An exhibition of paintings owned in St. Louis is held annually in the St. Louis Museum of Art, and leaves no doubt as to the genuineness of the interest of St. Louis citizens in painting. Nor can any one, considering the groups of canvases loaned to the museum for the annual exhibition, doubt that certain art collectors in St. Louis (Mr. Edward A. Faust, for example) are buying not only names but paintings.
The Art Museum is less accessible to the general citizen than are museums in some other cities. Having been originally the central hall of the group of buildings devoted to art at the time of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, it stands in that part of Forest Park which was formerly the Fair ground. Posed, as it is, upon a hill, in a commanding and conspicuous position, it reveals, somewhat unfortunately, the fact that it is the isolated fragment of a former group. Nevertheless, it must take a high place among the secondary art museums of the United States. For despite the embarrassment caused by the possession of a good deal of mediocre sculpture, a legacy from the World's Fair, which is packed in its central hall; and despite the inheritance, from twenty or twenty-five years since, of vapid canvases by Bouguereau, Gabriel Max, and other painters of past popularity, whose works are rapidly coming to be known for what they are--despite these handicaps, the museum is now distinctly in step with the march of modern art. The old collection is being weeded out, and good judgment is being shown in the selection of new canvases. Like the Albright Gallery in Buffalo, the St. Louis Museum of Art is rapidly acquiring works by some of the best American painters of to-day, having purchased within the last four or five years canvases by Redfield, Loeb, Symons, Waugh, Dearth, Dougherty, Foster, and others.
Another building saved from the World's Fair is the superb central hall of Washington University, a red granite structure in the English collegiate style, designed by Cope & Stewardson. The dozen or more buildings of this university are very fine in their harmony, and are pronounced by Baedeker "certainly the most successful and appropriate group of collegiate buildings in the New World."