International studio (24.1904/1905(1905))

Frederick Sandys

England—masterly in the beauty of its design,
unexcelled in the strength and suavity of its line.
The last fifty years are notable in British art for
one thing—they are years that have been fruitful,
and over-fruitful, in the production of pen-drawings.
From 1850 to 1900 extends the epoch of the rise
and culmination of the art of pen-drawing among
us, and from amid all the practitioners of the
method there stand out four unequalled men of
genius—Phil May, Charles Keene, George Reid,
and Frederick Sandys. The achievement of each
is in its way unique, and Sandys is not the least
notable of the four. Elad we no other work by
which to judge him but these marvellous woodcuts
—as virile, as accomplished, and as charged with
emotion as Diirer’s own—we must have hailed him
great; and his other work, his paintings and his
chalk drawings, are far from justifying any weaken-
ing of the epithet.
One of these woodcuts,
the notable illustration en-
titled Harald Harfagr, posses-
ses in addition to its intrinsic
beauty the extrinsic interest
of being the basis of one of
his delightful works in oils,
a charming panel known as
The Valkyrie, in which he ad-
ded to the dignity of the black-
and-white the beauties of
colour fine and pure, of hand-
ling at once delicate and
strong. Flad he similarly
transformed others of his de-
signs, how welcome they would
have been! What a picture
Amor Mundi would be, en-
dowed with the charm of rich
colour that delights us in
Vivien, with the precise and
exquisite manipulation and the
beautiful treatment of acces-
sories that are so notable in
Morgan-le-Fay ! For, indeed,
we have too few of his pictures
for our delight; and if there
were more they might be
better known—and to a wider
circle of admirers — even
though they could not be
more sincerely appreciated.
For, closely and delicately
painted, searching in draw-
ing and rich in colour, the

canvases of Frederick Sandys are among the very
finest fruits of the wonderful days of Pre-
Raphaelism.
One of the ablest of our younger generation of
artists once said to me, that to paint like Van Eyck
was to set back the clock, that the method of the
great primitives was not suited to the necessities of
artistic expression in the nineteenth century, and
still less in the twentieth, and that the man who
handled paint as Sandys did perpetrated an artistic
anachronism. Of course, if this is admitted, the
whole of the pictures produced by the English Pre-
raphaelites are dismissed as monstrosities, Burton’s
Wounded Cavalier, Millais’ Proscribed Royalist,
Wallis’ Chatterton, and Windus Burd’s Helen are
consigned with Sandys’ Medea to the limbo of
futility, and this is surely sufficiently absurd. But
even if the intrinsic quality of such pictures were


1‘F£ FTP
a study (By permission of Harold Hartley, Esq.) BY FREDERICK sandys