H. Siddons Mowbray

It has suited foreign writers on the American national character to describe it as shaped exclusively by the twin ideals of industrial efficiency and intensive salesmanship. The verdict no doubt gains emphasis from the observations of visitors from abroad who listen, as even Mr. Bryce used to make a point of doing when his “American Commonwealth” was in preparation, to the talk of traveling salesmen in the Pullman smoking compartment. It may have seemed to be confirmed by the triumphant election of an eminent efficiency engineer to the Presidency and by the wild enthusiasm of the Stock Exchange over that achievement. Yet Bryce’s own conclusion of forty years ago was that “the average American is more easily touched through his imagination and emotions than the average Englishman or Frenchman,” and the foreign investigator of today is usually forced in the end to concede to America a strain of idealism which does not altogether fit the rest of the picture.

Nothing has been more out of line with that picture than the repeated emergence of rare artistic genius from the unpromising background of American industrialism. Harry Siddons Mowbray was, so to speak, born into the atmosphere of the Pennsylvania oil boom of the sixties. His adopted father was an oil-refiner and nitroglycerine manufacturer; production and industrial application of high explosives occupied his own particular interest during his younger days. Yet it was in precisely these very materialistic surroundings that the American boy displayed an artistic imagination, a play of fancy, an irresistible desire to draw and paint the pictures that crowded on his mind, which might have belonged to sixteenth-century Italy. His earlier achievement with small and delicate imaginative canvases of the more modern school, though it won for the young Mowbray an immediate place among contemporary painters, was only an interlude. The mural work which followed, the panel at the Athletic Club, the wall decorations of the Appellate Court, of the University Club, of the Morgan Library and of the Library at Washington, Connecticut, ensured him a place with the old masters. Produced in a so-called American atmosphere of crass materialism, they remain as memorials of artistic ideals, perfection of technique and grasp of allegorical conception for which the student once had to look to the painters of the Italian Renaissance.

Mowbray’s personality was cheerful; he was keenly observant and remembered what he saw; as a companion he was always entertaining. He was a frequent visitor at the Century, but his every-day interests centered in his Connecticut country home, at whose fireside friends and neighbors used to gather on winter evenings and Sunday afternoons to discuss new books and new social problems, but more than all to listen to Mowbray’s stimulating talk and criticism.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1929 Century Association Yearbook