Pioneers Resting BY EUGENE HIGGINS
EUGENE HIGGINS has been called “America’s Millet.”
In this connection, it is interesting to note that, though born in the United States
at Kansas City, Missouri, in 1874 he studied in F ranee under such men as
Jean Paul Laurens, Benjamin Constant, and J. L. Gerome.
His work may be described as the successful adaptation of traditional European techniques to the American scene.
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It has won him numbers of prizes, and placed his ample,
old-masterly pictures in galleries in the United States, England, and France.
In Pioneers Resting, Mr. Higgins says, he aimed at “a monumental design.”
There can be no question of his success.
Although he has deviated from what must have been exact reality only in
the matter of carefully deployed sections of subject matter,
he has invested the covered wagon and the tired pioneers and animals with symbolic grandeur.
By choosing to view them from a spot somewhat below them,
and by thus placing them against the sky, he has given them a feeling of importance larger than life.
“I have been doing this all my life;” he remarked about this sort of subject,
“hoping to get something really fine.”
Pioneers Resting is sufficient comment on his modesty.
