International studio (25.1905)

in her art, since even trying commissions, com-
missions affording little scope for a personal render-
ing of things, have been executed by her in a quite
individual manner ; and where, as in the decorations
for the little Catholic chapel at Hunstanton in
Norfolk, a congenial task has been given to her,
she has expressed in her work high qualities of
emotional intention that override the rare faults in
design which here and there give to its significant
beauty a limitation. The face in the side panel of
is very expressive of the qualities which
give a charm that must last to Miss Levick's work.
In it there is conveyed with great simplicity and
with tenderness a face that in its gentleness realises
in a modern spirit the oldest tradition. It has the
particular gentleness that can be given to a face
by woman's hand alone. In the corresponding
panel of N/. a certain lack of feeling in
the drapery is not qualified so easily by the face.
In the work for St. Brelades, Jersey, the design
needs no qualification. The reredos panel frames
the heads of which are tenderly abstracted
from it, as tenderly as the heads in the relief
called which relief is as good an example
as any of handling which is informed with a
sympathy that becomes as strength in proportion

as the artist enables us to feel it. It is impossible
to look for more than a few minutes at these
two faces—little more than half of one only
revealed to view—and not to enter into the
delicate sympathy shown in the handling, and to
trace in the modelling of the lips, the hands, and
in the round faces the indefinable tenderness that
is the characteristic of Miss Levick's work. One
finds it too in the rendering of the angels on the
memorial tablet. What is the exact nature of
this quality, which more than any other gives
distinction to a woman's art, and more than any
other quality is at her command, it is difficult
to say; certainly it is a quality of the heart.
Luskin, with his dictum that high art was the
result of the brain, the hand, and the heart work-
ing together, was not quite right perhaps; very
excellent work may have been done by men—
stands out indeed amongst remarkable art—which
is so scientific as to give no evidence that other
than hand and brain were concerned in its creation.
The evidence that the heart has not informed a
woman's work takes from it all significance as an
important work of art, and leaves it feebly a re-
production or an impotent rearrangement of the
work of the masters. The word heart in this case,


ST. EDMUND'S CHAPE!., HUNSTANTON

WITH SCULPTURAL DECORATIONS BY RUBY LEVICK