in loose gray clothes sauntered into the class-room and moved around among the easels, giving a suggestion here and a word of praise there, for that was the night on which Professor Cummings touched our young hero's shoulder and said: "Mr. Gifford likes your drawing very much, Mr. Horn"--a word of praise which, as he wrote to Crocker, steadied his uncertain fingers "as nothing else had ever done."
The students in his school were from all stations in life: young and old; all of them poor, and most of them struggling along in kindred professions and occupations--engravers, house-painters, lithographers, and wood-carvers. Two or three were sign-painters. One of these--a big-boned, blue-eyed young follow, who drew in charcoal from the cast at night, and who sketched the ships in the harbor during the day--came from Kennedy Square, or rather from one of the side streets leading out of it. There can still be found over the door of what was once his shop a weather-beaten example of his skill in gold letters, the product of his own hand.
