Studio: international art (17.1899)

Frantz M. Melchers

George’s cross, to point the situation of the hearth
in an English home. In everything he does there
is the same earnestness, and whether he is engaged
upon a decorative adjunct to a modern house like
his other mantelpiece with the Sleeping Beauty
panel, or a piece of church furniture like his altar
frontal, or upon a stained-glass window, he is always
consistent in his manner of working. His designs
become, as it were, arguments, didactic in their pur-
pose, and with a sort of literary undercurrent that
gives them an almost dramatic meaning. Each
one provides food for thought and appeals as
definitely to the intellectual faculties of the people
who examine them as to their aesthetic instincts.
He gives nothing which he has not thought out,
and suggests no idea that he has not analysed and
tested by the light of reason.

Yet his symbolism is in no
way restless or self-assertive,
and is scholarly without
being ponderous. It adds
to his art an air of elegant
completeness, perfecting it,
and rounding it off with a
subtle touch of harmony ;
and it never goes astray in
the direction of merely pur-
poseless imagery. That it
should be so admirably
balanced and yet so rich in
its variety, is its completest
justification.

Frantz m.

MELCHERS.

BY POL DE
MONT.

Maurice Maeterlinck,
who, better than any one,
has appreciated the value
of repose, assures us that of
all modern painters Mel-
chers has best succeeded in
rendering, by the simple
reproduction of line maison
avec les volets verts, une
porte entr'ouverte au bord
dlune eau dormante, uti petit
jardin dans Pattente du
dimanche, as much quiet
beauty as the greatest poets
and the greatest thinkers of
all times and ages. And “dimanche

perhaps more than these. This thoroughly Dutch
and Flemish characteristic is the principal feature
of his talent.

That which he does not owe, however, to his
Dutch and Flemish origin, and which nevertheless
forms a remarkable trait in his character, is the
intellectuality of his drawing on the one side, and
the delicate distinction of his colouring on the
other. His repeated visits to Paris, and his friend-
shipwith theSymbolists and Mystics ofliterature and
art, have undoubtedly developed his intelligence ;
while a careful study of Japanese art, especially
that of Hirosjiege and Utamaro, has influenced
him as a colourist. Without taking these influ-
ences into account it is somewhat difficult to
appreciate at first the strange views of fields and

FROM A PAINTING BY FRANTZ MELCHERS

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