Studio: international art (21.1901)

A. D. Peppercorn

" YARMOUTH, ISLB OF WIGHT "

pre-occupations, which, although verbal, are not
wholly verbal, although decorative are also scien-
tific. It is this double study that made me
patiently await Peppercorn, knowing that here lay
a fascination that once yielded to becomes irre-
sistible. I have thought, doubted, studied enough ;
now I assert, he belongs to the great men.
*****
Mr. Peppercorn's work is without subtle in-
genuities or anything in paint akin to wit and
humour.

Excellences of different sorts may be distin-
guished in kind, but cannot be compared in degree.

We do not taste the flavour of his art on our
palate like a delicate Bordeaux, but gulp it rather
as a burly Burgundy or ponderous Port, or better
still, if the words are not too desperate in rank, as
a wholesome swig of honest admirable ale.
*****

I have resented at times the place or importance
given to the development theory in the history of
art. Art is personal, and its growth the develop-
ment of individual and progressive ideas. Some-
times the man who began a game finishes it as
Corot; sometimes it takes three men to perfect its
execution (not its conception). Yet as one learns
something of science, of history, of literature, of

BY A. D. PEPPERCORN

general knowledge as well as of a special art, one
begins to see that such treatment is inevitable, and
also justifiable. Artists are commonly against it,
as the individual painter cannot get away from his
own art, cannot see his own career in due perspec-
tive, cannot be conscious of his environment, and
so distinguish what may be his own from what is
the heritage of his age and school. The point of
view (which these determine often) counts for very
much in art. Men take things on the whole much
in the same way in the same age. Contemporaries
seen from a hundred years' distance appear to agree
in the point of view. Landscape with difficulty
disengaged itself from being the accessory to a
picture heroic, historical, religious or portraiture ;
with difficulty became not only the title of a
picture, but its true subject—Diana and Actceon,
Mercury and Argus, etc. When it won that point
formally it yet retained its servitude to the figure
point of view in habits of sentiment, composition,
and ideas of the worthy and dignified. Corot set
the last classic seal upon landscape and the points
of view.

From Corot, who summed up landscape, two
roads lead on—the bright, high, clear, luminous
observers, Sisley, Monet, and the weighty broad
Peppercorn and Maris.

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