Studio: international art (11.1897)

George Chester

of age, but it showed no sign of failing power or
diminished sense. However, his absence from ex-
hibitions by no means implied cessation of work.
He continued for some time as active as ever in
the exercise of his profession ; and relaxed little of
his energy until, two or three years before his death,
his health broke down, and he had perforce to
avoid the risks inseparable from wrork in the open
air. An attack of influenza, which prostrated him
when close upon his eightieth year, left him with a
chronic chest trouble which necessitated a degree
of care that was naturally extremely irksome to a
man who had before during his long life hardly had
even a day's illness. Until this breakdown came
deafness had been his only infirmity ; mentally and
physically he had retained marvellously that youth-
ful vitality which rarely lasts beyond middle life,
but the importance of wThich to an artist is almost
incalculable.

It can hardly be doubted that both his splendid
health and his acuteness of perception were the
outcome of his habit of constantly painting in the
open. No morbidity of idea was possible for a
man whose waking hours were spent in the worship
of nature's beauties; and by avoiding the confine-
ment of the studio he also escaped the bodily

discomforts which are apt to result from a seden-
tary life. He was always out of doors, and no
matter what might be the size of the canvas with
which he elected to grapple, everything important
was set down on the spot. In his case this meant
no slight amount of labour, for it was ever his
custom to make his pictures very large in scale.
To complete in the open a painting eight or nine
feet long implies a triumph over difficulties which
can hardly be realised by any one who has not
attempted such a feat. It means a never-ceasing
struggle with nature, who, prodigal though she is
with the beauties she displays to the artist, is in
her wraywTardness always ready to plague him and
to hamper him in his efforts to put her features on
record. But year by year Mr. Chester busied him-
self with canvases so large that he could, as he
would jokingly say, shelter himself from a passing
showrer by sitting beneath one of them ; and year
by year these canvases were remarkable in no
ordinary degree for beauty of treatment and ac-
curacy of statement.

In the subjects which he chose Mr. Chester was
widely catholic. Any type of landscape attracted
him if it appealed to him as pictorially possible.
He knew England, Scotland, and Wales thoroughly,