Studio: international art (8.1896)

The Salon of the Champ de Mars

delicious poems of Nature, lovingly fashioned, and
compelling one's admiration from the beauty of
the landscapes themselves, and from the supreme
art bestowed upon them. There is power here,
but without a trace of that violent coarseness
which is so common among the landscapists of to-
day ; and there is truth also, remarkable fidelity
to Nature, broadly expressed, yet with the utmost
delicacy of treatment. M. Thaulow is, moreover,
a colourist of the first rank, capable of seeing and
expressing without apparent effort the subtlest

tion. This year his works show that he has pulled
himself together in time. His manner has grown
broader and stronger and more diversified, as

witness his portrait of Mme. J. E. B- and

Mr. Aubrey Beardsley. Beyond all doubt, however,
his finest production is the splendid portrait group
of M. Fritz Thaulow and his Children. Certain
narrow-minded critics have blamed the artist
severely for having been over-influenced by the
English masters of the eighteenth century—Rey-
nolds, Lawrence, and Gainsborough. M. Blanche

phases of light. In his E Heure du Salut, Saint
Jacques, a, Dieppe, and in his Riviere d'Argues he
has surpassed himself. The first-named picture
has wonderful effects of moonlight on the glittering
windows of a chapel at the evening service hour;
and the other shows the exquisite play of the sun
on the water, which it wrinkles like a piece of silk
in the shimmering light of a glorious summer day.

M. Jacques-Emile Blanche is an industrious
and patient worker, ever seeking to freshen his
style by study and practice. At one time his
work had a certain defect of trickiness, with per-
haps (be it said without offence) a suspicion of
snobisme, and certainly his studied elegance de-
tracted in some measure from his great abilities,
and his delicate and most original gift of observa-
20

may rejoice in such a reproach, for the influence
of artists like these can only prove fertile in good
to a painter of his impressionable nature. In any
case here we have a noble piece of drawing and
of colour, very fine in manner and style, and,
apart from the attractiveness of M. Thaulow's
characteristic features, undoubtedly on its own
merits an admirable production.

In Mr. L. W. Hawkins we have a curious tem-
perament, a strange, twofold artistic nature. One
cannot forget his work of two years back, his
women's heads, mysterious, sphinx-like, smiling
faces, looking inexpressible things, symbolical
studies of great suggestiveness—Materialis?n and
Idealism, Eve and Noel. Now this artist has, so to
speak, gone back to Nature, reverted to a sim-