DOI issue:
No. 128 (October, 1907)
DOI article:West, W. K.: The landscape paintings of Mr. Grosvenor Thomas
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.28252#0274
Grosvenor Thomas
a credible and honest likeness. Realistic land-
scape of this sort, and handled by such an artist,
could never be passed by as unimportant; it has,
and must always have, a right to the most serious
attention.
Yet to the imaginative man the landscape
painting which concerns itself less with detailed
reality and more with the larger truths makes a
more stirring appeal. The painter who has a
knowledge of facts, but uses them only so far as
they will help him to complete his mental impres-
sion of the subject he has chosen, is better able to
satisfy the student of great abstractions. Turner
seems to many people more unquestionably a
master than Millais, not, perhaps, because his
observation of little, things was more accurate,
but because he thought more about the largeness
and dignity of nature and less about her incidental
details. She appeared to him habitually as a kind
of vision, exquisite, imposing, sometimes terrible,
as a goddess to worship, not as a merely agreeable
companion with whom an autumn afternoon or a
summer evening could be pleasantly lounged away.
Even Corot, though he fell far short of Turner in
artistic intelligence and had nothing like his power
of perceiving what were the possibilities of nature
study, could rise on occasions far above the
commonplaces of detail into dainty suggestion.
If Turner’s mental image took on the form of a
goddess that of Corot was visualised as a nymph,
graceful and alluring, but still too remote for
harmless intimacies.
The artist to whom this aloofness of nature
seems so evident admires her instinctively from
afar off, and never seeks to come too near to her
for fear that he might by closer contact destroy an
impression that he values. He understands that
his affections are fixed upon a being that is, and
must be, out of his reach, and that if this being
were brought to his own fireside the glamour of
distance would be gone. He might even find that
in possessing the object of his adoration he had
lost for ever the power to see anything in her that
would be either inspiring or satisfying. So in his
‘KAVEYS MILL, CLUDEN
258
BY GROSVENOR THOMAS
a credible and honest likeness. Realistic land-
scape of this sort, and handled by such an artist,
could never be passed by as unimportant; it has,
and must always have, a right to the most serious
attention.
Yet to the imaginative man the landscape
painting which concerns itself less with detailed
reality and more with the larger truths makes a
more stirring appeal. The painter who has a
knowledge of facts, but uses them only so far as
they will help him to complete his mental impres-
sion of the subject he has chosen, is better able to
satisfy the student of great abstractions. Turner
seems to many people more unquestionably a
master than Millais, not, perhaps, because his
observation of little, things was more accurate,
but because he thought more about the largeness
and dignity of nature and less about her incidental
details. She appeared to him habitually as a kind
of vision, exquisite, imposing, sometimes terrible,
as a goddess to worship, not as a merely agreeable
companion with whom an autumn afternoon or a
summer evening could be pleasantly lounged away.
Even Corot, though he fell far short of Turner in
artistic intelligence and had nothing like his power
of perceiving what were the possibilities of nature
study, could rise on occasions far above the
commonplaces of detail into dainty suggestion.
If Turner’s mental image took on the form of a
goddess that of Corot was visualised as a nymph,
graceful and alluring, but still too remote for
harmless intimacies.
The artist to whom this aloofness of nature
seems so evident admires her instinctively from
afar off, and never seeks to come too near to her
for fear that he might by closer contact destroy an
impression that he values. He understands that
his affections are fixed upon a being that is, and
must be, out of his reach, and that if this being
were brought to his own fireside the glamour of
distance would be gone. He might even find that
in possessing the object of his adoration he had
lost for ever the power to see anything in her that
would be either inspiring or satisfying. So in his
‘KAVEYS MILL, CLUDEN
258
BY GROSVENOR THOMAS