Some Artists at the Fair

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HE grand style, the perfect proportions, and the magnificent dimensions of the buildings of the World’s Columbian Exposition, excite a twofold sentiment in the mind of the visitor—wonder and admiration at the beauties of the edifices, and regret and disappointment that they are not to remain as monuments to the good taste, knowledge, and skill of the men who built them, and as a per

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manent memorial of the event which the Exposition is intended to celebrate. This complex feeling is a natural one, and is perfectly comprehensible in the presence of the noble porticos and colonnades, the graceful towers, superb domes, and imposing façades. Previous exhibitions, with the possible exception of that in Vienna in 1873, have been confessedly ephemeral in the character of their construction, and have shown a distinctly playful and festal style of architecture, with little attempt at seriousness or dignity of design. The monumental character of the group of Exposition buildings in Chicago is not the result of accident, but of deliberate forethought and wise judgment.

In the heat of the fever of construction, which has spread like a contagion from the rocks of Mount Desert to the white sands of the Pacific coast, a new race of architects has sprung up, fertile in resources and clever in execution, but with little well-grounded knowledge of the real principles of their art. Beginning with the bulbous conglomerations of material which have been forced upon a long-suffering public by the Government architects, and ending with consciously picturesque structures that hint more of the terrors of mediæval dungeons than of the comforts of domestic life, and bear the title of villa but the aspect of military strongholds, the architecture of the past two decades has, with some