International studio (44.1911)

Edwin Alexander, A.RS. A., RAES.

SOME RECENT WATER-COLOURS
BY EDWIN ALEXANDER,
A.R.S.A., R.W.S.
It requires a fine and ever-present sense of
proportion to live among mole-hills without
regarding them as mountains, and in art it is
not easy to push your explorations far into the
minor phenomena of nature without losing the
relationship between beauty in small things and
nature’s larger themes. Yet it is precisely this
relationship that Mr. Edwin Alexander is so
successful in observing in his drawings. One
■cannot think of any other artist whose view, of
bird-life, say, is so little taxidermic, or whose art
in the intimation of detail is so suggestive of the
.affinity with nature’s whole design. This sort of
.success is of course determined by an attitude of
mind, it is not the sort of success that can be
planned. One has only to look at such a picture
.as Mr. Alexander’s The River Mouth (p. 96), with
its sense of distance and of loneliness, to have it, in
his case, fully explained; such responsiveness to
the mood of nature, since it is in his power, will
not forsake the artist when he brings his attention
•down to detail.

Two kinds of love of nature seem to run side by
side, finding expression in painting; there is the
love of every mood in nature itself, of which the
clamorous birds are but a well-loved part; and
there is that other frame of mind which some
artists seem, to share with our scientists, if one may
judge from their pictures, in which the landscape
is as impassionate as a drop-scene to the drama
of bird and insect life. If we distinguish clearly
between the two classes, we shall unhesitatingly
place Mr. Alexander with the first, though it allows
him few companions among contemporary animal
painters. And it is necessary to classify the
character of his art thus, before we try to determine
the place of the niche that fame reserves. for him,
as one who really has an art. Every lover of art
finds out the rarity of artists, even among painters.
There must be that loyalty to emotion, shown in
careful expression, without which loyalty to any-
thing else is irrelevant to art.
Never in history have birds, or any animals,
received such flattery from the human race as they
do now. Bullfinches, goldfinches, young brown
owls, and all the rest of them are posed for their
portraits; the services of the best artists are
enlisted, and they have frames all to themselves


x‘ MICE ”

( The. property of Airs. Walter Jones of Hurlingham)

XLIV. No. 174.—August 1911.

BY EDWIN ALEXANDER
89