Studio: international art (71.1917)

The Recent TVork of Arnesby Brown, R.A.

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'.RAIN CLOUDS OIL PAINTING BY ARNESBY BROWN, R.A.

rolling woods, lush meadows, broad-flanked
bullocks, slow streams and wide estuaries, are
best for his purpose. He would be checked
among silver birches or if his brush had to
foUow the sinewy lines of mountains. Move-
ment with him is generally slow movement,
though sometimes, as in The Estuary, he will
give you a briskly going day, as expressed in
the sudden downpour of light, turning and
gliding sails, and sharply curving foreground.

Mr. Brown's concern with nature being so
exclusively that of a painter gives particular
interest and value to such rare drawings as the
National Gallery of Canada has been fortunate
enough to secure. For one thing they serve to
show the draughtsmanship which, though always
present, might be overlooked in the broadly
synthetic handling of the paintings ; and for
another that the sympathy for materials is not
limited to oil-paint. Obviously a painter's
drawings, they are still completely finished,
136

with a most tactful recognition of the nature of
the means employed.

As might be expected of such a consistent
worker, the life of Mr. Arnesby Brown affords
few biographical details. Apparently he has
been painting all his life, with as little conscious-
ness of an esthetic occupation as if he were
growing beans or breeding cattle. Born at
Nottingham in 1866, he received his art educa-
tion at the local School of Art, and at the Her-
komer School, Bushey. He first exhibited at
the Academy in 1890, was made an Associate
in 1903, and elected R.A. in 1915. Two of his
pictures have been bought for the nation out of
the Chantrey Bequest Fund ; Morning in 1901,
and Silver Morning in 1910 ; and he is repre-
sented at the Guildhall, in the National Galleries
of Canada and Australia, and in all the pro-
vincial public galleries of England. It is a
fortunate circumstance that so popular an artist
should be such a genuine master of painting.