Studio: international art (14.1898)

The International Society

“ THE THAMES AT KEW BRIDGE

[From a photogi'aph by Carl Hentschel Us* Co.)

BY H. MUHRMAN

that makes you shudder, in the Execution of Maxi-
milian, by Manet. This is a picture to the point,
with no railing of sentimentality round it to prevent
weak-hearted spectators from taking fright. Here
are men of our generation, soldiers, not attempting
to argue about the right or wrong of their deed,
knowing only the command of their superior: how
freely and easily these men fulfil their duty! A
moment has been finely seized, and all that went
to make it, that gives it right to perpetuation—the
inevitable, and the way to meet it—are summed
up in the moment, and given so felicitously that
you feel it is not so much the subject as the
treatment which fascinates. Opposite hangs his
other well-known picture, The Vagrant Musicians.

In the highest degree a contrast, but none the
less convincing, is Degas. He is evidently at home
in the world which he represents—the world of
the ballet girl. He knows all the secrets of it, and
tells them fearlessly. One of the finest masters of
tone, acutest of observers, and surest of draughts-
men, he is able to show how a work of art can be
produced out of any subject, provided you have
the master.

What a different world his from that of Uhde,
again a master of his own art, that of treating

I 12

Biblical themes, but in modern form. He is un-
fortunately here only represented by a portrait group
of three girls, but we hope soon to deal with his
work at length in these columns.

Two fine landscapes and three subject pictures
by Hans Thoma are excellent examples of German
Romanticism, of which Stuck represents another
phase, while Lieberman and Dill personify the
realistic tendency.

Besides these there are so many works which
enhance the value of the exhibition, such as Zorn’s
Midsummer Night's Dance in Moi-a, the Annuncia-
tion by Greiffenhagen, Eve by Howard, Strang’s Al
Fresco, and those other beautiful works by Mathew
Maris, the little girl in blue lying on the grass among
the flowers and the butterflies, who makes one long
to dream one’s childhood’s harmless, happy dreams
over again; and those two child figures in The Walk,
in which one feels all the vague, innocent, mystic
love of childhood, the tender, dawning feeling of
one for the other.

And now to the portraits.

The true portraitist is, I hold, the fragmentary
historian of his time, when he depicts persons who
are of interest to posterity, but only then when
he is capable of presenting them as personalities,