Studio: international art (5.1895)

The South Downs as a Sketching Ground

side. Is it that the vulgar and wholly erroneous
idea held by the general public has been adopted
by artists, and that they, too, have agreed to regard
the South Downs as a "land of barren, treeless
hills, bordered by a shipless sea " ? Do they agree
to accept the statement upon trust ? or will they
not traverse the fifty miles odd lying between
London and the neighbourhood of Brighton, and
see for themselves ? They are not usually ready
to act after this manner, and unless I am growing
too old and imbecile to have any judgment in
such matters, I would urgently entreat them to see
if a little more cannot be made out of this country
than has yet been attempted.

True, it is not easy to deal with pictorially. It
requires skilful treatment, no doubt, and like all
other scenery and subjects has its favourable and
unfavourable aspects—according to weather and
time of day. In the glare of a broad, bright, mid-
summer sun, few spots look at their best, yet grant
a sea-breeze, and I believe it is not altogether the
worst hour for the Downs, albeit it is perhaps
the most difficult to depict. They then, strangely
enough, assume a vaster look even than when mist
and cloud-wreath curl around their faces and
summits; and to express this great magnitude,
together with the relative stretches of distance of
hill beyond hill, is the painter's stumbling-block j
for he has to fill his canvas with those intangible
qualities, air and light. Nevertheless, it is to be
done by paint, patience, and perseverance ; and
since there is such a demand for novel subjects in
the world of landscape-art, might not a word-
picture like the following, for instance, from the
pen of a keen observer be transferred by the brush
to paper or canvas with advantage?

"The opposite hill is a dappled marvel of colour,
the golden brown of the stubble, the brilliant citron
yellow of the charlock amongst the turnips, the
pink of the clover, the purple of the freshly turned
ploughlands, and the soft, velvety faded green of
the untilled Down, all blend one into the other
without any hard dividing lines of hedgerows, until
one can hardly realise that one is looking at nothing
more marvellous or supernatural than the sun-
warmed breast of a Sussex Down. We could almost
believe that some all-powerful Djinn had caused
his attendant Afreets to spread his carpet on this
hillside whereon to take his lordly siesta. The
earth is so fair, so brilliant, so full of the light
which the sun is pouring into her lap, that the
hills loom light against the sky, which looks, in its
dull-grey blue, darker than they."

Realise this round-topped hill, I say, with fair
30

fidelity, give some lower intermediate bits of bare
swelling Down shelving towards the coast, crown
with a stretch of summer sea, and get some
simple characteristic piece of brambled, rutted
sheep-track or roadway leading into the picture for
foreground wherefrom to take your standpoint, and
the result ought to be an uncommon and beautiful
landscape—" The South Downs at Mid-day." They
certainly never look larger at any other time. It
is the very clearness and hot shimmer in the air
that appears to lend them size and mystery, making
the exception to the conventionally received tenet
that these qualities are only obtained by a certain
amount of obscuration and density of atmosphere
arising from cottage smoke, sluggish mist, or
driving cloud.

I have seen the effect on the spot, with scores
similar, anywhere between Chanctonbury Ring
and Firle Beacon, many a time and oft in former
days, and whilst drinking in its beauty have won-
dered why no one has tried to paint it.

But there is no lack of other incidental charac-
teristics of this particular seaboard which are all
available for the brush, and if in a certain fashion
commonplace, they have something unusual about
them. The " bits" of dun-red farmhouses not
devoid of equally old foliage within and about
their moss-grown, wall-enclosed gardens, the
quaintly built well-shelters, and queerly contrived
windlasses, chains and buckets, the lichen-covered,
thatched, or red tile roofed barns, outhouses, and
labourers' cottages, the peculiar shaped cornricks
and haystacks—some circular and all standing on
short, dumpy stone supports to lift them from the
ground, like the castors of hugecellarettes—theseand
many another feature of South Down agriculture to
be found amidst the dips and combes, are, every one,
open to graphic treatment; not to speak of the afore-
said churches, windmills, waggons, ploughs, harrows,
and the rest of the rude old-world field imple-
ments still in vogue in southern Sussex. They are
each and all available, needing but the Downs and
sea for background to become good stock-in-trade
for any painter, whilst animated items are to hand in
the teams of noble draught-horses, mild-eyed oxen,
sheep, dogs, shepherds, ploughboys, and other
native bipeds such as gulls, jackdaws, starlings,
and rooks. And the rooks ! My word ! what a
spectacle they present if you happen to catch them
following in crowds the progress of the oxen-yoked
plough as it turns up the rich, if shallow, alluvial
soil which covers like a thin purple jerkin much
of the otherwise unfruitful chalk ! What a fuss
and hubbub they make over their supper of worms;