Rensselaer Journal, Volume 10, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 May 1901 — Great Russian Painter. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Great Russian Painter.

If I could have my say in this matter I would give the prize to Vasili Verestchagin, the great Russian painter. The brush is mightier than the pen. Despite all that has been written and preached on peace from Jesus to Nazareth down to the Baroness Von Suttner there continues to be war almost as bloody and cruel as that waged in antiquity and the middle ages. A dozen painters like Verestchagin, however, could not help but move the nations of blood on the battlefield, against the arming of brother against brother, and compulsory arbitration would regin supreme. Verestchagin has convicted the world by the

mighty strokes of his brush of fearful iniquity. The misery and sickening horrors of the battlefield are brought home to the world. It is widely different from the heroic career which the sanguine recruit pictures to himself. It is a savage carnage, more brutal than the mortal combat of beasts, too ghastly degrading for the creature of intelligence, made in the image of God. Let Verestchagin have the prize, though even his work cannot disarm the nations. Perhaps some day some ingenious chemist will invent a death-dealing material more destructive than dynamite, a small quantity of which will blow up a metropolis. Since agitation by word and pen in the legislative halls, literature and newspapers or the art of a Verestchagin will not stop war, mayhap a more powerful Infernal material than dynamite will create such an awe and fear that a conflict will be made improbable. Then the Norwegian parliamentary committee need not hesitate as to the deserving beneficiary.—Henri Chevalier.

M. VERESTCHAGIN. [The Russian painter at work on his picture of Napoleon.]