International studio (48.1913)

Book Reviews

Authoritative literature dealing with prints is
rare, the subject is a vastly interesting one, and
“Prints and Their Makers” is the kind of a book
which will appeal in terms equally strong, even if
of a different nature, at once to the connoisseur-
collector and the aspiring amateur.
John Lavery and His Work. By Walter Shaw
Sparrow. (Dana Estes & Co., Boston. $3.50.)
The author has not only introduced himself (and
pleasantly) before as one of a facile but trenchant
pen, but also as one who seems ever happy in the
choice of his subjects. His “Life and Work of
Frank Brangwyn” is fresh in our minds from last
year.
And in the same manner, if not even more inti-
mately, Mr. Sparrow chronicles and analyzes the
work of his brilliant friend, Lavery, with many a
personal note that tells us, as in the Brangwyn
book, of the man no less than the painter, and fol-
lows the same excellent arrangement of contents.
And of Brangwyn and Lavery, perhaps the biogra-
pher found, in the Irish spontaneity of the latter,
a possibility of getting closer to the man behind
the painter.
Apart from the interest which surrounds his
subjects Mr. Sparrow should become a most popu-
lar biographer by reason of the warm generosity
and appreciation which he continually shows in
his viewpoint, and by the facile and cheerful man-
ner of his writing. He deals not only in facts but
in fancies, and when it is realized that the two play
equal parts in our lives, it will also come to be
realized how many half-biographies we have read.
Dates, facts, dates—alternated or thrown at us in
solid blocks, with nothing of the man, none of his
whims or that lighter side which has so much to
do with the vitality of his art. One would be as
successful in attempting to paint a picture all in
shadows. And with painters, above all other
mortals, how can we hope to arrive at an estimate
of a man’s art when he is so much a part of it (and
perhaps the greater part)—if we do not know the
man?
John Lavery came prominently into the view of
the picture-loving American people in last year’s
Exhibition of International Art at Pittsburgh,
where he showed a group of thirty-six paintings.
It is the custom of the exhibition committee each
year to devote one of the smaller galleries to a
“one-man” show, and last season John Lavery
was the painter featured.
Those who were especially impressed with
Lavery’s art on this occasion will find great inter-

From “John Lavery and His Work," David Estes & Co.
A PORTRAIT BY JOHN LAVERY


est in the present biography, which is beautifully
illustrated with a profusion of the same sort of
excellent color plates and heliotype reproduction
which made the Brangwyn book so pleasing in
this respect.

Richards: Masterpieces of the Sea. By Har-
rison S. Morris (J. B. Lippincott Company.
$1.00.)
Perhaps there have been no painters of the “old
school” who attained such wide recognition as the
late William T. Richards, and whose work has
been less a matter of written chronicle.
In the Corcoran Gallery, at Washington, in the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in the Met-
ropolitan Museum of New York City, and in
many other important collections, public and
private, there are paintings by Richards—paint-
ings as saliently admirable today as they were
when they were first hung—and yet not only their
painter but the ideals of art which inspired him
take little if any part in the tidal wave of impres-
sionism and half-founded “schools” that seems to
have nearly swept away the last breakwaters of
conservatism.
If the paintings of Richards—landscapes and

XLVII