Studio: international art (3.1894)

From Gallery, Studio, and Mart

also mention that there seem to be talented girls in
every one of your schools."

As a pendant to the fragment from the etching
by the President of the Royal Society of Painter-
Etchers, we reproduced a few months ago, Sir
Francis Seymour Haden has kindly allowed us to
illustrate another fragment of a large plate, etched
at Richmond, about 1858. All students of the
artist's work will feel pleasure in comparing these
two studies, worked at so wide an interval, although
the reduced size and the necessary loss in their

illusion is frequently destroyed owing to the com-
mendable desire of the manager that it shall be
complete. In Mrs. Lessingham we were shown
the bachelor " diggings " of a rising barrister. To
be a rising barrister means money, and money is
the mother of comfort. But for all that, the room
as presented at the Garrick was a thought too
elegant; indeed, there was a quite improbable air
of femininity about it, while its neatness was really
fabulous.

And in the beautiful landscape in the same play.

imitation by a mechanical process deprives them of
much of their charm.

The mounting of plays has of late been raised to
the level of a fine art. Garrick, we know, paid his
scene-painter well, and Clarkson Stansfield was not
the only artist who commenced his career by pro-
ducing theatrical scenery. Only the other day, at
Christie's, we had an opportunity of seeing the
essays of Fred Walker and Mr. Birket Foster in
this direction. Stage scenery, according to some,
should be realistic; according to others, symbolic.
The ideal of the leading London managers in these
days is realism, and, if one concede their point of
view, one's only complaint against them is that
they go too far and defeat their own end. Take,
for example, one of the most artistic and generously
directed of our theatres, the Garrick. Everything
in the mounting is very handsome, and the bounds
of good taste are never overpassed. And yet the

representing a Scottish Moor in the shooting season,
the pinks and purples of the heather, the silver of
the rushing water, were too pink, too purple, too
silver. For all that, it would be idle to deny the
beauty of the scene and the great talent of its
inventor. We merely suggest that realism was ex-
ceeded, that the effect would have been even better
if a little less had been done. As it was, the effect
was very charming.

Scenery which is symbolic as opposed to realistic
is all very well. The "This is a wall" of Shake-
speare's day may be enough for the severe
student of the classical drama, but the fortitude of
the average playgoer does not go so far. Mean
mounting is simply intolerable. Let anybody who
lightly accuses our leading managers of excess try
a course of productions at second-rate provincial
theatres. He will return to the Lyceum, the

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