DOI Heft:
No. 104 (November, 1901)
DOI Artikel:Sickert, Oswald: The International Society
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.19874#0135
The International Society
A VILLAGE BY HENRI HARPIGNIES
(By permission ofJ. Staats Forbes, Esq.)
No one will deny Mr. Bertram Priestman, for
instance, ability and taste. He has painted pic-
tures which were more than pleasant, landscapes
that stick in the memory. He had a landscape at
the New Gallery in '96, admirable in the black and
green of thunderclouds above a grassy dip of bare
country. There were signs of weakness, perhaps,
the paint was certainly sticky and not elegant; but
he was nearer to Nature in one of her moving
aspects—and, surely, no further from the pos-
session of an expressive technique—than he is here
in the wavy sweep of the easy brush that has
knocked The Lock and The Bend of the River on to
the canvas. During the five years that separate
the two pictures the artist's colour has grown
warmer and his paint more fluent, not to the end
that he might become capable of greater delicacy,
not that he was approaching nearer to the point
where the brush may move out skilfully to meet a
first-hand vision of Nature, but tending towards
another and quite an unindividual ideal—the picture
that the dealer loves. For somewhere in the realm
of ideals there is the Dealer's Landscape. I do not
know if any painter has actually incorporated the
ideal in oil paint ; but his period, if he existed, can
be fixed with a fair amount of certainty. He must
have flourished somewhere between the end of the
Barbizon School and the fashion for the un-
122
varnished and cold productions of the square brush.
Perhaps when the style first came out, in the hands
of the original master (for whose lost work the
dealer still ransacks France and Holland), perhaps
then it had a sense, perhaps it was a profound
development, fit to express something that its
master saw. Now it is anything but profound, it
is a manner by which the able painter may achieve
an impressive landscape at the expense of all
intimacy and sensibility.
Of the other painters who lean towards the
dealer's ideal, Mr. Alfred Withers has gone furthest
in his Lynn Mill, which is of a very handsome
deep brown, richly broken into here and there
with romantic plums of colour, and Mr. Oliver
Hall, who is freer, has still some feeling left in
his pleasant Yorkshire Uplands.
The painter who approaches the dealer's land-
scape is advanced, he has reached a stage where
he may stop, his landscape is final of its kind,
there is no reason why he should go further.
Miss MacNicol's is a good example of the paint-
ing that stops and settles down at an earlier stage.
One is surprised, not because it is surprising that
the struggle with the unmanageable medium of oil
paint should be given up at this, or indeed at any
stage, but because the painter reveals no quiver of
inability anywhere in her picture--why, then, has
A VILLAGE BY HENRI HARPIGNIES
(By permission ofJ. Staats Forbes, Esq.)
No one will deny Mr. Bertram Priestman, for
instance, ability and taste. He has painted pic-
tures which were more than pleasant, landscapes
that stick in the memory. He had a landscape at
the New Gallery in '96, admirable in the black and
green of thunderclouds above a grassy dip of bare
country. There were signs of weakness, perhaps,
the paint was certainly sticky and not elegant; but
he was nearer to Nature in one of her moving
aspects—and, surely, no further from the pos-
session of an expressive technique—than he is here
in the wavy sweep of the easy brush that has
knocked The Lock and The Bend of the River on to
the canvas. During the five years that separate
the two pictures the artist's colour has grown
warmer and his paint more fluent, not to the end
that he might become capable of greater delicacy,
not that he was approaching nearer to the point
where the brush may move out skilfully to meet a
first-hand vision of Nature, but tending towards
another and quite an unindividual ideal—the picture
that the dealer loves. For somewhere in the realm
of ideals there is the Dealer's Landscape. I do not
know if any painter has actually incorporated the
ideal in oil paint ; but his period, if he existed, can
be fixed with a fair amount of certainty. He must
have flourished somewhere between the end of the
Barbizon School and the fashion for the un-
122
varnished and cold productions of the square brush.
Perhaps when the style first came out, in the hands
of the original master (for whose lost work the
dealer still ransacks France and Holland), perhaps
then it had a sense, perhaps it was a profound
development, fit to express something that its
master saw. Now it is anything but profound, it
is a manner by which the able painter may achieve
an impressive landscape at the expense of all
intimacy and sensibility.
Of the other painters who lean towards the
dealer's ideal, Mr. Alfred Withers has gone furthest
in his Lynn Mill, which is of a very handsome
deep brown, richly broken into here and there
with romantic plums of colour, and Mr. Oliver
Hall, who is freer, has still some feeling left in
his pleasant Yorkshire Uplands.
The painter who approaches the dealer's land-
scape is advanced, he has reached a stage where
he may stop, his landscape is final of its kind,
there is no reason why he should go further.
Miss MacNicol's is a good example of the paint-
ing that stops and settles down at an earlier stage.
One is surprised, not because it is surprising that
the struggle with the unmanageable medium of oil
paint should be given up at this, or indeed at any
stage, but because the painter reveals no quiver of
inability anywhere in her picture--why, then, has