International studio (23.1904)

The Art of Thomas Collier

impression. And that is brought about by this
delightful fact—that each drawing, and especially
each vivid, untouched sketch, is, in essence, what-
ever may be the tangible matter of it, a new con-
ception and a new performance. It records with
absolute freshness, with the most skilled hand-
work, with the mental power to receive, select
or reject such material as may have been
offered, the impression which the place—the
whole scene, indeed—made upon the artist, on
that particular day, at that particular hour when it
lay before him. History may “ repeat itself,” but
never Nature; and it was the happiness and privi-
lege of Collier not to repeat himself either. There
is thunder about—a touch of greyish violet in a sky
that is rolling and low; or, the air has freshened,
and over the heath it blows from the west,
carrying rain-charged clouds upon their ominous
voyage; or the day is keen and clear, or clear and
golden, on the chalk downs, and into the drawing
there is conveyed the sense of the serene, great
sky—a heaven
billowy-bosomed, overbowed
With many benedictions—-
and the sense, too, of the great upland, fold beyond
fold, the long and sauve and gentle curve of the
chalk land.
The mass of Collier’s work was done, as I have
implied already, in water-colour. A little was done
in oil—it was chiefly, I suppose, in his later time ;
and, though thoroughly successful as far as it went,

in the sense that it was skilled, and for most people
sufficiently characteristic, it yet had not, as it seems
to me, the complete individuality of the water
colours—for the medium of water-colour was that
which was made to express best, with a learned
facility, an unemphasised vigour, the scenes and
the effects that Collier cared for. I do net wish,
in this short general estimate of Collier’s art—which
conveyed so vividly the life of that world that lay
before him, and of infinite heavens, his truest world
of all, where I think of him (as Corot would have
done), with that great and not yet fully recognised
Frenchman, Eugene Boudin—I do not wish, I say7,
to name particular pictures, particular performances
—priceless possessions of Mr. Hollingsworth, or
Mr. Fulleylove, or Mr. Orrock, for instance—and I
will say why.
The sketches of the oil painter may be many,
but the pictures by which he will count are gener-
ally few. They are bulky generally; they make
much show in a gallery ; the world recognises them,
and, if it deigns to know the artist at all, it knows
him by them, and knows them individually7. It is
not so with the water-colour painter. He, too,
makes—if he is ill-advised, he makes rather too
often—large drawings. Sometimes they are beyond
the scale fitted to water colour; sometimes only
beyond the scale fitted to his particular talent, or
particular method — which is a different matter.
But even when they are not that—and Collier’s
were, as a rule, not that—when they are the





“a stormy day
4

FROM THE WATER-COLOUR BY THOMAS COLLIER