DOI Heft:
Nr. 229 (March 1916)
DOI Artikel:William Callow: painter in watercolours (1812-1908)
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.43461#0026
William Callow
“NOTRE DAME DE PARIS, FROM BERCY”
BY WILLIAM CALLOW, R.W.S.
extravagantly illuminate the whole length of a street
of buildings facing the sun.
It is a very poor education for the appreciation
of the vibratory charm of Sargent’s art to accustom
oneself to the skilful theatric use of light and
shade upon which depends the effect of the most
characteristic Callows. And it is a very poor educa-
tion for the enjoyment of the beauty in Callow’s
art at its best to share Sargent’s restless vision.
Callow was employing in the ’forties and ’fifties
the equable and serene style that he inherited from
an earlier school. He commenced with a very re-
fined vision supporting his extraordinary skill, and
if his art was eventually deteriorated by incoming
influences which his sympathies would not permit
him to understand, it was also assailed by an
enemy that has a special eye on excellent drawing-
masters—facility itself, when it outstrips every
other faculty. In the later years of his long life,
the tradition which had sustained him in his best
work was barely remembered by the most old-
fashioned collectors. We are but now finding
our way back to it in that search for first principles
which is the end of the end. When Callow died
in 1908 he was ninety-six. He was as a boy
assisting Theodore Fielding, elder brother of
Copley Fielding, in colouring prints in 1823, and
was an exhibitor at the Royal Society of Painters
in Water-Colours in 1838. He exhibited there
thenceforward for seventy years unbrokenly.
Although he was exhibiting oil paintings at the
Royal Academy after 1850, his reputation is
secured to him by his water-colours. Drawings
by his grandfather, John Callow, who was born in
1770, can be studied with the work of contempo-
rary draughtsmen, in the portfolios of the South
Kensington Museum. When William Callow
began to draw he started with the convention that
was employed by his grandfather and all the
draughtsmen of the first part of the nineteenth
century. The broad definition of trees in which
their shape is made clear by always shading them
on one side was easily emphasised by a simple
but comprehensive wash of colour. There are in
the Victoria and Albert Museum at South Ken-
sington a series of water-colours done in 1842 of
scenes in Hyde Park and Regent’s Park, in which
this simple recipe for an atmospheric topographical
drawing is carried out with the greatest art. The
vision is extremely refined. Nothing could be
further removed from the commonplace into
which such a style would decline in the hands of
the amateurs, of whom there seem to have been
more at that time than there are even to-day.
4
“NOTRE DAME DE PARIS, FROM BERCY”
BY WILLIAM CALLOW, R.W.S.
extravagantly illuminate the whole length of a street
of buildings facing the sun.
It is a very poor education for the appreciation
of the vibratory charm of Sargent’s art to accustom
oneself to the skilful theatric use of light and
shade upon which depends the effect of the most
characteristic Callows. And it is a very poor educa-
tion for the enjoyment of the beauty in Callow’s
art at its best to share Sargent’s restless vision.
Callow was employing in the ’forties and ’fifties
the equable and serene style that he inherited from
an earlier school. He commenced with a very re-
fined vision supporting his extraordinary skill, and
if his art was eventually deteriorated by incoming
influences which his sympathies would not permit
him to understand, it was also assailed by an
enemy that has a special eye on excellent drawing-
masters—facility itself, when it outstrips every
other faculty. In the later years of his long life,
the tradition which had sustained him in his best
work was barely remembered by the most old-
fashioned collectors. We are but now finding
our way back to it in that search for first principles
which is the end of the end. When Callow died
in 1908 he was ninety-six. He was as a boy
assisting Theodore Fielding, elder brother of
Copley Fielding, in colouring prints in 1823, and
was an exhibitor at the Royal Society of Painters
in Water-Colours in 1838. He exhibited there
thenceforward for seventy years unbrokenly.
Although he was exhibiting oil paintings at the
Royal Academy after 1850, his reputation is
secured to him by his water-colours. Drawings
by his grandfather, John Callow, who was born in
1770, can be studied with the work of contempo-
rary draughtsmen, in the portfolios of the South
Kensington Museum. When William Callow
began to draw he started with the convention that
was employed by his grandfather and all the
draughtsmen of the first part of the nineteenth
century. The broad definition of trees in which
their shape is made clear by always shading them
on one side was easily emphasised by a simple
but comprehensive wash of colour. There are in
the Victoria and Albert Museum at South Ken-
sington a series of water-colours done in 1842 of
scenes in Hyde Park and Regent’s Park, in which
this simple recipe for an atmospheric topographical
drawing is carried out with the greatest art. The
vision is extremely refined. Nothing could be
further removed from the commonplace into
which such a style would decline in the hands of
the amateurs, of whom there seem to have been
more at that time than there are even to-day.
4