International studio (34.1908)

The International Society s “Fair Women ” Exhibition


Augustus John in another room—La Gioconda
metamorphosed.
This artist endows everything he touches with
strangeness. There is an extraordinary sug-
gestion of a lonely fate about the women he
draws. Their air of resignation is oppressive,
and sometimes rather sordid, but the painting
of Seraphita is not sordid. It is a type so remote
from the normal as to have been a source of con-
sternation to the normal visitors who pressed
around it in the exhibition, but it is not more
remote from ordinary womanhood than it is from
“ Seraphita.” Balzac created “Seraphita” as the
spirit of platonic love, and environed her in
northern snows. In some of the little Whistler
lithographs of women we have this spirituality of
type expressed, and in a
method, too, which more
than anyone else’s escapes
the embarrassment of
material.
One of the most in-
teresting contemporary
pictures near Mr. Lavery’s
group was Mr. Charles
Shannon’s Miss Lillah
McCarthy in the Dress of
Dona Aha — painted in
the part which she played
for Mr. Bernard Shaw. It
must drive that playwright
to distraction to see her
here, environed in the
very atmosphere which he
disclaims, symbol of the
very word which he abhors,
her own presence dis-
till’ng romance in spite of
his drab philosophy. The
art of Rossetti, Burne-
Jones, Beardsley and
Conder was represented
here, all deriving life en-
tirely from the romance
that is pressed betwei n
the pages of books, most
of them written for the
sake of women. And
what is this Romance of
which we speak but the
memory of the race?
To it the wraith of the
buried past always returns
with beauty. But the

artists, however great in every other way, are
few to whom the ghostly visitant will come, and
Watts’s great masterpiece, the portrait of The Hon.
Mrs. Wyndiiam, is rendered less great only by
its attempt at romantic arrangement, which fails
to communicate the sense of association with
great tradition which was apparently intended.
Nothing can carry conviction that is not painted
with conviction ; that is why Mr. Steer’s portrait
of Mrs. Hammersley at once attracts us and
repels—attracts by extreme mastery in the face
and in the management of light on the silk
dress, repelling by the unconvincing background.
The painter does not permit us to accept
it only as a conventional background; instead
he subjects to the problem of natural lighting

“ MRS. F. W. H. MYERS :

BY SIR JOHN MILLAIS, R.A.
( By permission of Airs. Tennant)