artistic societies and associations in this country, London, Paris, Munich and Vienna, officer of the Legion of Honor, Master of Arts at Princeton, gold medals in Paris, Buffalo, St. Louis, and two in Philadelphia, bronze medals, Carnegie prizes, etc., elsewhere, and important examples of his works in public and private galleries, official buildings, universities, etc., from St. Petersburg and Odessa to Minneapolis) verified. That he was himself a native of the city was cause for congratulation, but not counted of primary importance, though it might be considered as very appropriate that a Pittsburger should do the work. It is said to be the first case on record in this country of an important commission for mural decoration given a painter by his birthplace.

The opportunity was certainly an inspiring one-all the more so that he is an admirer of the city, its enterprise, its development, its vast resources, and as a boy had haunted its streets, its wharves, its foun

deries, and found delight in the fires, the gloom, the vivid and changing phases of the great industries. Called upon thus to do honor to his native city and to himself there was evolved, naturally, a resolve not to content himself with a mere record upon the walls of some of the most notable events in the local history, but to create a great triumphal pictorial epitome, a monument of light and color and form, which should present in tangible and admirable shape all that the great manufacturing and commercial metropolis stands for in the annals of mankind.

This being resolved upon, the first step was to decide upon the central point both of the idea and of the paintings-the typifying in a single figure, to which everything else should be tributary, of the city itself. It appeared to be demonstrable that in this case the usual personification in a female form was not the most appropriate, that something more virile, less graceful, might be fitter, and thus appeared, in the great

wall panels of the second story, the apotheosis of the Steel City as the mail-clad warrior, sword in hand, to whom the elements, the nations, the influences of Nature herself, bring gifts and tribute-the arts, the graces of life, that come to crown and complete the conquest of matter. Around the four sides of this great open space these figures appear, not following each other in uninterrupted procession, but in every case facing toward the central point. An architectural character, a sort of epic grandeur, and also a fine artistic and decorative feeling, are secured by presenting them as floating, drifting through space and time, serene and upright, not as flying with unseemly haste, or diving and curveting like swallows in the air, or like the foreshortened and somersaulting figures of the later Italian painters of the Golden Age. The irresistibleness of the attraction that draws them is perhaps better presented in this manner. The architectural arrangement of the interior of the building suggested the

placing of this great main theme in the larger wall spaces of the second story, in the colonnade which surrounds the great central stairway, and the central point, the focus of the whole, at the head of this stairway or, much better, just to the left of it. By this latter device, owing to some peculiarity of the human vision, the sense of forward motion is much better suggested than if the mailed city appeared directly at the head of the stairs, or to the right of them. The spectator, mounting them, grasps the idea at once, he is struck with this dominating figure and then attracted by the numerous graceful winged feminine visions that float through the air toward it. Being thus, at the first glance, informed and pleased, his conquest is completed, and he proceeds to inspect and admire at leisure the multitudinous further details of the great decoration, feeling that he has comprehended the situation and that as a competent connoisseur he may take his pleasure at his ease.

his theme by the introduction of other elements, more realistic and documentary. It is an old claim, and one sufficiently plausible for his pictorial purposes, that the greatness and prosperity of our civilizations are founded upon the toil of the laboring man, so this he has suggested in the long frieze of much smaller panels in the first story of the building, over the tops of the doors. Here appear, visible and partly visible through the cloudy smoke and steam of their furnaces and the skies, groups and single figures of the ironworkers, sinewy, half-naked toilers occupied with great steel beams and girders and cranes, perched aloft in mid air or strenuous in glowing or gloomy interiors. A too practical precision has been carefully avoided in these paintings, the individual rivets are not given, no one but an expert could probably define exactly the particular operation under way-the careful observation of men and machinery, made on the spot, in the fog of the coal, has been generalized and epitomized into these mural decorations. All around the top of the walls of this first story, into which the visitor enters from the street to mount the central stairway, stretch these gray and agitated scenes, recalling those which he has so recently witnessed in the city outside, and preparing him for the serener and more beautiful allegory above.

But the separation between the two is not so distinct but that the clouds and smoke of the toilers below float upward as vapors into the empyrean of the winged figures above, and the glare of the furnaces below strikes upward illuminating strongly the knightly figure of Pittsburg and in a lesser degree many of the others. From above, from the blue sky seen in glimpses, falls the cool, clear light of the heavens, and with this double lighting-not too much insisted upon, with the drifting vapor, and the full liberty to express all the spiritual qualities of his charming aerial ladies in uncrowded space, the artist has contrived to invent and carry out a great decorative painting that is as logical as it is beautiful. Moreover, it is architecturally decorative, carefully designed for its situation and painted, for all its apparent freedom, in constant consideration of the somewhat polished yellowish-gray Hauteville marble which covers the walls and frames the

paintings, and which is not the most docile in color of encadrements. All through the paintings, felt rather than seen, appears the reflection of the yellowish-gray tones, so that pictures and marble abide together in great harmony and mutually set off each other. It was with some trepidation that the artist mounted his vast canvases, painted in his studio in New York, on their Pittsburg walls, and his relief was great when he found that there was no shade of discord.

There are four doors on each side wall of this second story colonnade and a bay or alcove, the central panel of which, and the narrow side panel nearest the head of the stairs, only are of full length. On these four tall narrow side panels, at right angles to the main walls, surge up again the Labor panels of below-this time of ironworkers high in the air. On the three broader alcove panels on each side, which by their recession seem to withdraw themselves from the others, appear somewhat more realistic renderings, on each wall a symbolical extended view over the two cities and the rivers, presenting the commerce, the manufactures, the great producing factors. Opposite the central panels of the Apotheosis the stairs from the second story to the third rise in an extension of the main hall over the entrance vestibule, so as not to obstruct the great open well of the staircase, and in the top of this extension, around the three sides, is a frieze of twelve smaller, upright panels in which appears a continuous procession from left to right, against a background of flat decorative foliage, of the people, men, women and children, none of them too old or decrepit, representing the progress, the emulation, and, indirectly, the comfort, the healthful pleasure in living and doing. This is that humanity to which art, architecture, allegory, and all else, ultimately refer. Along the walls of the gallery around the main staircase well in this third story is carried a frieze of panels, not continuous in composition, representing in many and ingenious forms of allegory personifications of the arts, the sciences, the letters, all that may be considered as included in the scope of a great Institute. The variety of graceful invention displayed in the composition of these two sets of third-story panels, thirtythree in all, may be qualified as prodigious. Those of the gallery around the staircase

It may be as well to state that this eastern wing of the extension of the Institute building, corresponding in the general plan to the western, which contains the great Music Hall, is devoted to the Art and Science departments. Both of these pavilions, with the long main façade which connects them, facing on Forbes Avenue, are included in the addition to the original structure, which ran at right angles to the avenue and in which is located the library. The official description of the building recounts with some pride that when the Carnegie Library was opened to the public in 1895, it was predicted, even by those connected with the Institute, that the building was of such

size that years would be required for the different departments to find use for the space allotted them, whereas, within ten years, the growth of the Institute was such as to warrant the erection of an addition five times the area of the original structure. One department alone has found the space formerly given to three insufficient for its uses. The whole might have been bigger still but for material limitations-immediately in the rear, in Schenley Park, is a ravine some eighty feet deep, so deep that the boiler house of the Institute, located in the bottom for æsthetic and prudential reasons, just shows the top of its chimney above the edge. Various items are given