Sunspots by Lawton Parker, c. 1912.In the spring, in the time before the massacre, the faithful made

Sunspots by Lawton Parker, c. 1912.In the spring, in the time before the massacre, the faithful made the great pilgrimage to Giverny, where the Seine meets the Epte River, to praise the flowers and worship the light. It was Claude Monet who had seen this land of promise, from his railway car in 1883, when the Belle Epoque was too green to have a name. He built his settlement in Giverny, dreaming into the world his jardin remarquable of brick walls adorned with blooming vines and tulips in their thousands planted in carefully cultivated rows.A decade later, emboldened by sales of his paintings, Monet bought vacant land across the road and baptized it as a pond by diverting a tributary of the Epte. It was there he cultivated his water lilies and mingled art into nature, nature into art.Lawton Parker’s first pilgrimage to Giverny may have been in 1903, when he was 35, but it was later than that, when the Belle Epoque seemed immortal, that this American disciple worshiped at the shrine with all his heart. He witnessed the light as it made gold of the green leaves and marveled at how it danced across the surface of warm skin, unclothed, the innocence of the human form.What sin of man could be so horrific as to sink this Eden to grief?When the massacre started Parker returned to Chicago, where he’d kept a home since 1901. He hosted salons, taught young artists. He continued to win prizes for his paintings, but they also brought scandal: luminous nude bodies, sun-dappled and shameless–in a fallen world, they were emblems of vice. Conservative museums, including the Art Institute, refused to display his work. Parker left for New York in 1916.On the canvass, he always retained his impressionist devotions, but war ruptured the conjoining of nature and art, leaving an incurable wound, bloody, pus-filled and gangrene.Parker faded as the light at the end of the day. The chaos of expressionism, modernism and surrealism provided no sanctuary for a person of faith.He was just another old guy who’d retired to Pasadena when his heart stopped beating in 1954. They were pipes of pagan mirth,And the world had found new terms of worth.He laid him down on the sun-burned earthAnd raveled a flower and looked away–Play? Play?–What should he play?- Robert Frost(Additional source) -- source link
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