International studio (44.1911)

Studio- Talk

too impatient to work out, beckoned, as he always
was at that time, from one thing to another by the
commands of his essentially speculative genius.
The Black Frame Club has always been a club
whose exhibitions have given us pleasure. There
is so evident a note of sincerity, so little of the
obvious picture-making for exhibition purposes
which compromises so many exhibitions. After
all the permanent destiny of a picture is not that
of an exhibition. The president of the society is
that draughtsman of remarkable accomplishment,
Mr. E. Borough Johnson, whose fine and charac-
teristic Head of a Gipsy we are reproducing as a
supplement to this number. At the Dore Gallery,
where the Black Frame Club showed this year, Mr.
Johnson was represented by more than one
drawing. Works in the exhibition calling for
particular notice were Black and Gold, by Percy
AV. Gibbs; Morning, Romsey Marshes, by Alfonso
Toft, and A Grey Day by this painter ; The Stream,
The Windmill, and The River, by Paul Paul, the
last being one of the finest landscape pieces in the
Gallery. Marsh and Orchard were characteristic of
the delightful art of Benjamin Haughton, a painter
who is perhaps not half so well known as he should
be. Poole Ferry, by T. T. Blaylock; The Old
Hedgecutter and Practising for the Village Corona-
tion Fete, by Daniel A. Wehrschmidt; and Swanage,
and The Beach, Swanage, by Septimus Edwin Scott,
were other pictures which should be commended.

We give here and on page 69 two examples of
stained glass by Mr. Archibald J. Davies, of the
Bromsgrove Guild. One belongs to a series of
three-light windows he has recently completed for
a church in Montreal, and the scheme of colour-
ing is gold, green, and white, with small jewel-like
spots of brighter colour distributed in smaller
quantities. The motif is taken from Ecclesiastes.
The same scheme of colour is employed in the
oval light shown on p. 69.
From the contemplation of Mr. Max Beerbohm’s
caricatures at the Leicester Gallery people ex-
perience the sensation of knowing celebrities at
first hand. The literary tags with which—like any
Royal Academy exhibitor—he backs up the
innuendo of his drawings are half the sport. Often
we could not do without them, for his art is not
always entirely self-explanatory : it postulates know-
ledge of “the victim.’’ On this account visitors to
his exhibition at the Leicester Gallery were
fashionable people; but how this element of the
66

public manages to recognise art in Max’s work
when they seem so unsuccessful in recognising it
elsewhere we do not know. And it is the art in his
work that they acknowledge, for there is nothing
else to acknowledge—certainly none of those
photographic resemblances which Press caricature
has taught them to look for. As a writer Max
has well-known characteristics; among them a
stylistic grace which sometimes forsakes him with
the pencil, and until it is recaptured we shall con-
sider that with the pencil self-expression has not
yet been quite attained.
If evidence were needed that the essential thing
is for a man to be by nature an artist, and that the
medium in which he ultimately finds expression is
a secondary thing, we should find it in Mr. Nelson
Dawson’s water-colours at the Leicester Gallery.
The transition from metal-work and enamel to
work in water-colours is about as difficult to achieve


MIDDLE LIGHT OF A THREE-LIGHT WINDOW FOR
CHURCH OF MESSIAH, MONTREAL, CANADA. DESIGNED
AND EXECUTED BY ARCHIBALD J. DAVIES, OF THE
BROMSGROVE GUILD, ASSISTED BY J. N. SANDERS