A visit to his studio affords great pleasures. He is, one might say, the painter of theatrical celebrities. He has painted Joe Jefferson more than a dozen times in all his parts -- Rip Van Winkel, Bob Acres, and old Caleb Plummer. One of them is owned by Henry Irving. His portrait of Irving as Becket hangs in the Players' Club. He has also portrayed Irving as King Arthur, Mrs. James Brown Potter as Marie Antoinette, Mrs. Corinne Jackson as Tillie Slowboy, Mme. Calve as Carmen (owned by Jefferson), and Anton Seidl -- quite an interesting collection. The principal merit of his work is a certain richness of color that is subdued to a harmony of tone, rarely met with in pictures, suggesting all colors of the solar spectrum. Another characteristic of his portraits is that they look -- particularly those of Jefferson -- more like genre pictures than ordinary portraits, which is rather refreshing in a time when everybody has his portrait painted.

But the visitor who strays into the studio at present sees but little of these accomplishments; the painter has turned photographer, and wants everybody to share his enthusiasm and hopes about the artistic possibility of photography.

Mr. Eugene has practiced photography for quite a number of years, and the number of his prints amounts to several hundred. Looking them over carefully, as I have done, one by one, I have been impressed by two facts: that nearly all his prints contain technical imperfections, such as could easily be pointed out by any moderately accomplished critic; and that -- despite these glaring, almost unpardonable mistakes -- they have, in almost every instance, pictorial qualities which the majority of artistic photographs lack.

Look at his "Henry Irving." Surely a remarkable bit of portraiture, in many respects the best I have ever seen, and yet the left leg is all out of proportion. Then again his "Madonna." What a marvelous contrast of light and shade; the first impression is that of a perfect composition, but how disappointed one feels when one discovers that the plate has been scratched all over, and that the hand of the mother is almost twice as large as it should be. The same mistake we find in his otherwise so beautifully composed picture, "The Misses H." The accessories are handled with remarkable cleverness; only the two large spots in the background, overlooked by mere carelessness I suppose, disturb.

This strange combination of shortcomings and meritorious traits can be only explained by taking into consideration that Mr. Eugene, whose versatility has led him to exploit nearly every graphic art, (like etching, pencil, pen and ink, and charcoal drawing, etc.), looks at photography merely as a new medium to express his artistic temperament, overlooking entirely that photography, as soon as it rises above mechanical picture-making, is a science which can only be mastered by long years of apprenticeship and experimentation.

The ambition to get painter's results is nothing new. All photographers of high standing and ability have striven for it, and a few in this country, principally Messrs. Stieglitz, Day, and Miss KŠsebier, have achieved it. With few exceptions, their knowledge of drawing, light and shade, composition, however, is simply theoretical, acquired by the study of galleries, reproductions, and books, and not by practical application in some other art. They endeavor to reflect the principles of painting and to imitate its effects as to tonality and chiaroscura. Mr. Eugene, on the contrary, being a wielder of the pencil, etching needle and brush, strives to introduce the technical characteristics of other arts into his prints. They look like reproductions of paintings and etchings. He imitates linear expression and brush work in the same way as Mr. Keiley does Japanese wash paintings.

Let us investigate his method of working. It is most peculiar. His routine as a portrait painter gives him the advantage of posing his subjects at once in adequate surroundings that are in themselves artistic. Like most studios, his contains all sorts of paraphernalia, the use of which no ordinary mortal can solve, but which lend the place that atmosphere, apparently indispensable, to the production of a work of art. It is interesting to watch Mr. Eugene manipulate these odds and ends. He places, for instance, a lady sitter against a most unconventional background, formed of a gobelin or painting, throws an old piece of drapery over her lap, and surrounds her with plaster casts, fans, large faded flowers, picture frames, books -- in short, whatever falls into his hands or impressed his fancy for the moment. While doing so he keeps up a most entertaining conversation, in order to make his fair sitter feel in no way embarrassed at finding herself suddenly in such an artistic curiosity shop; he continually adds one thing or another to his pictorial arrangement, and patiently watches for the moment when the lady, by accident, assumes a pose that pleases him. Thereupon he lets somebody hold a mirror at a certain angle, so as to throw a reflex of light on the shadowy side of the face, and then relies upon the camera to do the rest.

But the camera refuses to obey him. He has arranged his subject nearly as a portrait painter might do, who can rectify any shortcoming of the composition while painting. He has paid no particular attention to the foreshortening (very likely the fault of his lens), he has overlooked the fact that the action of light accentuates and often exaggerates every detail, and that colors always turn out differently from what the layman expects. The result is a plate abundant with obtrusive details, meaningless dark and light spots, and, worst of all, with a false perspective. There is hardly any excuse for such oversight, not to say ignorance. A man like Eickemeyer knows exactly what he will get when he presses the rubber ball, while with Mr. Eugene a perfect plate, in which no retouching is required (like his portrait of Miss Jones, remarkable in its suggestion of color, and his large head of Kyrle Bellew as Cardinal de Rohan), is simply a lucky incident.

