An American Art Student in Paris: The Letters of Kenyon Cox, 1877-1882

Cox is remembered as an outspoken opponent of modernism, a muralist and an art critic for the Nation. Incredibly, however, these letters from his formative years as an art student in Paris never mention impressionism, which was then gaining ground. Determined to become a successful neorealist painter, Cox forged his own style under the tutelage of various French teachers. Filled with youthful enthusiasm, these delightful letters to his worried parents in Ohio combine a gifted writer's eye for human detail with an artist's sensitivity. Pungent comments on people, places, novels, concerts and architecture abound. Of Dickens, he writes: ""Though he is eloquent, brilliant . . . he is not a great depicter of character and nature.'' Cox is awestruck at Venice (``It is like violet and pink and pale yellow fire''). And no one ever wrote more devastatingly of Dutch portrait painter Frans Hals (``If the man had a soul, he kept it out of his painting''). (December)