“No art atmosphere.” “No Latin quarter.” “No true Bohemian spirit.” To sigh they who decry Chicago’s modest attempt at being an art center.  Then they shake their heads ominously over its timid aspirations, and so change the subject.

Some way through much listening to them people have come to believe there is a dearth here in Chicago of all that charming, irrationally unconventional, uncomfortable life which juggling devotees of art are popularly supplied to lead.  But one afternoon devoted to the exhilarating game of “Hunting Artists” is enough to convince a doubter of his error. The game is indispensable though. No one has a hope to acquire even a bowing acquaintance with the studios scattered far and wide all over the city unless he first masters it.  For the benefit of those as yet uninitiated in the gentle pastime of tracking artists to their studios, but anxious to begin, an expert has accumulated a few simple directions.  Here they are: 

1. Arm yourself with an energetic pair of legs.  This seems to be a bull, but the rule can’t be forgotten on that account. Patience and long suffering are also good things to take along.

2. Select the one building in Chicago which seems to you the most widely improbably place for a studio.

3. Approach it boldly. It doubtless will seem to you the first structure erected after the big fire but that’s just as it should be.

4. If the elevator runs rapidly and the man who manages it is in uniform, you might as well go away at once.  But on the contrary, if he wears jumpers and a smudge on his honest face; of his machine crawls like a snail up the blackened walls; if his manner is a confusing mixture of defenses, affability and contempt, you may have pretty certain you are on the right road and there may venture to make inquiries.

5. Unless he takes you to the wrong floor at first, keeps you waiting there ten minutes and then directs you through several tortuous labyrinthine passages, distrust him. He probably prevaricators if he says there are any artists in the building.

6. Don’t expect to find your artist the first time you walk through those passages; nor the second.  Take time and make careful inquiries at each office along the way.  The more times you inquire at the same office the better.  You probably will have unpleasant remarks regarding “wooden heads” hung in your direction but that’s part of the game.

7. When on your fifth or sixth journey through the hallways you run upon a door with a little visiting card bearing the magic word “studio” tacked on to it don’t give vent to your feelings if it happens to be locked and the artist flown.  Be calm. Try it again another day.

Finding the Artist’ “Shops”

As far as they go these rules are admirable, but, unfortunately, they do not exhaust the subject.  Sometimes it is necessary to take steam cars or the cable and ride long miles in every direction -north, south, and west into those suburbs that are still Chicago to find the pleasant places that out-of-town artists call their “shops.”  In a few cases - not so many as give the impression that Chicago artists, as a class, are rolling about on luxurious beds of ease, however - one can enter boldly the portals of the most imposing office building in town sure of finding somewhere on the topmost floor where the light is good the object of his quest.

The character of those “dens” devoted to the pursuit of fame, and incidentally to the exigencies of daily life, are as diverse as those of the men and women who make them.  But they speak of crusts sweetened by ambition and self-denying study or of a degree of comfort won by rigid devotion to the most exacting of all mistresses there is in each something of the “atmosphere” that all people with artistic instincts like to talk about and with which they like to surround themselves.  We studied hard in our styles. Chipped-each at a crust like Hindus, for air, looked out on the tiles, For fun watched each other’s windows.

Browning didn’t know anything of Chicago artists when he wrote that cynical little poem about “Youth and Art,” but the types are eternal, and the lines are just as true for the city by the lake as they are for Rome or Paris the two places where starving for art’s sweet sake has always been most in vogue.  If sometimes the bare floors, the dreary lack of everything beautiful, the too-evident signs of poverty’s pinches, leave one with an arching sense of the pathos, the fruitlessness of the sacrifice, history furnishes enough eases of genius neglected to youth and scoffed at in middle life, only to be recognized in old age or honored posthumously, to serve its  a sort of comfort if considered in the proper spirit.  And in all the studios, luxurious or barren, there generally is a cheery greeting for newcomers that goes far toward making one’s impression of them pleasant.  The stamping ground of Chicago artists in the good old days before the Academy of Design had developed into the Art Institute was the McCormick Building on Dearborn Street.  Almost every slave to the brush who calls Chicago his home at one time, or another has occupied a sky parlor, opening off some one of its long, dark corridors. Now, however, only Miss Atkinson remains of its old friends, Emil Wuertz, a newcomer who lately has joined the ranks of the Chicago sculptors, helping her to keep up its tradition as a “home of art.”

