IT

T would be difficult to think of any living painter, certainly none could be found in the Scandinavian countries,-who has won such immediate and almost universal recognition abroad as Anders Zorn. After reading an article, dealing with his life and art, which appears in the February number of Ord och Bild (Stockholm) one can reach only one conclusion,-that Zorn achieved his international reputation by remaining steadfastly loyal to his early conceptions of Art's mission, the portrayal of Nature, by scornfully refraining from the employment of the commonplaces, dubiously known as "internationalism" in painting lore, on which so many artists have depended for a superficial and short-lived popularity, and by boldly throwing down the gauntlet to the conventional when the conventional constituted an obstacle to the telling of truth on canvas.

As an illustration of Zorn's courage, the writer in Ord och Bild tells how the Swedish artist when he made his first bid for fame in this country, sent to the Columbian Exposition at Chicago a series of paintings in which the naturalistic treatment of the nude might have been supposed to prove too much of a challenge to Puritanical concepts to permit of an unbiased verdict. And yet, the writer says, "before the most daring reproductions of the nude by Zorn, the most Puritanical Miss from Massachusetts did not venture a word of protest."

Anders Zorn is fifty years of age. He was born in Dalecarlia, a Swedish province where the sturdy peasant population in the Middle Ages helped to make history on broad lines, even to the ushering in of a new era. And it may be added here, where that peasant population of to-day still clings to the ornate but antiquated garb of those same days of history-making and nation-molding. Zorn's father was a Bavarian brewing master. His mother was a simple peasant girl. When he was a little boy, like David of the Bible story, he watched sheep, with this difference, though, that the sheep were not his father's. His father was too poor for that.

While he sat among the white-stemmed birches and kept his sheep from going astray, he carved horses and cows out of wood and colored these images with huckleberry juice.

Some friends of his father decided that Anders should become a sculptor. After an elementary education he was sent to the Academy of Free Arts at Stockholm. He was gifted, but he was also stubborn. At fifteen he took charge of his own destiny. He decided that sculpture did not lend itself so readily to the purple hues of his horses and cows of the shepherd days. At twenty he had advanced far enough to give lessons in water-color painting. At twenty-one he became dissatisfied with the instruction at the Academy. About that time young Zorn had finished his exquisite water color, 'In Mourning," a woman's face behind a gauzy black veil. Professor Scholander, Director of the Royal Academy, tried to buy it from his pupil, but the latter fixed the price at such a figure that his teacher considered it beyond his means.

In the early eighties Zorn had earned enough money to enable him to go abroad. He painted some clever water colors which found their way into the collections of the

From the days when he carved the images of the cattle he guarded up to the present time his sense of realism is the salient feature of his art. It was not until 1889 Zorn began to paint in oil. His first oil painting, "Fishermen in Cornwall," was greatly appreciated in France. It was bought by the Musée de Luxembourg. The same year he received the decoration of the Legion of Honor. It was in 1889, also, that the portrait he had painted of himself was hung in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence. About the same time the National Gallery in Berlin acquired one of his best known paintings, "A Woman Bathing."

seen.

Zorn's art has an independence that is rarely In Spain the youthful Swede, a-hunger and a-thirst for the real, was compelled to admire Valasquez, and that a painting like the

sons

"Hille Bobbe" of Franz Hals, with its perfect technique, must have interested Zorn, is more Manet and the impressionists? Naturally they than probable. How does he stand in relation to have influenced his art, but to him Art did not involve merely a problem of optics and technique.. In an attempt to draw compariMaupassant. Zorn has the same splendid techone inevitably is brought to think of nique, the same faculty for emphasizing the essential, the same astounding sensualism, underlined, but without any alien flavor of decadent spices. After looking at one of Zorn's paintings of the nude one will say with much assurance: Our race shall not cease to exist for a very long time to come. His paintings contain no symbolism, they depict the human body so convincingly that the simplest woman becomes a type for the elementary drift and inherent warmth of Life itself.

It is, after all, the etchings of Zorn that will survive as the most characteristic in his art. worthy of a Rembrandt. Many of Zorn's paintings have found their way to this country, where he is chiefly known as one of dred. But few of his original etchings have the fashionable painters of the Four Hunbeen seen here. Zorn paints with few colors, mostly with black, though he loves red best.

In these there are chiaroscuro effects

THE HE fame acquired some years ago by Mme. Marie Sklodowska Curie by her discovery of radium promises to be equaled, if not surpassed, by the honors which have come to her as the discoverer some months ago of the new, even more wonderful, element polonium. It was as a co-worker with her husband, the late Professor Curie, that this brilliant woman succeeded in isolating radium, and it is now with the assistance of M. de Bierne that she has succeeded in isolating the tenth part of a milligram of polonium. This substance, 5000 times rarer than radium and taking its name from her native Poland, was the product of the chemical treatment of more than 5 tons of pitchblende with hydrochloric acid. Polonium "wastes away "with great rapidity a thousand times quicker than radium. Of course, the value of this discovery is as yet purely scientific in a theoretical sense.

