In Onofre Gari Torrent we have another exponent of the pathos of the sea, the hard lives of those who live upon it, and the heroic ending of those lives. The artist, though he was born in Charleston, S. C., is the son of a Spanish sailor, and his choice of subject shows influence of heredity. After study at the Academy of Barcelona, and in Paris and Madrid, he has settled on the coast of Catalonia, and there he finds material that is new, at least to Americans. In his sporting children, his toiling men and women, and his sailor returning the kit of a lost shipmate to his family, he shows types that in sturdiness and settled gravity are like those which the French and Dutch painters have introduced to us; but the costumes, surroundings, and ethnologic cast give to them a character of their own. He is original in composition, and his figures have both movement and fixity. The "Drawing of the Net" is especially able in pose, the men and women of heavy frame tugging at the ropes with ox-like persistency and resignation. There is, in the pictures of this painter, an absence of the pessimism that makes a bitter strain in the work of so many of the painters and writers of Europe who have taken the ocean for their theme. His grave, but never despairing. A current of warmer blood seems to pulse through his veins than the blood of Breton and his followers. Mr. Torrent was one of the exhibitors at the World's Fair, and he holds the United States in affectionate remembrance. By C. S. Montgomery, Quarterly Illustrator
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