International studio (23.1904)

Moffat P. Lindn-er

like Mr. Brabazon and Mr. Francis James, has
drunk at the Turnerian stream; but he has
retained his individuality, and he has kept always
before him the idea of beauty, steadily loyal to it,
expressing only those things that appeal to his
artistic sense, phases of the loveliness of the world.
I am aware that the artists who hold that the
province of water-colour is the rendering of atmo-
spheric effects, notes of aerial colour, luminous
tones, in a word, the transitory beauty of nature,
are few in number. In water-colour, as in all the
other branches of art, the man of genius or strong
talent, may, and does, over-ride tradition and
theory, and convince us that his method is the
right one for himself. Sir John Gilbert has not
convinced me that water-colour was the right
method to adopt for his Guy Fawkes before James
the First, a reproduction of which lies before me.
Neither does Charles Green persuade me that
the elaborate detail of A Fascinating Volume is
suitable for water-colour. But before Whistler’s
Little Sea Piece—all atmosphere and light—hints
of boats sailing under a suggested sky, on the
slightest indication of a sea, there I feel at home
again. Water-colour has been used to express an
aerial effect, wet and wide, loose and large, that
only water-colour was able to express.
That there is not the remotest possibility of an
agreement among artists as to the kind of subjects
that should be treated by water-colour, a visit to
the centenary exhibition of the Royal Society of

Painters in Water-Colours abundantly shows. Each
member goes his own way, and the electing and
selecting council are as catholic in their tastes as
the proprietor of a draper’s shop in Oxford Street.
The frame of Mr. S. J. Hodgson’s patient repre-
sentation of the Market-place at Verona touches
the frame of one of Mr. Robert W. Allan’s impul-
sive sketches. You may choose between Mr.
Allan’s free, blottesque manner, with its running
colour and gaiety, and Mr. Glindoni’s suave-
coloured anecdotes ; between Mr. Arthur Melville’s
whirl of arbitrary colour called The Music Boat and
Mr. Arthur Hopkins’s precisely imagined and pre-
cisely drawn Eavesdropper; between Miss Fortescue-
Brickdale’s minutely wrought allegory called The
Posthumous Child, so pregnant with meaning that
one forgets all about the craftsmanship, and Mr.
Arthur Rackham’s grey-blue fancy, which he calls
Covent Garden Market, but which might be called
anything; between Mr. Paterson’s Moniaive, which
could only have been expressed in water-culour,
and Sir Ernest Waterlow’s Mill, which ninety-nine
out of a hundred painters would have executed in oil.
You may see Mr. Robert Little using water-colour
to produce an effect—decorative and very pleasing
to look upon, that can only be described as first
cousin to the Titian glamour; Mr. J. M. Swan
giving us in this medium the hue and texture of
leopards, and Mr. J. S. Sargent—well, he shows-
five drawings, and three of them are of Venice.
Not the Venice that Turner dreamed, losing him-
self in her loveliness, and
painting his own interior
vision of beauty quite as
often as the actual sight
that unrolled before his
eyes; not Mr. Lindner’s
Venice, half hiding in her
dawn or sunset mists, or
shimmering in heat under
the intense Venetian sky;
but the Venice of one
who looked, admired, and
smote her on his sketch-
board, so sure of eye,
so certain that he can
do just what he means to
do, that you can almost
feel the touch of contempt
under the mastery of the
performance. And yet in
the • line of development
of Turner’s later use of
water-colour — the line in