DOI Heft:
No. 118 (December, 1906)
DOI Artikel:The water-colours and oil-paintings of W. Dacres Adams
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.28250#0142
W. Dacres A dams
his water colour picture, The Entrance to the
Precincts, Canterbury, the subject is one scarcely to
be divorced from the sentiment of its early
ecclesiastical associations, but the broken shadows
upon crumbling stonework make in the sunlight a
pattern which has put to the test the resourceful-
ness of Mr. Adams’ technique and interested
him apart from the sentiment of time and
tradition, of which, however, his art is successful
in reminding us. An appreciation of all that
has been added to the art of water colours by its
modem masters influences Mr. Adams in his work,
for he is not a painter who disregards the distinctive
properties of that medium, though anxious that his
art should embrace everything which signifies a
closer approach to nature.
The point at which water-colour fails as an imita-
tive medium is ever a debatable question. It is a
question whether the beautiful qualities of a
delicate, evasive and partly unreal medium shall be
strained to emphasise such a difference of texture,
say, as there is between the bark of an oak tree
and the satin surface of a rose petal. To accurately
imitate the smaller phenomena in nature is one
problem; how to reconcile such close imita-
tion with the legitimate and most beautiful quality
of water-colour paint is another. We have water-
colours handled in two ways to-day, for all the
variety of contemporary work, taken individually,
can be ranged under one of two schools. On the
one hand there are those who, feeling that the
most elaborate imitation still compromises, and
accepting compromise as the first tenet of art, seek
to reconcile just so much of the truth of nature
with water-colour as is possible, whilst having
regard for the beauty of its peculiar qualities.
Others, arguing that these beauties inherent in
the medium have come into evidence only in its
use, ask why the compromise should be made at so
early a point when the discovery of other qualities
of beauty in paint may result by pushing its imita-
tive qualities a little further in an endeavour to
approach nature more closely.
Of course the training to which an artist has
submitted himself, the influences which he has
consciously courted, and those by which he has
unconsciously been affected, all count for so much
in determining the particular convention which in
“THE OWL” (WATER-COLOUR)
BY W. D. ADAMS
his water colour picture, The Entrance to the
Precincts, Canterbury, the subject is one scarcely to
be divorced from the sentiment of its early
ecclesiastical associations, but the broken shadows
upon crumbling stonework make in the sunlight a
pattern which has put to the test the resourceful-
ness of Mr. Adams’ technique and interested
him apart from the sentiment of time and
tradition, of which, however, his art is successful
in reminding us. An appreciation of all that
has been added to the art of water colours by its
modem masters influences Mr. Adams in his work,
for he is not a painter who disregards the distinctive
properties of that medium, though anxious that his
art should embrace everything which signifies a
closer approach to nature.
The point at which water-colour fails as an imita-
tive medium is ever a debatable question. It is a
question whether the beautiful qualities of a
delicate, evasive and partly unreal medium shall be
strained to emphasise such a difference of texture,
say, as there is between the bark of an oak tree
and the satin surface of a rose petal. To accurately
imitate the smaller phenomena in nature is one
problem; how to reconcile such close imita-
tion with the legitimate and most beautiful quality
of water-colour paint is another. We have water-
colours handled in two ways to-day, for all the
variety of contemporary work, taken individually,
can be ranged under one of two schools. On the
one hand there are those who, feeling that the
most elaborate imitation still compromises, and
accepting compromise as the first tenet of art, seek
to reconcile just so much of the truth of nature
with water-colour as is possible, whilst having
regard for the beauty of its peculiar qualities.
Others, arguing that these beauties inherent in
the medium have come into evidence only in its
use, ask why the compromise should be made at so
early a point when the discovery of other qualities
of beauty in paint may result by pushing its imita-
tive qualities a little further in an endeavour to
approach nature more closely.
Of course the training to which an artist has
submitted himself, the influences which he has
consciously courted, and those by which he has
unconsciously been affected, all count for so much
in determining the particular convention which in
“THE OWL” (WATER-COLOUR)
BY W. D. ADAMS