Studio: international art (83.1922)

REVIEWS

Constable, Gainsborough and Lucas: Brief
Notes on some early drawings by John
Constable. By Sir Charles Holmes, M.A.,
D.Litt. (Maggs Bros.) 21s. net.—The
subject of these notes by the Director of the
National Gallery is a private collection of
sixteen landscape drawings belonging to
the early part of the great East Anglian
master's career, all of which are reproduced
in half-tone, fourteen of them apparently
for the first time. The drawings are in-
teresting chiefly for the evidence they yield
of the influences by which the master's
efforts to perfect himself were directed. In
these days when a great fuss is made of
juvenile performances, it is well to re-

member that Constable's genius was both
late and slow in developing—up to his
twenty-fourth year he was, as Sir Charles
Holmes reminds us, “ not only an amateur,
but an amateur of more than average dull-
ness," and it was only by indomitable per-
severance and patient study that mastery
was attained. And when so many young
artists on the threshold of their careers
pride themselves on their originality, it is
also well to remember that along with the
direct study of nature, a potent factor in
Constable's development, was his study of
the Old Masters and his great contem-
poraries, Girtin and Gainsborough—the
latter especially. “ By founding his own
method of sketching from Nature on the
luminous, easy style of Gainsborough, he

“ ICARUS." BY GLEB DERUJINSKY
(National Academy of Design, N.Y.)

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