heir manful,
poetic way. They were all of them poets in words; all but Victor
Chapman were professional poets, and he, even if he himself was not
aware, gave us some rare bits of loveliness in his letters. There are
others almost nameless among soldier-hero people who gave us likewise
real bits of unsuspected beauty in their unpretentious letters.

Rex Slinkard was a soldier, poet-painter by inclination, and ranchman
as to specific occupation. Rex has gone from us, too. How many are
there who know, or could have known, the magic of this unassuming
visionary person. Only a few of us who understand the meaning of magic
and the meaning of everlasting silences. It is the fortune of America
that there remain with us numbers of highly indicative drawings and a
group of rare canvases, the quality of which painters will at once
acclaim, and poets will at once verify the lyric perfection of,
paintings and drawings among the loveliest we have in point of purity
of conception and feeling for the subtle shades of existence, those
rare states of life which, when they arrive, are called perfect
moments in the poetic experience of men and women.

There will be no argument to offer or to maintain regarding the work
of Rex Slinkard. It is what it is, the perfect evidence that one of
the finest lyric talents to be found among the young creators of
America has been deprived of its chance to bloom as it would like to
have done, as it so eagerly and surely was already doing. Rex Slinkard
was a genius of first quality. The word genius may be used these days
without fear of the little banalities, since anyone who has evolved
for himself a clear vision of life may be said to possess the quality
of genius.

"The day's work done and the supper past. I walk through the horse-lot
and to my shack. Inside I light the lantern, and then the fire, and
sitting, I think of the inhabitants of the earth, and of the world, my
home."

These sentences, out of a letter to a near friend, and the marginalia
written upon the edges of many of his drawings, show the varying
degrees of delicacy Rex was eager to register and make permanent for
his own realization. His thought was once and for all upon the
realities, that is, those substances that are or can be realities
only to the artist, the poet, and the true dreamer, and Rex Slinkard
was all of these. His observation of himself, and his understanding of
himself, were uncommonly genuine in this young and so p