The buildings that have out rivaled it in the affections of painters are the Athenaeum, where a thriving colony finds the rooms of the Chicago Society of Artists a convenient center for their interests and activities; the temporary quarters of the Art Institute of Chicago classes, now abandoned for the new building on the lakefront, at No.302 Wabash avenue; the Auditorium ,where a number of busy people find excellent light and as wide a view of enterprising smokestacks as anyone could desire; and the Columbus Memorial; where Hubert Vos works, surrounded by hi portraits and enough of the traditional furnishings to give his studio the requisite “air.”  Here, too, at least one of the several successful decorators of porcelain, Miss M. O. Barnes, has her kiln.

Robert Rascovich’s Studio

If one were asked to pick out the most attractive studio in Chicago one’s choice probably would fall upon that of Mr. Robert Rascovich, whose room on the top floor at No. 10 van Buren Street comes rather nearer satisfying one’s idea of what a studio should be than any of the others.  It is a large, square place, well-lit from overhead and with a little side window looking out onto a shaft.  This was ugly enough in the beginning, but Mr. Rascovich has converted it into something akin to one of the old medieval leaded panes by a judicious combination of pasting and illuminating.  The walls are hung with tapestries painted by Mr. Rascovich in Paris, but so cleverly that they give the effect of age with its mellow color.  There are rugs, too, here and there by way of draperies and among them a few pictures are hung.

Others stand along the wainscoting and make bright patches of color in dark corners.  A splendid old Dutch sideboard of mahogany elaborately carved forms and effective receptacle for bits of tapestry and embroideries, old leather covered books, and some pieces of pewter, all of which seem to have mastered for themselves the trick of still-life arrangement.  On the top are vases, old Delft, Persian, Florentine, Venetian, Pewter, a satisfying mingling of tones.  A set of Dutch shelves that once graced some quaint kitchen cabinet that looks as if it might be a "stray" from an old picture, just staying where it is because it has forgotten the way back.  Old tables, comfortable chairs, a faint odor of cigarettes, and a couch with a wide-awake Maltese kitten playing luxuriously with a Roman scarf of many colors-these are the things one notices in the pleasant room.  Mr. Raschovich suits his surroundings.  Tall, slender, dark eyes, hair touched with gray, regular features, pointed beard, all is as it should be, even to a velveteen jacket and a cultured manner.  One feels as if one has stepped into the middle of a romance.

His Paintings and Etchings

Mr. Raschovich has happily something more than a delightful personality to support the pleasant reputation for being a "good fellow" that he enjoys among his fellow workers.  On the easel is an extremely clever bit of landscape - Wisconsin translated into the soft dull tones of early fall, and in its black frame suggesting strongly nothing half so much as Holland.  And in Mr. Rascovich's portfolio are etchings and pen-and-inks that combine happily breadth and delicacy and are witnesses to his versatility.  He came to Chicago from Italy two years ago, attracted to this country possibly by his American wife.  His training has been as eclectic as his tastes are in a cosmopolitan nature.

Another studio in which it is pleasant to linger is that of Mr. Frank Dvorak, at No. 1506 Michigan Ave.  Like Mr. Rascovich, Mr. Dvorak may be considered a newcomer.  He has not been long in Chicago, having come here from Philadelphia about two years ago.  He is a conscientious worker and spends many hours each day at his easel.  His rooms are made bright with rugs and "green growing things," and at present, with nothing so much as the picture on which he is at work, a group of laughing babies and a bunch of roses.  It is a pretty concept and should be popular if the finished picture fulfills the promise of the incomplete state.  A large canvas, the back of this, on which Mr. Dvorak works occasionally, is covered with a sketch of the club house lawn at Washington Park on Derby Day, introducing the portraits of the people who make "society."

To return to the "big building" studios. One of the cheeriest airiest of them is that of Mr. Jules Guerin in the Auditorium.  Its furnishings are simple but in the best of taste, leaving plenty of working room while giving one a satisfied sense of colors.  Rugs and Oriental draperies, some studies, and a few finished pictures make an apartment that if "mannish" is none the less attractive.  Mr. Guerin is one of the younger Chicago artists and has worked hard for his success.  Those who know his delicate watercolor landscapes in gray and green tones will perhaps be surprised to learn that he served his apprenticeship to it as a scenic painter under Ernest Albert.  Mr. Guerin has several pupils and a large amount of order work.  His neighbors in the Auditorium are Miss Anderson and Miss Hourmann, both of whom are decorators of porcelain.

