Studio: international art (23.1901)

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale

For the rest, it is far from easy to write of any
artist whose appeal is made through subjects
having an allegorical significance. Allegories in
art have one thing in common with jokes—they
must be enjoyed at first-hand; they ought never
to be explained. To describe what they mean
is to degrade them into flat, dead prose, greatly to
the annoyance of those who can appreciate their
message without the least help from the stubborn
realism of words. Apart from this, moreover, the
water-colours by Miss Fortescue-Brickdale are
good pictures, no less than thoughtful allegories;
and hence it would be unfair to lay stress on their
literary allusiveness. On these accounts, and no
others, it seems to me best simply to draw attention
to their most important merits when considered as
works of art; and in doing so, for the sake of
clearness, I shall speak of each characteristic under
a separate heading.

i. Intuition. An instinctive habit 01 mind

is so strong in the case of Miss Fortescue-
Brickdale that she finds it well-nigh impossible
to translate her pictured ideas out of art into
descriptive prose. Her subjects not only present
themselves to her mind in forms and colours,
but, in her efforts to call them up into pictorial
presence, they do not take shape in words, as
conceptions are apt to do in the minds of men-
painters. Miss Fortescue-Brickdale arrives at her
ends without becoming conscious of the steps by
which she gets there. Even the task of finding
titles for her pictures not only troubles her, but leads
her at times into such difficulties as might be easily
avoided by anyone who understands her work.
Too often, like a young writer who has yet to learn
how to begin an article, Miss Fortescue-Brickdale
seeks refuge between quotation marks. Titles of
quoted poetry for works of art may have been
excusable years ago, in the most sentimental days
of the Victorian era, but the painters of to-day

-'THE TRAVESTIES OF LIFE'

(By permission of Messrs. Dowdeswell)

IiY ELEANOR FORTESCUE-BRICKDALE
41