International studio (30.1906/1907(1907))

Book Reviews


By courtesy Cassell and Company
STANHOPE A. FORBES, CHARCOAL DRAWING
A. R. A. BY ELIZABETH
STANHOPE FORBES, A. R. W. S.
student who uses it merely as a court of last resort
on minutiae will have missed its import, which con-
sists rather in its spirit of sincere conviction and its
direct delight in men rather than theories.
Stanhope A. Forbes, A.R.A., and Elizabeth
Stanhope Forbes, A.R.W.S. By Mrs. Lionel
Birch. With eight reproductions in colour and
thirty-two other illustrations. 8vo. Pages, viii,
123. $1.50 net. Postage, 12 cents.
Those of our readers who have followed with

interest the yearly appearance of paintings by the
English artist Stanhope Forbes in our reviews of
the Royal Academy exhibitions will rejoice in hav-
ing his career and personality given independent
record in a book of the engaging make-up of the
volume before us. The dead-line in criticism, ex-
cept in certain exceptional aspects, commits us to
inarticulate judgement. It does not really avoid
judgement of living workers; rather, it avoids clari-
fying such judgement. And if any one were dis-
posed, without disputing the achievement of the
artists made the subject of this extended sketch, to
cavil at their being considered at length on the score
that other artists, certainly no less interesting and
important, remain unsung, we should urge that the
unfortunate element lay in the omission elsewhere,
not the commission here. Books are plentiful
enough nowadays for us to be done with any such
false sense of awe at typesetting and backstitching.
Let us welcome all the pertinent knowledge we can
obtain about the aims and characteristics of the
artists whose work comes fresh from the studio to
the eye. And in doing so, let us admit that the arts
of reproduction, with all their acknowledged limita-
tions, render the work of artists peculiarly adapt-
able to such discussion. Thereby we can check, to
some degree, the writer’s conclusions. Neither in
the work of authors, nor of actors, nor of musicians,
for example, can we have set before us so readily an
abstract of the exhibits in the case.
The work of Mr. Stanhope Forbes was summed
for our readers not long ago by one of his comrades
in the Cornish colony of painters at Newlyn,
Norman Garstin. With the article were shown
reproductions of the painting A Fish Sale, which
brought the painter’s name to the front, and which
with Walter Langley’s exhibit at the Royal Institute
in the same year, 1885, threw the colony at Newlyn
into notice; the harbour study called The Light
House that followed, a study for the Forge and
other characteristic work in seafaring and rural
subjects, marked by a sympathetic interest in
human feeling, an unhampered endeavour for sin-
cere rendering and technical ability in sound draw-
ing and pleasure in varied effects of light. It has
now fallen to another Newlyn artist to take up and
complete the tale, Mrs. Lionel Birch and her hus-
band being devoted members of that interesting
colony. She deserves her readers’ thanks for hav-
ing filled the record carefully, while avoiding the
reproach of overexcitement and an exaggerated
sense of the import of her task. She may go into
early details rather fully, but that is the manner of
biography, and Air. Forbes’s career, while remark -

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