International studio (27.1905/1906(1906))

A Glanee at the Holiday Art Books

ported by Charles Scribner’s Sons, N. Y., i2mo,
$1.25 net). Plogarth’s portrait of himself before the
easel, painting the Comic Muse, is reproduced in
photogravure as frontispiece. The other twenty
plates are good reproductions. Professor Brown
draws a lively picture of the artist, treating of his
works in chronological sequence and doing great
execution upon the early detraetors. He has a pun-
gent way of putting things, as when he says “Ho-
garth created his own type of feminine comeliness,
and this was of a robust and full-blooded kind, so


STUDY FOR DANTE
FROM “DRAWINGS OF ROSSETTI ”
(CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS)

that a single one of his milkmaids or actresses
coulcl rout at hockey a whole team of the elegantes
of the Burne-Jones or Rossetti school.”
In another series of painters’ biographies, of
which we recently noticed the volume on Giotto,
M. Sturge Henderson and G. F. Hill contribute
studies respectively of Constable and Pisanello.
(Imported by Chas. Scribner’s Sons, $2.00 net each).
Mr. Henderson relies for many biographic details
and documents upon the life by C. R. Leslie. In
his estimate of Constable’s work he seems to Charge
him with being the unwitting occasion of a later
attempt to lay too much stress on feeling. Con-
stable had an unconscious habit of expressing his
observation emotionally and his “successors have
moved too far in the direction thus indicated by
him.”
His influence is particularly interesting in the
route it may be said to have taken to reach
England by way of the impulse given to what
became the Barbizon School. The importance of
Pisanello lies largely in his work as a medallist.
Mr. Hill, of the Department of Coins of the British
Museum, well qualihed to approach the subject on
this side onty, has vet found it best, with modest
apology, to portray the work in painting particu-
larly, in orcler to understand the sources of this
artist’s knowledge and skill and his artistic pecli-
gree. Pisanello quite outranlcs the other medallists
and yet preceded them, a combination of quality
and priority not common in any branch of art.
Sir Walter Armstrong in his temperately balanced
study, “Sir Joshua Reynolds, First President of the
Royal Academy” (imported by Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 8vo, $3.50 net), presents in conclusion to a
thorough and interesting biography a sympathetic
picture of an unsympathetic man, a guarded esti-
mate of a deliberate artist. He finds Leslie quite
at sea in reading the character. Hard of heart and
just of mind is the verdict, a man who lacked all
passions except ambition, and had this without
üre; a painter born, insisting that painters were
made, and resolutely modelling his art on this
conviction. He is drawn as “the supreme, if not
the only modern instance of a painter reaching
greatness along a path every Step of which was
trodden deliberately, with a full consciousness of
why it was taken and whither it was leading and
with the power unimpaired to turn back or to change
the goal at any moment.” In the curiously eclectic
development of his art, the Keppel portrait is held
to mark the beginning of an individual style, which,
however, came to- its liest expression after the
artist’s fiftieth year. The illustrations comprise

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