DOI Heft:
No. 60 (February, 1902)
DOI Artikel:Sickert, Oswald: The twenty-seventh exhibition of the New English Art Club
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.22772#0329
The New English Art Club
“THE BELFRY AND WATCH-TOWER OF CALAIS”
BY D. S. MACCOLL
sentiment about nature which is not characteristic
of Constable, and beside their landscapes Mr.
Steer’s is certainly cold. They were attached to
nature as the discoverers of a neglected truth
before which they first knelt with longing. The
moving appeal of their attachment, the sentiment
of such a communing with trees and pools and the
tender sky, is clean wanting in Mr. Steer’s land-
scape. With his power of detachment Mr. Steer
can go back to scenes and weather which have
been little touched by painters since Constable,
the wide expanse of country, full summer, the
blaze of even sunshine, the open weather of
wind and sunny clouds, the brassy green of a whole
valley when the sun bursts through a rainstorm.
In such weather sentiment has no place. As for
imitation I could more easily see the unusual
failure of Mr. Tonks’s The Farmyard, in Constable’s
sketch of The Glebe Farm, or refer the hollow-
ness of Mr. Muirhead’s brave Waier-Mill to his
admiration of that painter.
If the course which Mr. Steer has taken has not
led him to the cultivation of an unfailingly gracious
surface, his painting has a native splendidness, it
is always justified by the fulness and subtlety of its
effects, it is never wilful or tired. It has the charm,
and the power of carrying the spectator along with
it, which seems to belong to his instinctive feeling
for the purposes of oil-paint. And, as a novel
reader might say that he would not jeopardise a
single scene out of the “ Comedie Humaine ” for
the sake of the fairest style in French literature, so
I should hesitate to bargain for any surface, how-
ever gracious, at the possible price of what
Mr. Steer has to say. Constable himself did not
arrive at so satisfying a surface as Old Crome.
Mr. Steer has never shown more clearly how
much he is the master of his medium than in his
picture of the two nude figures, with a reflected
third, which he calls The Mirror. The colour
scheme of apricot and silver is a new thing, a dis-
covery. The feeling of the picture, its content,
the artist’s mind on the subject, is the fresh delight
in the fair bodies, their grace, the health, the glow,
the brilliant truth that has more persistently than
any other ravished the eyes of painters. If we
seldom hear it spoken out, that is because to realise
so fully just those beauties which are the sense of
265
“THE BELFRY AND WATCH-TOWER OF CALAIS”
BY D. S. MACCOLL
sentiment about nature which is not characteristic
of Constable, and beside their landscapes Mr.
Steer’s is certainly cold. They were attached to
nature as the discoverers of a neglected truth
before which they first knelt with longing. The
moving appeal of their attachment, the sentiment
of such a communing with trees and pools and the
tender sky, is clean wanting in Mr. Steer’s land-
scape. With his power of detachment Mr. Steer
can go back to scenes and weather which have
been little touched by painters since Constable,
the wide expanse of country, full summer, the
blaze of even sunshine, the open weather of
wind and sunny clouds, the brassy green of a whole
valley when the sun bursts through a rainstorm.
In such weather sentiment has no place. As for
imitation I could more easily see the unusual
failure of Mr. Tonks’s The Farmyard, in Constable’s
sketch of The Glebe Farm, or refer the hollow-
ness of Mr. Muirhead’s brave Waier-Mill to his
admiration of that painter.
If the course which Mr. Steer has taken has not
led him to the cultivation of an unfailingly gracious
surface, his painting has a native splendidness, it
is always justified by the fulness and subtlety of its
effects, it is never wilful or tired. It has the charm,
and the power of carrying the spectator along with
it, which seems to belong to his instinctive feeling
for the purposes of oil-paint. And, as a novel
reader might say that he would not jeopardise a
single scene out of the “ Comedie Humaine ” for
the sake of the fairest style in French literature, so
I should hesitate to bargain for any surface, how-
ever gracious, at the possible price of what
Mr. Steer has to say. Constable himself did not
arrive at so satisfying a surface as Old Crome.
Mr. Steer has never shown more clearly how
much he is the master of his medium than in his
picture of the two nude figures, with a reflected
third, which he calls The Mirror. The colour
scheme of apricot and silver is a new thing, a dis-
covery. The feeling of the picture, its content,
the artist’s mind on the subject, is the fresh delight
in the fair bodies, their grace, the health, the glow,
the brilliant truth that has more persistently than
any other ravished the eyes of painters. If we
seldom hear it spoken out, that is because to realise
so fully just those beauties which are the sense of
265