International studio (40.1910)

Henry

Tonks

Personally he is attached to a story, a subject, It may perhaps be objected that one of his most
in the anecdotal sense or in the analytic. This we charming creations is the little girl carrying with
have seen illustrated in his pictures of children, concentrated care a tray across the foreground of
and of firelight phenomena. His success with The Strolling Players. But her charm, I think,
these is not, I think, comparable with that of lies not in her active childishness; rather in the
the others I have named. His sympathy with or patent fact that she has early assumed the serious-
rather his comprehension of children does not ness and business of life. And the yet smaller
enable him to reach their queernesses and elusive child seated on the left, is of another timbre corn-
qualities in the degree that he can suggest the pared with those I have in mind,
mysterious humanity of girlhood when it is opening The heads of these two children represent Mr.
or just has opened into the full flower. And Tonks' most personal expression in pigment; they
while it is this quality that calls out his instinctive are in point of technique his special signature,
sense of romance and poetry, it is to his analytic Contrasting with them his painting of the Toilets,
vein that the questions of firelight appeal. So that Blind Man's Buff and The Girl with a Parrot, all
in these subjects he most nearly approaches the belonging to the late nineties, one notes that his
impressionism of Monet or Pissarro—an impres- gain in richness, in device, and purity of colour has
sionism that deals less with pictorial conditions of been striking. The most fastidiously painted of
unity and repose than with the science of optics, them all, I think, is the last named, a picture much

PORTRAIT OF MRS. HAMMERSLEY

{In the possession of Hugh Hammer shy, Esq.)

BY HENRY TONKS