International studio (26.1905)

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about it most engagingly. It is nearer the truth to
say that he cannot be beguiled into laying down the
law. Most men, as the reader will by this time
readily admit, are fond of laying down the law.
The habit is not, let us say in extenuation, by any
means altogether vicious. It stimulates interest, at
least in the legislator. It is an excellent talisman
against the idleness that overburdens the employ-
ment bureau of the Prince of the Air. It keeps
critics from becoming a charge upon the com-
munity or taking to fiction. And for creators it is a
cheering solace in artistic defeat. If an inspiration
refuses to be realized there remains some relief in
explaining the only way in which it can be. Yet
laws for creative work are so many and so easily
enacted that they are properly to be evaded with at
least as good a grace as any measure on the crowded
statute books. Such laws indeed fall readily into
two categories: one, in which they are neither
made nor regarded by creators; and the other, in
which a creator proclaims them, either for mere
intellectual pastime, or for his fellow artists, not
himself, in either instance approaching the task
without judicial or scientific bias, but producing a
piece of legislation that is in itself a mere work of
art, a law that is no more to be obeyed than a
painted ocean is to be sailed upon or a statue to be
listened to.
Our taste for this by-product of the studio may
be depraved. Let him who is without ideas cast
the first stone. We confess to a little disappoint-
ment, not untouched with admiration, that Mr.
Lockman will divert so little of his energy into
darkening counsel with authority. We are perhaps
somewhat of the mind of the turtle in Mrs. Ewing's
pond, who held that
Life without mud at the bottom
Was existence without repose.
It would be a mistake to give any impression
that Mr. Lockman's personality was conspicuous
in the element of bustle that at present we are
nationally prone to applaud, that he lacked in
the least degree the dignity that is at ease with
high purpose. Yet it is certainly true that where
you find fertile land uncovered you may infer
good crops on the way and a vigilant husband-
man. A lack of assertive theory argues a certain
natural concentration. And it puts a new light,
for instance, on the chance words that Mr. Lock-
man "just paints," to learn that the portrait shown
herewith of Mrs. Tinker with the champion wolf
hound Bistri, a work of such happy characteriza-
tion, ready address and pleasing arrangement, and
in point of mere physical achievement, too, a matter

of covering a canvas measuring go by 80 inches,
was ready for exhibition after two sittings aggre-
gating only six hours. We shall not pretend to dis-
close any stop-watch observations by recording the
rapidity with which such a characteristic study as
Coco, shown at the Settlement Exhibition in 1904,
or such a direct and unhesitating bit of painting as
the Tor^a^ 0/ Afrc. B., in reality a preliminary
study for the portrait, was produced. Mr. Lock-
man would have no delight in being set forth as
what the playbills call a "lightning artist." For
all that, he works very quickly; and, naturally
enough, he believes in working quickly. He is
never at a loss as to what he sees, and his hand
answers his eye. He does not palter with his colours.
He lays them on with an instinctive nicety, never
comes at them by any muddling pertinacity.
His handling, in consequence, has a clear cut ele-
gance, like the diction of a fastidious but ready
speaker. In form his attack is much the same.
Being thoroughly a painter, form and tone never
present themselves to him separately; he does not
depend upon a preliminary outline.
Again, in composition, he illustrates that work-
manlike opinion that the way of composition is to
paint. In the portrait of Mrs. Tinker, for example,
he did not begin as a painter might properly do,
with a deliberate adjustment of related massing.
This canvas like any other had to be begun at some
point; and Mr. Lockman began, if the truth is to
be told, at the dark patch near the hound's hind
quarter. It was a chance, Mr. Lockman says, that
the choice proved to give him the necessary room
in all directions from this as a centre to produce
the intended arrangement of masses. But if so,
it was of the sort of chance by which a sharp-
shooter at Creedmoor makes the bull's eye. Again,
when a fellow artist admired the placing of the head
in his striking 0/ Afry. Bfw (an element
that is slightly misrepresented in the plate owing
to a trifling encroachment on the edges by the suc-
cessive photographic and engraving reproduction),
pointing out that it exactly fulfilled the require-
ments of a mathematical proportion in composi-
tion, the painter realized that he would have been
quite dumbfounded to apply such a rule at the
easel.
So far as there are laws or canons, Mr. Lock-
man's work falls within them, not because he con-
sciously conforms to them, but because his instinc-
tive performance would serve as a pattern. His
skill is not the product even at the start of a school
training, which, indeed, he is not inclined to over-
rate. Though he drew at the old Academy in New

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