ftTHE CRAFTSMAN,,ft
NOW       GUSTAV STICI(LEY. EDITOR AND P UBLISHER  NoW
     V    VOLUME XII      MAY. 1907    NUMBER 2    1   J

EUGENE HIGGINS: AN AMERICAN ARTIST
WHOSE WORK UPON CANVAS DEPICTS THE
DERELICTS OF CIVILIZATION AS DO THE
TALES OF MAXIM GORKY IN LITERATURE:
BY JOHN SPARGO
           T WAS the Sunday evening before Christmas when
           the trail ended and my eyes rested upon the gloomy
           soul-haunting pictures of the social abyss, and upon
           their artist-creator, Eugene Higgins. The pictures
           were not new to me, for some vision of them had
4haunted me for months in a strange, uncanny sort
            of way. One night last winter as I sat in a New
York cafe with a group of friends, one of them pulled from his pocket
some worn and tattered pages of a French magazine, L'Assiette deBeurre,
containing several poor reproductions of some powerful pictures of out-
cast, broken and desolate human beings, which exercised a wonder-
ful fascination over our little group. All that we could learn about
them was that the pages we saw were part of an entire issue of the
magazine devoted to the work of the artist, an unknown, mysterious
painter named Higgins-Eugene Higgins. The pictures took irre-
sistible hold of my thoughts and fancy; their greatness manifested
itself despite the poor paper and engraving, dominating everything.
   After that everywhere I went among artists and students of art I
made vain attempts to learn something about the pictures and the
man who painted them. Eugene Higgins became a Man of Mystery
and his work something belonging to the world of legend and romance.
   Then I heard of my mysterious unknown in various places
and strange ways. A poet-painter friend at the shrine of whose
genius I have sought and found inspiration for the life-struggle,
spoke of the painter of the weirdly great "Les Miserables" as "a
Charles
Haag in paint," and confirmed my own judgment thereby, for I
had already associated the two names in my thoughts. So he was
in New York! But, alas! New York is a great wilderness of humanity
and no one has blazed the trails. There is no place in our great
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