Mr. Bigelow's Landscapes

The group of artists in the Athenaeum Building includes several of the men whose canvases have grown familiar to people who attend the occasional exhibitions of the Chicago Society of Artists.  Mr. D. F. Bigelow, who is one of the oldest painters of landscape in Chicago, has a workroom, in which he receives pupils on the top floor.  It is a businesslike looking place that is, in an artistic sense, of course filled with canvases representing Mr. Bigelow's work out of doors.  Many of the landscapes are bits of New England and the Middle States.  For although Mr. Bigelow has lived in Chicago more than thirty years, most of his studies form nature have been made in the East.  New Englanders have a fashion of keeping their love for the prim old States whence they came, and many of Mr. Bigelow's orders have in their Western homes something to remind them of home scenes.

Mr. A.F. Brooks, who likes to paint portraits better than anything else, but who, nevertheless, has some clever things that are not portraits on the walls, is a neighbor of Mr. Bigelow, and so is Charles A. Corwin, whose studio shows pleasing evidences that the days he spent at the Fair last summer were not idle ones:  and that among other things, he made a pretty careful study of "Midway."

To E. A. Burbank's studio a touch of the "eternal feminine" is given by the presence of Mrs. Burbank.  A solemn black cat which generally assists Mr. Burbank to receive his guests, although it belongs to the janitor, may be responsible for something of the air of domesticity that pervades it.  It is a large room made attractive by rugs and divans piled up with pillows, with pieces of "old blue," picked up everywhere, with Mr. Burbank's own canvases, finished and unfinished, and with odd things form the Orient, to which it is the fashion to allude disrespectfully as "gimcracks," no matter how good to look at they may be or how effective as decoration-and Mr. Burbank's Oriental objects are effective.  Mr. Burbank's penchant for painting dusky subjects will be remembered by those who know his work.  His favorite models are Negroes, and he has been successful in hitting off some of their characteristics.  These facts may explain his affinity for the solemn black cat whose portrait he painted recently and intends to again.

Their Comradeship and Jollity

All those men and a hundred more whose names are enrolled on its membership list find in the "every other Saturdays" of the Society of Artists that comradeship and jollity that seem some way essential to successful picture making.  After the speechmaking is ended on these nights of suppers and gayety several good fellows who don't happen to be painter-actors, newspaper men, a few lawyers, and sometimes a physician or two-drop in.  There is music then and the galleries take on something of the look that Du Maurier likes to dwell on in the studios of his friends "the Laird" and "Little Billee," the heroes of the new story "Trilby."

In these festivities women artists have, of course, no part.  But they have their own headquarters and give their own "functions" regardless of the men.  The Palette club, of which Miss. Alice Kellogg is President, forms a center for their social life.  Miss Ida Burgess, who it may be remembered, decorated the rooms devoted to women's exhibits in the Illinois Building, shares with the club her pleasant studio in the Chickering Building, or else the club shares its rooms with her; at all events, they seem to be identified.  Just now the place is in confusion because the pictures intended for the "Palette" exhibition to be opened at the Art Institute Feb. 1 have been received and judged there and are standing about in melancholy looking wrappings ready for their journey to the lakefront.  Ordinarily the club puts its "best foot forward" every Saturday afternoon.  The tea things are brought out, somebody "pours" and the pretty room, with its bright if somewhat womanish furnishings of divan, lampshades, draperies, and pictures galore, takes on a look of animation.  Its chairs and sofas fill, and the Palette people and their friends discuss art, or dress, or the Salvation army, whichever topic happens to be uppermost, to their hears content.

Miss. Kellogg, who is so closely identified with the club, shares a studio with Miss Beatrix Wilcox in the Giles Building, No. 802 Wabash Ave.  It is a large room, affording both side and top light, and is furnished with a variety of belongings that is bewildering, partly artistic, partly feminine, but wholly jolly and pleasing.  There is of course a divan, covered in this instance with pretty striped Madras grass cloth.  A tea-table occupies one corner with cups invitingly spread on it and some tête-à-têtes drawn up cozily.  There are bookshelves, everywhere sketches, studies, finished pictures, portraits just begun and back-and-whites, souvenirs of some exhibition.  It is pleasant to think of Miss Kellogg herself as a representative Chicago artist so far as the women are concerned.  She is one of the instructors at the Art Institute and does clever work for the dealers’ front time to time.  She has, too, ideas on subjects other than art, is bright to talk to and graceful in her manner.  Although ten at her table is a good thing to remember.

