Studio: international art (54.1912)

M. A. J. Bauers IVater-Colours

colour-scale of this painting is the full depth of A ■ AHE WATER-COLOURS OF
the artist's last easel pieces. In these he plays on MARIUS A J BAUER BY T.

a keyboard of greater compass than any he has MARTIN WOOD

hitherto employed. The clear descant of the

impressionist here rings out still, and is heard all It is to the rarest type of artist that M. A. J.
through, in light and smiling melody, but only to Bauer belongs. Any one of his pictures is as com-
still further enhance the mighty breadth of the plete in its narrative as a Balzac story, and in a
fundamental chords. We see the very latest technical succession of them the story is continued about the
conquests employed as means of expression for a same people, as with Balzac. A great drama is
sense, a grasp of nature, that carries one's thoughts unfolded in these drawings—in the processions
back to the Fontainebleau school. And now the from palace to palace, the endless coming and
artist returns to Tyreso. He beholds once more going, the horsemen travelling at night. When the
the scene of his youthful, wistful dreams of beauty morning comes the whole country-side glistens with
—but he sees it with other eyes. Manly and arms, and a doomed city is encompassed,
vigorous are the strokes of the brush with which The titles of Mr. Bauer's pictures matter very
he shows us again its bays and hills. And so he little. He gives one genius to the East and
paints its ancient church enframed in billowing obscures the dissimilarities of the tribes. He
vendure, with a pantheistic religiousness which, to shows us the spirit of a city as it is manifested in
this piece of landscape bathing in evening light its architecture more than in its present-day people,
after a storm, gives significa-
tion as of a seal, confirming
the eternal renewal of nature.
There is a touch of Millet in
a picture like this, and the re-
semblance does not depend
on any imitation; it is a con-
genial feature of the artistic
temperament, common to the
artist-prince of royal blood
and to the prince among
painters who lived like a
peasant.

So stands Prince Eugen,
with his virile work executed
in splendid isolation ; listen-
ing to no other voice than
that of his artistic conscience ;
one of the captains of that
phalanx of artists who have
led Swedish landscape paint-
ing on to that prominent
position it at this moment
occupies. A. G.

[Three of the paintings by
Prince Eugen, to which the
writer makes particular refer-
ence m the foregoing article,
were reproduced in an early
number of The Studio
(December 1897, vol. xii.),
namely, The Cloud, The Old
Castle, and A Summer Nioht

_The Editor 1 "optocht" by m. a. j. bauer

■J (By permission of Messrs. P. and D. Colnaghi and Obach)

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