In an article in a recent number of the Revue Scientifique (Paris), Professor Lippmann, the French scientist, remarks apropos of Mme. Curie's two discoveries:

Radio-activity, it must be remembered, is a general property of matter. If the theory of

radio-active transformations continues to inspire a growing degree of confidence it will result in an important consequence for geology. It will lead to a careful study of the proportions of the clements occurring in rocks with a view to the manifest that the hypothesis of radio-active, determination of their relative antiquity. It is transformation is well adapted to the present state of the science of radio-activity. It was among those proposed by the late Pierre Curie into radio-activity, but it has received its perfect and myself at the beginning of our researches development at the hands of Professors Rutherford and Soddy, to whom it is for this reason generally attributed. It seems to me, however, better not to leave the domain of demonstrated fact,-not to lose sight of other explanations of radio-activity which have been proposed. The actual state of the science does not seem to me far enough advanced to warrant a positive con

clusion.

Personally Mme. Curie is a very modest and undemonstrative woman. She has been for years one of the most efficient original workers in the laboratory of the Sorbonne. According to a writer in London Truth she takes all the honors heaped upon her with

great modesty and is "the most unobtrusive, reserved person possible." The English writer says:

She is a little better dressed now than formerly, but with extreme plainness. The complexion is still that of one brought up in stove heated rooms, ashen, and the lusterless hair unchanged in all but a few silver threads. She remains hard to read, a consequence of being brought up at Warsaw under the heel of the Russian boot and the eyes of an officialdom jealous of all scientific investigation. Mme. Curie spoke of the university in which her father filled the chair of chemistry as having in all its corridors finger posts pointing to Siberia.

As a lecturer she closely confines herself to statement and demonstration, risking nothing that is unproved, however strong cause she may have for divining inference. She is completely innocent under all circumstances of any wish to dazzle or show off. Her laboratory is kept with apple pie order, and her note books show

Mme.

the plain, straightforward and scrupulously exact observation of a good seaman's log. They bristle with notes of interrogation. Curie is essentially womanly. But she lost her mother early and was brought up at her father's side, in his laboratory, and not warped from her true nature according to any conventional standard of femininity. She evolved from within according to her opportunities and the tender paternal guidance, and became on chemistry an authority in the minds of the university students who came to the laboratory. The suspicious prying of the police taught her how necessary it was to hold her tongue. Reticence in speech became her second nature. Mme. Curie is greatly hindered in her researches by the rapid rise in the price of radium. It is to be hoped the French Government will be able to borrow some grains of the Austrian on the basis of an insurance bond given to the lender. Mme. Curie lectures regularly before the Sorbonne explaining the progress of her work and setting forth what she expects to prove by her experiments.

ISABEL BELAUNSARAN

66

funds are paid in and the necessary work done without delay. Truly, a model municipality!

Cuernavaca is unique in another respect: it is the home of Isabel Belaunsaran, who makes the smallest dolls in the world. She is Queen of the Needle; and the natives, who regard her with a great deal of affection, say that "since the time when the ancient builders of Cuauhnahuac wrote their history in hieroglyphics no cleverer Indian maiden has ever been known."

Mr. Millward's account of how the liliputian dolls are made is as follows:

The operation of making consists in forming a diminutive framework of wire, barely threefourths of an inch in length, and winding the same with many turns of fine silk thread. After the frame has assumed the proper lines and proportions, it is ready for dressing. The clothes are cut, according to the character of the doll, and fitted carefully about the small figure. The most difficult work, that of embroidering the clothes, is then begun. With a needle that can scarcely be held in the fingers, and whose eye is almost invisible, various designs are actually embroidered on the clothing with the finest of silk threads, and so cleverly executed that even through a powerful magnifying glass the details appear to be perfect, although the entire work is done without the

the smallest dolls known)

IN the peaceful and picturesque Mexican valley of Cuernavaca lies the town of the same name, unchanged since the days of the Aztecs and peopled by the descendants of a long line of Indian tribes who, through many vicissitudes, have preserved the customs and the arts of their forefathers. In many respects the place is unique, as will be seen from the following description of it in the Bulletin of the International Bureau of the American Republics by Mr. Russell Hastings Millward:

Nature has been most lavish in her gifts to Cuernavaca, for there time or money counts for little except the peace, comfort, and happiness it will bring. In no place on earth is law more highly respected than in this quaint little village of the crooked streets and cobblestones. A police force is almost unnecessary, as the natives are a peaceful, happy, law-abiding lot of citizens. The poor people there have practically no taxes to pay, as each year the city council calls a meeting of the more prominent property owners, who subscribe, voluntarily, the sums necessary to keep up the village and carry on all necessary public works. Each property owner considers it a great honor to be one of the chosen, and cheerfully sets opposite his name such amount as his purse will allow. All

the dressing has been completed it is necessary to add the hair. What is undoubtedly an example of the tiniest and most marvelous hairdressing on earth is then performed on each doll. Even to the details of the braids and ribbons, the work is most completely carried out. The eyes, nose, mouth, hands, and feet are then formed, and the doll is ready to be placed in the quaint little tea shop, where, on account of workmanship, it finds, at all times, a ready sale its daintiness, exquisite coloring, design, and at the ridiculously low price of 50 cents Mexican currency, or 25 cents gold.

Although the finished dolls bear evidence. of the greatest patience as well as of artistic skill, it appears that only two hours are occupied in making each one. Incidentally it may be mentioned that "by working steadily for ten hours each day the sum of $1.25 gold may be earned,-less than the sum paid to an ordinary day laborer in the United States for work of the crudest kind."

these dolls is the wonderful variety of types Perhaps the most remarkable thing about that they are made to represent. Some idea of these may be gleaned from Mr. Millward's description of a few of them. He says:

The matador is complete in every particular, his costume being gaily decorated in many colors, the hair dressed in true Spanish fashion,