Miss Kellogg is one of the groups of women students at the old Academy of Design who went abroad together.  Miss. Wade and Miss. Ida Haskell were among the others.  Miss Haskell is still in Europe, but Miss Wade has a studio in the Athenaeum Building with Miss. Murphy.  Her "Portrait of a Lady," which found a place in the Art Palace last summer, was painted here.  Besides making it an arena for hard work herself she sometimes lends it to another hard worker, Frederick Freer, who paints there an occasional portrait of somebody who happens to feel that Lake View is a long way off.  Miss. Dorn and Miss Jones have studios here, too, as has Miss Bartel who paints nothing but portraits.  All three belong to the Palette club.

Mr. Vanderpoel's Latest Work

Mr. J. H. Vanderpoel has a modest workshop in the Giles Building devoted wholly to study.  Just now it is filled with unfinished watercolors which he is preparing for the exhibition which he and Mr. Guerin are to make in February.  Among them a study of a girl reading strikes one as being full of life and color.  Mr. Vanderpoel's excellent draftsmanship is even better displayed, however, in a picture which he calls "The Empty Cradle" and which suggests that the subjects which the modern Dutch artists like to paint.  It is a little old-fashioned wooden cradle, and it stands in rather a bare, forlorn room.  A woman has thrown herself on the floor beside it, her arms clasped about it caressingly, her head bowed upon it.  Her entire attitude speaks of longing and despair.  The coloring is subdued and handled with a satisfying degree of breadth.  Mr. Vanerpoel's story is known to most Chicago people.  It is one of the patient devotion and faithful service to art.  Born in the little village of Kruisdorf, Holland, he came to Chicago as a child and has been so long identified with the city that his connection with the Art Institute as instructor has a pleasing suitability.  Last year Mr. Vanderpoel had a studio with Charles Boutwood, another of the Art Institute teachers, the latter now does his work at home.

Where Frederick Freer Works

When one wants to find Frederick Freer, who belongs also to the ranks of those whose care it is to instill ideas of form and color into the young persons who are beginning to find out that "art is long" at the institute, one must get into a "Limits" cable and like the duck in the nursery rhyme "gae and gas and gae" until he comes to the barns which Mr. Yerkes steadfastly refuses to move farther north.  Then unless he wants to walk four or five blocks, he’ll present his transfer check to the conductor of the Evanston Avenue horse car and he'll drop off at Wellington Ave.  No. 1701 is the place.  It's a little house, he'll find, and just running over with pictures. "Studio?"  says Mr. Freer when you ask him about it, "why bless you, I haven't any studio. I paint all over the house - dining room, kitchen, roof when I can get on it, anywhere the fancy strikes me.  I think I would rather prefer the roof, but it's sort of difficult just this weather." The house bears him out.  Art is written all over it in big, black capital letters.  Mr. Freer is not one of the men who shut themselves up and wrestle with their colors in grim solitude.  The door between the room where during the winter his easel stands and the rest of the house, which is enlivened by the chatter of his small sons, stands wide open.  Only "Diana" the little dog, who would evidently rather be with Mr. Freer than anyone else in the world, is debarred the privilege of entering the room. A cruel, though low, wire screen shuts him out.

The room is a workshop, primarily, It is hung with studies, sketches, photographs, and all kinds of things in all kinds of states stand about the room, some with their faces to the room, some looking out with the mute appeal for completion. "When I get through with the postmortems," says Mr. Freer, "then I'm going to attend to all this.  But somehow-they are so inconsiderate about these things-people will delay getting their portraits painted until they die, and then I must fix them up for posterity. I don't mind doing it especially, of course, but they do interfere with other work woefully." There is an interesting lot of portfolios in the room filled with odds and ends, delightfully jumbled pictures he picked up when he was a boy, photographs of masterpieces in foreign galleries, reproductions of his own pictures. By far the best portrait Mr. Freer has is one he is painting when "postmortems" don't interfere, of himself and the very youngest of his small boys.  In time they are all to find a place on the canvas, not for a moment forgetting Mrs. Freer, who has been her husband's model for some of his most successful pictures, notably the "Lady with the Fan." owned by the Boston Art club.  Mr. Freer is a Chicago man, although he has lived for several years in New York.  He was born here and studied in Munich and Paris.  He is a thorough believer in broad, open methods of work.

