Studio: international art (71.1917)

The Paintings of Joseph Southall

Of his essentially imaginative or symbolical tail in his grand composition New Lamps for
panel paintings in tempera it is impossible to Old.

speak too highly. That such a great decorative In the panel picture of The Sleeping Beauty,
designer as Burne-Jones saw in the youth of now in the Birmingham Art Gallery, his success-
the 'eighties an artist of no mean talent as a ful employment of large masses of pure colour
draughtsman and colourist is not surprising, as contrasting forces is noticeable. The white
especially if one of his earliest works, finished in of her robe heightens the flesh tints of the face.
1884, and representing a woman with dove in Notice the powerful rendering of the eyes,
hand, is considered. Although there is here not observable, too, in the delightful Nut-Brown
the absolute certainty of design, as in those now Maid, exhibited in the New Gallery in 1904,
reproduced, the landscape background reveals and, subsequently, in the Salon. The' soft
quite extraordinary powers of rendering tonal green background, with the light effects in gold
values. Two essentially
Primitives are The
Daughter of Herodias, ex-
hibited in the New Gal-
lery in 1906 and, later, in
the Franco-British Exhi-
bition, and his rendering
of the heartening story of
Beauty receiving the White
Rose from her Father. The
draperies in these two de-
signs of both the principal
female compositions are
frankly Botticellian in
character, though the
facial delineations point
to the influence of Burne-
Jones. The foreground
domestic pets recall the
space-filling solvents of
the Tuscans.

To charge his pictures
with beautiful colour-
schemes, the artist, like
William Morris, has feasted
on the Orientals, espe-
cially the Persian colour-
masters, probing beyond
the Venetians, and find-
ing out the secrets they
embodied so successfully
in their work. It is espe-
cially observable in the
leopards aslant the dis-
gruntled passer-by in The
Daughter of Herodias ', in
the patterning of her coat;
and in the deep rich blues
and golds of the peacock
sweeping the foreground
with its ably delineated "the nut-brown maid" by joseph e. southall'

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