Studio: international art (37.1906)

Reviews and Notices

the beautiful Manor House of Tintenhull; a street
of gabled houses at Tetbury; Holt Court; the Bank
House, Wootton ; Kirkleatham Hospital, Yorks ;
and the College of Matrons, Salisbury ; but there is
nothing from Bath or Chichester where there are
many good examples. The notes on illustrations
given are full of useful suggestion.

A History of English Furniture.— Vol. II.: The
Age of Walnut. By Percy Macquoid. (London :
Lawrence & Bullen.) £2 2s. net.—Although it
cannot be denied that the age of walnut was syn-
chronous with a less simple and dignified period of
English social life than that of oak, the study of
the furniture produced in it is full of interest,
reflecting as it does the changes of taste that took
place in the reign of Charles II. and his immediate
successors. As is pointed out by Mr. Macquoid,
simplicity under the Commonwealth had degene-
rated into the commonplace, and further evolution
in that direction could only have resulted in the
elimination of all art feeling. It was time there-
fore for a change, but that change was progressive
in the wrong direction; for, says Mr. Macquoid,
" towards the end of the seventeenth century ....
the nobility of proportion in Elizabethan decora-
tion and furniture disappeared, giving way to the
somewhat exaggerated mouldings and contrasted
curves, prompted by the vagaries of the Italian
artists, Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini."
For such extravagances oak was, of course, not
suitable, and walnut was presently substituted for
it, success in the treatment of which depended
chiefly in faultless execution. Only by slow de-
grees was that success achieved and anything
that could justly be called a new style evolved,
but mastery of technique once acquired, an infinite
variety of fine designs were produced, the dis-
tinctive qualities of which, with the principles of
their decoration, are carefully defined by Mr.
Macquoid. Reproductions, some of them in
colour, after Shirley Slocombe, are given of numer-
ous fine examples of furniture, in some of which
walnut is either the chief or the sole material
employed, whilst in others may be traced the
gradual introduction of marqueterie and of lacquer,
culminating in that over-ornamentation which de-
tracted so greatly from the charm of later work.
The decline of the age of walnut was rapid, but
its traditions were largely carried on in that of its
successor, the age of mahogany, which is to be
considered in Mr. Macquoid's third volume.

Adolph von Metizel. Abbildungen seiner Ge-
miilde und Studien. (Munich: F. Bruckmann.)
100 Mk.—This copious and usefully bound volume

deals very exhaustively with the art of Menzel. It
includes 661 illustrations in the text and 25 special
plates. It gives chronologically the dates of the
various works produced by Menzel with a descrip-
tion 01 each, and the chronology is completed by
reference under each year to the chief incidents
then occurring in the painter's life. One marks in
turning the pages the transitions through which the
painter's art passed on the way to the remarkable
heights which it eventually attained. From the
first it was complete. Menzel almost seems to
have been a master at once, for the earliest works
show no trace of studentship. The extraordinary
certainty and self-confidence with which he handled
the most difficult and elaborate pictorial problems
came to him out of a fund of genius which, even
at the end of a long and industrious life, showed
no signs of exhaustion. Problems of light and
difficulties of composition were met in the same
spirit in which they were met by the French Im-
pressionists, by Whistler, and other moderns who,
by their genius, freed painting from the tyranny of
subject. Yet Menzel was always a subject-painter.
When the liberty of the artist to paint subject pic-
tures at all was almost denied, Menzel could still
be pointed to as a superlative painter who had
relegated subject to its proper place, and to whom
it was not a handicap, but simply an excuse, and
always an interesting one, for good painting. Men-
zel's drawings must ever rank, we suppose, with the
great drawings of the world. Everything came in
under the power of his pencil; there was hardly a
phase of life that remained outside his range. A
German, the breadth of his interest in life was only
comparable with Balzac's in another art.

Kate Greenaway. By M. H. Spielmann and
G. S. Layard. (London : A. & C. Black.) 20s.
net.—It is somewhat difficult to account for Kate
Greenaway's phenomenal success and wide reputa-
tion. That she was a gifted artist and especially a
sympathetic interpreter of children, no one would
dream of denying; but she lacked the sense of
humour of Randolph Caldecott and the feeling
for form and prolific imagination of Walter Crane,
with both of whom she has been ranked alike
in England and on the Continent. The fact is
she owed very much at the beginning of her
career to the over-laudation of Ruskin, who often
referred to her work in terms that not even her
most partial admirers would now endorse. More-
over, she was fortunate in winning the friend-
ship of many influential men, such as Stacy
Marks, Frederick Locker, and Austin Dobson,
who did much to help and encourage her, though

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