International studio (45.1912)

Sir Alfred East's Water-Colours

THE WATER-COLOURS OF SIR
ALFRED EAST. BY CHARLES
MARRIOTT.
‘'Your attitude towards nature should be re-
spectful, but at the same time confident.” These,
the opening words of Sir Alfred East’s book on
“ Landscape Painting,” were strongly recalled to
my mind when I first saw him at work in a studio
in St. Ives, Cornwall. The picture, painted in the
Cotswolds and brought to St. Ives for final revision
in a winter light untroubled by the fogs of London,
though true to nature in essentials, and therefore
respectful, seemed to exist for him less as a subject
found in nature than as a theme to support and
express a conception of his own. Relations that
were accidental in nature seemed to have a pur-
pose in the picture, as if the artist had disengaged
the inner meaning of the scene; discovered the
essential rhythm under the surface of appearances.
It was a single statement and not a collection of
parts. I felt that he could have abolished a tree
or put one in as one might alter the position of a
flower in a garland without materially affecting its
character as a garland, though the design would be
improved. As he worked he talked—about music,

I think—and his hand moved from one part of
the picture to another so that the suggestion of
arranging flowers was complete.
That impression of Sir Alfred at work is con-
sistent with the impression that it is now my good
fortune to renew at frequent intervals in the
Academy, at the R.B.A., and from the water-
colours that are reproduced in these pages. If I
had to sum up in a single word the characteristics of
Sir Alfred’s art in their immediate effect upon the
observer, I should use the word “Improvisation.”
That, for the immediate effect and what is
implied in it, is admirably expressed in the artist’s
own words : “ Nature expresses life with a curious
and interesting sense of directness. Although we
know there are millions of years behind her
simplest development, yet the result is one of
apparent ease, a spontaneous and direct effort.”
One has only to look at the drawings here re-
produced to recognise that though many years of
observation and labour have gone to the develop-
ment of the power to make them, they are not in
themselves produced by obser ition and labour.
To paraphrase the words of the artist, in them he
has expressed nature with a curious and interesting
sense of directness. “This,” he seems to say, “is


“ST. JACQUES, DIEPPE”
XLV. No. 180.—February 1912.

BY SIR ALFRED EAST
259