Illustrated Catalogue of the Willitts J. Hole Art Collection

By Margaret Lamar Stearns

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1942.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Dec 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520346598

Book preview

The Willitts J. Hole Art Collection

Illustrated Catalogue of the

WILLITTS J. HOLE

ART COLLECTION

Old Masters Colleted by the Late Willitts J. Hole and

Given to the University of California, Los Angeles, by

SAMUEL K. AND AGNES HOLE RINDGE

Twenty-two of Which Are Pictured, with Notes on the Artists by

MARGARET LAMAR STEARNS

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES

1942

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON,ENGLAND

COPYRIGHT, 1942, BY

THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

From the Address by Robert Gordon Sproul, President of the

University, at the Public Ceremony of Acceptance at

the University of California, Los Angeles

January 7,1940

OF THAT TRADITIONAL trilogy of values—truth, goodness, and beauty—so often mentioned by the philosophers, truth and goodness have always had the formal respect, at least, of the dominant members of society. Not so with beauty. In certain places and periods the fine arts have been highly regarded, as in the Florence of the Medici; but not, for example, in the America of the nineteenth century. The genius of our people has seemed to be so completely absorbed in the economic and social struggles of pioneering in a new and undeveloped country that we have had little inclination to spare time or energy in taking thought of subtler values, or of pursuing interests that did not press directly and insistently upon our daily lives. There is a growing mass of evidence that this period in American life is ending; that we are approaching maturity as a people, and that from now on art may come to be as important with us as it has been in many civilizations of the past—as important as it should be in any civilization worthy of the name.

Today, most of us live incomplete lives. We are specialists, more or less, who do a few things over and over again, not for a day or a season or a year, but for a lifetime. Something in us is too often overexpressed, and much more within us is underexpressed. This is as true of the professional man and the industrial leader as of the wage worker. What close concentration or intense specialization do at the one social extreme, machine tending and minute mechanical repetition do at the other.

Democracy, too, lays a special burden upon those who must participate in it, as all must if it is to succeed. The impulses of individualism and the attitudes of cooperation cannot be harmoniously interwoven save by severe self-discipline.The essential elements of self-discipline—self-restraint, mutual tolerance, sensitiveness to others, and the will to act—are emotionally wearing. The democratic order, with its constant shifting as men exercise their liberty to move up or down, can never be particularly calm or peaceful. Each succeeding day sees that order’s component parts forced nearer and nearer to the limits of emotional depletion. Men begin to lose the drive that it takes to get hard civic duties done, and tend to become indifferent and complacent. That men be kept emotionally refreshed is an urgent need of our kind of social and governmental organization. When the day’s work