Studio: international art (9.1897)

The New English Art Club

The truth would seem to be the opposite of this,
Colour, the most obviously sensual element in
painting, has been a rare gift in this century among
the French, and when Delacroix rediscovered it,
and, with all the difficulties of a missionary, essayed
its use, there was a veritable scandal in his country.
English painting, from the gross rollicking Hogarth
downwards, has usually been sensual, as painting
has every right to be. "What is inconvenient in
painting, and what in English painting is often
done, is to take the "rather sad subject" and
stultify it by rendering it in comfortable and sen-
sual terms. The scene of misery or of melancholy
in which the actors, strive as they will, cannot divest
themselves of a sense of hot supper round the
corner, while the very chairs and tables, the curves
and tints and shadows, are chuckling all the time
with suppressed jollity, is an ill-advised mixture.
But we are so inured to fat, rosy sorrow that a man
whose mind is really of the brooding sombre cast
enters like an insult. Mr. Legros' painting almost
becomes a contradiction of the art, so much is
colour saddened and reproved, but the contradic-
tion is not one of feeling.

In Mr. Steer's Nude of this year I find that gift
of colour which, to my thinking, gives him a place
apart in his generation ; and also, what is interest-

ing, an effort to complete a picture of a very posed
sort to a degree unusual with him. Indeed, I find
something of the fallacy of finish in it, a straining
to complete beyond the painter's interest, which
reacts unhappily on the paint. Mr. Steer always
seems to me to walk about among the things
of this world as one might take a walk across fields
and woods enjoying their freshness and colour
in passing, but never caring or inquiring very
closely what they are. He has his own magic
business of colour to transact with everything, but
beyond that no great concern, and we share with
him a light wanderer's entertainment. He crosses
the fence from a purple field into a golden field,
not from clover into barley. In a picture like this
it is as if he had met the farmer and had been
saddened by a discussion about the crops.
Whether wiser as well as sadder remains to be seen ;
the brilliant sketch expresses his interest in things
better as we know him.

Mr. Conder is as different a type of artist as
another man of talent can well be. Instead of
following a clue of colour and effect across the other
relations of things, he puts his pictures together by
what affects us as a dream faculty. He feels a
strong sentiment and desire for the people and
things as people and things. The rose is there as