Another Portrait Painter

Just as far south as Mr. Freer's house is north is the studio of Oliver Dennett Grover, whose picture "Thy Will Be Done," which won the Yerkes prize, is perhaps his best-known piece of work.  Mr. Grover's studio was built for him, and it is a delightful place either for work or for idling time away.  Mr. Grover is a native of Illinois and was born in Earlsville about thirty-three years ago.  Chicago, Munich, Venice, Florence, and Paris are the cities in which he has at various times pursued his studies.  Pictures of his have been purchased by several Chicago men, Charles Hutchinson and Lyman J. Gage among them.

The sculptures' studios seem to fall into a group of their own.  In any description of them that of Leonard W. Volk seems naturally to take the lead.  Mr. Volk is the pioneer sculptor of Chicago.  This sounds formidable, but Mr. Volk isn't.  On the contrary, he is kind and genial, full of entertaining reminiscences and stories of famous people who he has met or worked for.  His studio in McVicker's Theater Building is a simple one, but to people who know anything of Mr. Volk's portrait busts it has its attractions.  One bit of furniture of which Mr. Volk is proud is the chair in which Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas sat to him.  On the back of it is a silver plate setting forth this fact.  It was one of the few things that went through the Chicago fire unscathed, being at the time reposing peacefully under a tree on the lawn of Mr. Volk's residence.  The mask of Lincoln in the studio is another object to which a melancholy interest is attached.

Before the Columbus Memorial Building became one of Chicago's landmarks Lorado Taft had a large studio in the gallery that formed a part of the old building.  He is at the top of the Venetian Building now, regretting the glories of the past.  His present quarters are pleasant though, en if they are more cramped than his old ones, and they are what New Englanders term "slightly" to a degree that should be a continual delight.  Poised up here between heaven and earth, Mr. Taft does his work.  Just now it is a great pleasure to him, for he has turned his back for a little on the "soldiers’ monuments" and portrait busts which are such good friends to artists' purses, but interfere so badly with their dreams, and is indulging in pure fancy.  The figure upon which he is engaged is destined for the approaching exhibition in New York.  His model is a young girl about 15 years old.  The figure which is nude is posed simply in a sitting posture, the face lifted, the eyes dreamy, and the lips sweet.  One hand, the right is raised to the head adjusting a flower in the closely coiled hair.  Every line and contour express youth and innocence and the subtle charm to both.  The flower will probably give the name of "The Nymph" to the figure but indeed, its perfect simplicity is such that it scarcely seems to need a name.

Working on Busts and Bas-Reliefs

Besides this, which from Mr. Taft's point of view, is not work at all, the things that are claiming his attention are chiefly busts and bas-reliefs for collages, both of professors and bestowers of substantial gifts, a mild epidemic for which seems to have broken out over the country.

Not even the elevator in the Woman's Temple can aspire to the height which Carl Rohl-Smith's studio reaches.  One must leave it and climb up a long flight of stairs before one reaches it.  It's a fine place when one gets there, though making up in light and quiet what it costs in energy.

There are a score of other studios which one would like to mention if there were space that of Charles Francis Brown, the President of the "Cosmopolitan," who works in the Giles Building at No. 809 Wabash Ave. that of Kemyes, who this week is "off and awa" hunting, taking a vacation, now that his bronze lions are being cast; that of Gelert, who is in Europe, among others.  But perhaps, after all, these are enough to convince people that Chicago has artists and studios, even if there is no "quarter" and no "atmosphere."  The artists are the main thing.  Given them, Chicago can echo with a clear conscience John Boyle O'Reilly's invitation to "Come into

Bohemia." sure as need be of the spirit of the place to which she invites her guests.

Artists in the city set aside Saturday afternoons for visits from the public as they were being frequented at all hours and especially in the winter that cut down on their daylight to be able to work.[1]

[1] “Art and Artists,” ““Where Art Thrives. Chicago Has Its Studios and Its Bohemian Spirit. Lacks A Latin Quarter. Many a Painter’s Picturesque Workshop Is to Be Found. How To Ferret Them Out. Tapestried Walls Between Which Mr. Rascovich Has His Easel. Haunts Of Other Clever Men,” Chicago Tribune, 1/28/1894, p.25.