Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/182

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
166
CLAUD JOSEPH WARLOW

main on the board for months after he had done them as an incentive to other children. After leaving school he started a sign-painting business, sketching in oils in his spare time. Owing to his father's death, about 1906, he had to postpone for some years his ambition to enter the Academy classes, finally attaining that desire in 1911. At the Academy he was awarded several prizes, notably the Cresson traveling fellowship, which he was not able to enjoy on account of the war.

We hope that all lovers of Philadelphia will take occasion to step into the office of the Electric Company to see this beautiful painting. There are no words competent to express the tragedy of those who have worked patiently for an ideal and yet die too soon to see their dreams come to full fruit. Yet it is good to remember that those pinched and bitter days of last winter, when we were all bemoaning Black Mondays and ways clogged with snow, gave Claud Warlow his opportunity to put on canvas the beauty that haunted him and which made his life a triumph. And a civilization that is wise enough to beautify an electrical office with so fine a mural canvas, that builds railroad stations like Greek temples, puts one of the world's finest organs in a department store and a painting of mosaic glass in a publishing plant, is a civilization that brings endless hope to birth.