International studio (33.1907/1908(1908))

The Society of Twenty-Five Painters

The third exhibition of
THE SOCIETY OF TWENTY-
FIVE PAINTERS.
The exhibition of the “Twenty-five” at Messrs.
Marchant’s Goupil Gallery starts the important
exhibitions of the season, and it marks the return
of some well-known artists to town. The clock-
work of the exhibition season in London to some
extent regulates the coming and going of artists,
and in the case of an exhibition held close upon
their return to London there must be something
different in its nature from exhibitions towards
which painters work through the long dark days of
winter in their London studios, separated some-
times by many months from direct intimacy with
nature, whose promptings come in a very thin
voice by the exhibitions of the spring.
A society such as the
“Twenty-five” is not with-
out significance in the
politics of current art. In
its formation one may
look for something more
than the mere agreement
of twenty-five individual
painters to exhibit together
— one looks for some-
thing they have in com-
mon, though the group
comprises painters with
quite dissimilar motives
and styles. An examina-
tion individually of the
aims of some of the mem-
bers, as apparent from
their work, was attempted
last year in these pages
when noticing their
second exhibition. In
dealing with the subject
then our consideration
was very largely given to
the figure-subject painters,
and it were well perhaps
on this occasion to devote
most of our space to the
landscape side of their
exhibition.
Last year we noted that
the landscape painters
who exhibited had, for
the most part, this trait
in common, a regard for

the elegancies of picture-making which the first
impressionists so roughly set aside; yet on this
occasion they show themselves distinctly “on
the side of the angels”—of light, let us add.
They are all impressionists, meeting Nature out-
side the ancient landscape garden from which
impressionism was the gate. Our illustrations will
emphasise our meaning. It is not difficult to see
in all the work a high regard for the great tradition
of composition, which the extreme impressionists
ignored, or, at all events, defined in such a way
that anything on the face of the earth which could
be pictured within the limits of a canvas was
considered composition.
Whether this idea of how to make a picture was
brought to birth with the advent of the camera, or
whether the camera has since come fully into play
and partly killed it, no one can say—but of this


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