Studio: international art (5.1895)

The South Downs as a Sketching Grotind

crisp, elastic turf beneath my feet, are sufficient to
recall them to my mental vision. Yes, that whiff
of brackish breeze and footfall on thymy turf
bring back strangely graphic pictures of the rolling
South Downs, following and enfolding one another
like the waves of some mighty solidified sea. I
can see the windmills perched on the highest
points, making landmarks for mariners and fisher-
men and quaintly suggesting the old-fashioned
semaphores in use between the Admiralty and
the Channel before days of electricity. I can see
the tiny villages with their squat, square, grey
church-towers, or the farmsteads surrounded by
ample cornricks, and the twisted, weather-bent little
spinneys sheltering here and there among the
hollows. I can see the dazzling white, winding
chalk roads and footpaths, like silver threads of

braid binding and decorating__

an emerald mantle, and in
places the darker green of
mangold and turnip, the stray
fields of golden waving wheat
and oats, or the stretches of
neutral stubble intermingling
with the purple of the fresh-
turned fallows. The senses of
smell and touch alone will do
thus much, but when I listen I
can

lines one of those world-renowned fleecy flocks of
the incomparable South Down "muttons."

I can, I say, picture to myself all these things,
and the forms they take, although rather out of
focus, on the sensitive, if somewhat dry, plates of
my memory, and they set me wondering more than
ever why this delightful champaign is so neglected
by the brethren of the brush. Copley Fielding in
former times made it his happy hunting ground;
but beyond Henry Hine in these latter days, I can
scarcely recall a single landscape-painter of distinc-
tion in water-colour or oil who has done even a
tithe part of what is possible, as it seems to me,
with the district. The white umbrella is rarely or
never seen cropping up in any of the multitude of
snug nooks beside farm or cottage, gorse-clump,
or wind-bent spinney, or out upon the bare hill-

" catch the many twinkling smile
of ocean,

And with pleased ear, bewildered,
watch

His chime of restless motion."

Or, again, if the jangling
music of harness bells crosses
the wind, I behold in my
mind's eye the heavy lumber-
ing farm waggon, horsed by
the glossy-coated sturdy Sussex
breed, or the plough with its
team of dark, slow-paced oxen
steered by the long pole of their
smock-frocked driver. The
tall, grey-coated, slouch-hatted
figure of the shepherd, stand-
ing solid and still as a statue,
leaning on his crook, starts
into existence if I but chance
to hear the drowsy tinkling of
a sheep-bell, or the bark of the
collie, whilst before me wander
away in straggling groups and

"LORD JUSTICE L1NDLEY "

FROM AN ETCHING BY WM, STRANG

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