DOI issue:
No. 123 (May, 1907)
DOI article:Studio-talk
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.28251#0240
Studio-Talk
ranked with what was best in the exhibition. We
noted also some interesting contributions from Sir
Wm. Eden, Mr. Innes Fripp, and others.
The wTater colours of “Old World Gardens,”
exhibited by Mr. E. Arthur Rowe in Messrs.
Dowdeswell’s gallery, deserve much praise for their
technical cleverness and their freedom from any
trace of triviality or over-elaboration. Mr. Rowe,
indeed, can be accounted as the ablest of the many
painters who attempt this class of subject • he
realises admirably the necessary details, but he keeps
in his paintings a remarkable degree of breadth
and atmospheric subtlety, and he treats them
with exceptional sensitiveness.
Continuing our note of last month on the recent
exhibition of modern photography at the New
English Art Club Galleries, and the question of
photography as art, we give on this and the follow-
ing pages six reproductions
from the exhibits. The
decorativeness which every-
where is contrived by acci-
dent of nature and works
of man, and which only
awaits artistic statement,
receives such statement
in Mr. Coburn’s picture of
The Sky - Scraper. The
faculty of selection can
perhaps not be exercised
to such full extent in
photography as in painting,
but the characteristic
beauty of any art is to be
discovered in its exercise
within its own limitations.
Photography admits of
little compromise with a
composition accepted, as
in Mr. Coburn’s picture
The Sky - Scraper, direct
from nature, but this fact
gives to the art its pecu-
liar charm if it somewhat
alters the character of
the impulse that controls
the artist from that in
more plastic arts. Artistic
photography, however, in
those who practise it
calls for just as highly
trained an appreciation of
226
all that lends to beauty. Miss Gertrude Kasebier
showed not a whit less of this appreciation than
her fellow exhibitors, though less content with
photography as an art which need not borrow its
chosen effects from the sister art of painting—•
effects arrived at by painters in baffling the re-
strictions of paint. Full of aesthetic suggestion and
charm as her work is, this flattering deference to
the other art is scarcely consistent with the
aphorisms which, mistakenly, we cannot help think-
ing, preface the catalogue, and to which we made
brief reference last month. Quoted from Mr.
Bernard Shaw, these suggest a rivalry between the
arts of painting and photography as regards their
respective processes which can never exist, as where
he says “ Velasquez could have drawn Philip better
wTith a telephoto lens than with his brush.” In
subject-matter and its interpretation the exhibition
proved that the artist in photography and the
painter or etcher may and do rival each other, but
PORTRAIT
BY F. HOLLAND DAY
ranked with what was best in the exhibition. We
noted also some interesting contributions from Sir
Wm. Eden, Mr. Innes Fripp, and others.
The wTater colours of “Old World Gardens,”
exhibited by Mr. E. Arthur Rowe in Messrs.
Dowdeswell’s gallery, deserve much praise for their
technical cleverness and their freedom from any
trace of triviality or over-elaboration. Mr. Rowe,
indeed, can be accounted as the ablest of the many
painters who attempt this class of subject • he
realises admirably the necessary details, but he keeps
in his paintings a remarkable degree of breadth
and atmospheric subtlety, and he treats them
with exceptional sensitiveness.
Continuing our note of last month on the recent
exhibition of modern photography at the New
English Art Club Galleries, and the question of
photography as art, we give on this and the follow-
ing pages six reproductions
from the exhibits. The
decorativeness which every-
where is contrived by acci-
dent of nature and works
of man, and which only
awaits artistic statement,
receives such statement
in Mr. Coburn’s picture of
The Sky - Scraper. The
faculty of selection can
perhaps not be exercised
to such full extent in
photography as in painting,
but the characteristic
beauty of any art is to be
discovered in its exercise
within its own limitations.
Photography admits of
little compromise with a
composition accepted, as
in Mr. Coburn’s picture
The Sky - Scraper, direct
from nature, but this fact
gives to the art its pecu-
liar charm if it somewhat
alters the character of
the impulse that controls
the artist from that in
more plastic arts. Artistic
photography, however, in
those who practise it
calls for just as highly
trained an appreciation of
226
all that lends to beauty. Miss Gertrude Kasebier
showed not a whit less of this appreciation than
her fellow exhibitors, though less content with
photography as an art which need not borrow its
chosen effects from the sister art of painting—•
effects arrived at by painters in baffling the re-
strictions of paint. Full of aesthetic suggestion and
charm as her work is, this flattering deference to
the other art is scarcely consistent with the
aphorisms which, mistakenly, we cannot help think-
ing, preface the catalogue, and to which we made
brief reference last month. Quoted from Mr.
Bernard Shaw, these suggest a rivalry between the
arts of painting and photography as regards their
respective processes which can never exist, as where
he says “ Velasquez could have drawn Philip better
wTith a telephoto lens than with his brush.” In
subject-matter and its interpretation the exhibition
proved that the artist in photography and the
painter or etcher may and do rival each other, but
PORTRAIT
BY F. HOLLAND DAY