Bird Song,

1896

Cox was a leading proponent of the American Renaissance, a conservative movement that advocated timeworn, academic aesthetics because of their perceived universal appeal and ability to act as a beneficial, unifying social force. A master draftsman, in works such as Bird Song the artist evoked a timeless classical ideal through legible design and accessible subject matter, in contrast to emerging, more abstract styles. He promoted his conventional views as an influential instructor at New York’s Art Students League, where over a twenty-five-year career he insisted that "artists who still follow the old roads do so, not from ignorance or stupidity or a stolid conservatism, still less from willful caprice, but from necessity; because those roads are the only ones that can lead them where they wish to go."