WOMAN IN ART
imagination. It is easy to fancy her as a child, poring over books of fairy tales and ancient lore, as food for her active imagination. Her craftsmanship is choice. To her the ideal is indeed real, and her art has made it suggestively real to the rest of us. She was made for her art, and it has grown under her hand and experience rather than under a school or a master. Her father was a painter, and her two brothers are artists. Her choice of subjects comes naturally to her, and her life has been lived in the environment and atmosphere of art. Her real instruction has been from her brother, Mr. Walter Bayes, a distinguished painter and critic, and for a short time she studied evenings at the Central School of Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. She was enormously aided, too, by travel to such centers of art as were allied to her own interests.
In the decorative line Miss Bayes has accomplished a beautiful mural for a Vienna house; its message, "For lo! the Winter is past, the rain is over and gone." Worked into that motif she has painted slender trees sparsely leaved with tender green, that blend with the turquoise blue of the melting sky that spreads beyond the soft, pale purple of the distant hills. The foreground with flower-sprinkled grass is gracefully figured with Spring's maidens, browsing sheep, and birds on the wing are as quavers in the air.
Another artistic design from her fertile mind is a unique bedstead. Of course it is made of wood, but if you were not told, cedar would not come to your mind; it has been so thoroughly prepared, so lavishly painted and gilded, that it is indeed a work of art. The supporting pillars of the canopy-frame rest on a four-paneled portion of the legs. On the big panels are painted scenes and figures from "The Song of Solomon." The variety and harmony of colors and the burnished gold give a very unusual and attractive effect.
Another of her designs is in water color; a kneeling damsel at the foot of a high cliff is feeding a pair of doves. The whole is a harmonizing of soft pink and blue, a lavender atmosphere resulting.
To facilitate her artistic kinship with the fairy element and their ilk, Jessie Bayes got as close to nature as she could by spending a long time on Cahill Island among the Celtic folk, who on that remote and desolate spot still cling to their belief in those imaginary beings that are said to haunt their glens and groves—a reality to them, as we all accepted Scott's White Lady of Avenel in our younger years, and longed to watch for her coming to the spring, when evening deepened the shadows of the yew.
Miss Bayes has accomplished more serious and dignified work than
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