Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 March 1883 — A Picture-Factory. [ARTICLE]

A Picture-Factory.

There is a place down near Chatham Square where oil paintings are turned out pretty rapidly. And the oddest thing about it is that the proprietor is not at all embarrassed when a visitor drops in, but effusively welcomes him and shows, up the lightning process. A large loft is devoted to it, only diminished by two little rooms cut off the front for offices. Along each side of a large room runs a continuous easel, forty feet long, I should say, and on this is stretched cheap white cetton, half-width. Along the middle of the room, running the whole length between the easels, paints of all sorts are arranged on a convenient bench. There are six or eight “artists” usually engaged at once on this canvas. One does the ground-work with a brush somewhat like a whitewash-brush, which he plies with both hands. With one splash in the brown he walks quickly along and lays on five or six yards of the foreground and middledistance; with a splash of blue and yellow he sets five or six yards of vague sky above it, and makes a sweep with another brush along the horizon the blue and brown are required to blend. Then he marks the long canvas off into suitable lengths for pictures; and retires to another stretch of virgin white awaiting him across the room. Then the rest of the painters nifili upon him, flourish their brushes and fall to filling in the beauties of landscape. A blotch of red for a cloud, a blotch of dead brown for a tree, and a smaller blotch of the same kind for a man, dots of white for sheep, and there you have it I There are no patterns and it is to be said for those works of art that no two are alike. About twenty an hour are turned out. Then they are cut up, framed and put on the market in the hands of itinerant dealers. If they can’t get $5 for one they will take 50 cents. The manufacture of them is a curious sight.— New York Letter. A French naturalist says that spiders, bugs and worms love each other and car b i .uisappoisted in love and die of brok< n hearts, tjie same as human be-