Any other photographer would despair at such dire results; to Mr. Eugene, on the contrary, they suggest all sorts of pictorial possibilities; they call his artistic temperament into play, and not only by the most extraordinary methods of suppression and modification, but also by actually adding absolutely new matter, he succeeds in producing something whose artistic merit cannot be denied. He alters entirely the aspect of the subject as seen by the eyes of the camera; for instance, he is capable of changing a gobelin background into a forest interior, as one can witness in his Madonna composition. The left part of the portrait of Mrs. H. is produced by oil color, manipulated on the negative by thumb and index. the same you can observe in this portraits of Miss M. W., and many others. Another of his retouching methods is a peculiar application of lines. The tonality which the camera refuses to repeat for him, he strives to attain by covering up and hiding all defects with cross-hatching. I have seen a portrait of the sculptor D. C. French by Mr. Eugene in which only the face was purely photography; all the remainder was the work of an etcher. Traces of these etched lines you can find in nearly every one of his prints.

The merit of his work lies distinctly outside the domain of photography; and although I do not undervalue his peculiar gift of imbuing a technically most hopeless subject with artistic feeling, I fail to see how the art of Daguerre can particularly benefit by such proceedings.

Every art has its limitations, and only he can claim to master it who accomplishes something within these very limitations. For that one must have its entire mechanism at one's fingers' ends. Nobody would dare to compose a symphony unless he were thoroughly acquainted with musical rhythm and form, the laws of harmony, and the construction of counterpoint. Why should it be different with photography?

Mr. Eugene defends his method by saying: "I do not see how my way of retouching is more illegitimate than the gum process," and with some right. To make a photograph look like a sepia wash drawing is really as unsatisfactory as to make it resemble an etching, the more so as the men who apply the gum process are generally no draughtsmen, and have no experience in handling a water color brush. Mr. Eugene at least can draw; but for his photographic career it would be more essential if he knew the difference of long and short focus lenses, and had given a little study to the chemical principles brought into action.

It is a great pity that the majority of artistic photographers are as deficient in artistic temperament as Mr. Eugene is in the technique of photography. The artistic photographers with their great stores of knowledge have, with few exceptions, but little to express, while Mr. Eugene has too much to express for his insufficient mastery of technical agencies. And for that reason Mr. Eugene's work is worth careful study. It represents an interesting phase in the development of artistic photography in America. It contains at times wonderful passages, almost as astonishing as the feats of an Ole Bull on the violin.

The student of photography can therefore go to his works as proofs of what could be done in the art, if feeling and technique would go hand in hand, and derive from them the lesson that whenever a print fails to express something worth expressing, the fault lies in unskillfulness and not in any defect of the process. On the other hand, it would not be desirable to rival Mr. Eugene on his own ground, which would anyhow be impossible unless the photographer were himself an uncommonly clever artist to begin with. Even Mr. Day, with his rare decorative talent, could not approach it on its own ground.

His work also shows that artistic photography is capable of performing a good deal more than it has accomplished hitherto. And although I look at Mr. Eugene's achievements merely as an experimentation in a direction not quite desirable, it enables us to estimate all the nonsense said to the effect that photography cannot do this thing and cannot do that at its true value.

Artistic photography is still in its infancy, and it will not reach maturity before it has freed itself from the influence of painting; for nearly all prize pictures of the Photographic Salons, with few exceptions (for instance the "Winter on Fifth Avenue" by Alfred Stieglitz) remind us of pictures that we have seen before. This is also the most grievous fault I have to find with Mr. Eugene's work; it is reflective, not original. In quite a number of his productions I can distinctly trace the first cause of his inspiration -- his "Lady of Charlotte," one of his most graceful and delicate compositions, to a pastel drawing of Fernand Khnopff, the profile of a pre-Raphaelite lady kissing the air; the portrait of "Miss Lillian" to the Glasgow school, etc. He has the ability to re-create. Instead of exploring new realms for photography, he has been satisfied with endowing it with a certain pictorial beauty. It matters not from what source, as long as it pleases his artistic fancy.

We must be grateful to him even for that. In a decade or so his work may attract but little attention, but at present despite the fierce opposition it will meet on account of its technical shortcomings, it may command a position and perhaps even have followers, as it is the first time that a truly artistic temperament, a painter of generally recognized accomplishments and ability, asserts itself in American photography.