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her people could again provide food for the hungry villages. The dance retells the story, whose interest for the Indian is perennial. When he comes to picture the dance, a lively rhythm goes through his whole design, and his colours are light and joyous. The shirts of the drummers at the left of the painting are of vivid but delicate hues, most nearly recalled by the colour of the Persian miniaturists. A remarkable sequence—red, orange, and yellow in the figures in the first row, with the cooler tones serving as foils in the surrounding figures—shows how the instinct of these children of nature carries them forward at a bound to a use of colour which any "civilized" artist might be proud to have achieved. The action, both of the deer-dancers and of the maiden and the hunters, is beyond all praise. Not the least remarkable feature of the picture is what Maurice Sterne calls its abstract quality—the sudden appearing out of white space of the horns, faces, feet, and so forth, of the figures—only those things which stood out before the artist's mind as essential. And so they arrange themselves in the vivid, vital design and the picture is perfect in its completeness.
The mood of the Corn Dance picture is given in the opening lines of Verlaine's Offrande. Simple and static lines prevail; the larger "spaces of colour are a flat warm black in the flesh of the men and in the hair and part of the clothing of the women. Contrasting with this black and the white of the background comes the glow of luxuriant greens in the corn stalks and leaves, in the melons and other fruits, while the most extraordinary note in the picture is furnished by the head-dresses of a royal blue, relieved by reds and yellows. The drawing of detall is, as in the preceding picture, of a fairy fineness, even where the ensemble is most massive. The richness of the whole is worthy of a great Oriental school, but this work is different from the Oriental and nearer to us: it is American! I believe I may be permitted to return once more to my former thesis—that it behooves us other Americans to fight to the limit of our strength against the agents and missionaries who are to-day striving to end the conditions of Indian life that make these beautiful works possible.
The Hopi Snake Dance picture, Na-ka-vo-ma, has, to my mind, an element of grandeur that should make all comment unnecessary. The colours are of great simplicity in the figures, almost nothing save an orange-red and black in varying quantities, while the