DOI Heft:
No. 120 (February, 1907)
DOI Artikel:Wood, T. Martin: Drawings and sketches by modern masters
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.28250#0350
Drawings and Sketches by Modern Masters
masters would seem very much alike. For, after
all, the old masters were concerned not with
a way of drawing differently from each other, but
with the different way in which they saw the same
thing, content with, the fact that no two minds
truly expressing themselves find expression in the
same way. The modern artist seems to put down
a line and to alter it lest it looks like a line which
another man might have drawn, and to alter it yet
again lest it should fail to astonish. This is part
of the desire for advertisement which has the
modern world in possession, which has the artist
too in its sway; for all that his methods are subtle.
But we know that when anything so irrelevant as
advertisement comes in at the door, Art must go
out by the window.
In an exhibition of drawings the public is always
faced with two separate kinds of affectation. That
of work which forgets what it set out to say whilst
striving to say it in a novel way, and that of work
which is simply a museum crib, the empty husk of
an old-fashioned style. It is quite difficult to find
drawing which is content to be simply a reflection
of the artist’s view of life and its appearance.
By reproducing for our illustrations drawings in
various stages of completion, we have tried to give
in the case of each artist a stage of finish charac-
teristic of the artist’s methods. Rossetti liked to
work across his picture with a point, to let his
drawing grow slowly whilst he brooded over the
vision that should appear on his paper. He had
no reason to hurry any of his drawings of beau-
tiful women, for if he finished one he felt compelled
to begin another in which to dwell on that same
beauty. Always looking inwards, he cared only for
the reflections life cast into the soul. His Ligeia
Siren, here reproduced, which must be ranked
as one of the best, if not the best of his large
drawings oi women, has hitherto remained unpub-
lished in any account of the painter and his work.
It is almost the only finished nude of any im-
portance which he drew, and it is a wonderful
example of the strange emotional beauty of his
art. It is his art at its very best, altogether free
STUDY OF drapery (By permission of Hugh Lane, Esq.) BY lord Leighton, p. r.a.
336
masters would seem very much alike. For, after
all, the old masters were concerned not with
a way of drawing differently from each other, but
with the different way in which they saw the same
thing, content with, the fact that no two minds
truly expressing themselves find expression in the
same way. The modern artist seems to put down
a line and to alter it lest it looks like a line which
another man might have drawn, and to alter it yet
again lest it should fail to astonish. This is part
of the desire for advertisement which has the
modern world in possession, which has the artist
too in its sway; for all that his methods are subtle.
But we know that when anything so irrelevant as
advertisement comes in at the door, Art must go
out by the window.
In an exhibition of drawings the public is always
faced with two separate kinds of affectation. That
of work which forgets what it set out to say whilst
striving to say it in a novel way, and that of work
which is simply a museum crib, the empty husk of
an old-fashioned style. It is quite difficult to find
drawing which is content to be simply a reflection
of the artist’s view of life and its appearance.
By reproducing for our illustrations drawings in
various stages of completion, we have tried to give
in the case of each artist a stage of finish charac-
teristic of the artist’s methods. Rossetti liked to
work across his picture with a point, to let his
drawing grow slowly whilst he brooded over the
vision that should appear on his paper. He had
no reason to hurry any of his drawings of beau-
tiful women, for if he finished one he felt compelled
to begin another in which to dwell on that same
beauty. Always looking inwards, he cared only for
the reflections life cast into the soul. His Ligeia
Siren, here reproduced, which must be ranked
as one of the best, if not the best of his large
drawings oi women, has hitherto remained unpub-
lished in any account of the painter and his work.
It is almost the only finished nude of any im-
portance which he drew, and it is a wonderful
example of the strange emotional beauty of his
art. It is his art at its very best, altogether free
STUDY OF drapery (By permission of Hugh Lane, Esq.) BY lord Leighton, p. r.a.
336