International studio (21.1903/1904(1904))

BEDROOM IN BURTLE AND WHITE

DESIGNED BY GEORGE LOGAN
EOR MESSRS. WYLIE & LOCHHEAD

JA /T ODERN DUTCH ART: THE
/\/nETCHINGS OF MATTHEW
j V S MARI$.
AsiONG the leaders of the modern Dutch schoo],
Matthew Maris holds a position that is in many
ways remarkable. He has earned it, not by the
customary devices of the art poiitician—by the
exercise of a personal authority, or by the activity
of his intervention in the burning questions of the
art world—but by the strength of his individuaiity
as a worker. In his achievement there has been
from the ßrst a peculiar quality which has stamped
it indisputably as the outcome of an exceptional
conviction, as the visible expression of an un-
common train of lesthetic reasoning. Technically,
his paintings have always been memorable ; their
elegance of draughtsmanship, their subtle charrn
of colour, and their wonderful persuasiveness of
pictorial sentiment, have made them distinguished
among the best examples of imaginative art. A
true nobility of style has been not the least of his
qualities as an artist. Whatever the subject he
has chosen to represent he has consistently digni-
hed it by his manner of setting it on the canvas,
and has, by the aid of his rare intelligence in-
vested an atmosphere of romance which has
never failed to be perfectly appropriate.
His preferences lie in the direction of a kind of
mediasval mysticism, which has more and more
dehnitely, as years have gone on, determined the

manner of his expression. At irrst it appeared
only in the curiously abstract simplicity of his
paintings, in the repose and reticence which gave


ETCHING BY MATTHEW MARIS

20g