Studio: international art (24.1902)

The New English Art Club

what sort of a distance, other than an advance in sonal contact between vision and the medium,
that mastery which makes paint speak, separates Even the pictures which were held to show
The Rainbow of this exhibition from the early plainly the influence of Monet or Manet, to take
Walls of Montreux—these are questions which an instance, had the hand and the eye of the
must be left to the occasion when Mr. Steer artist in them, active and full of life. The
shall get together for us a collection of the work spectator felt none of the despondency that flows
he has done. Meanwhile there is this to be said from borrowed work, as from a charge brought
for those who find the changes from one picture in our very faces against the day in which we live,
to another radical : the pictures are, if we may use Indeed, their newness is exactly one of the surprises
the expression, in themselves radical. Each one of Mr. Steer's pictures. If one thinks of Constable
as it came before us gave the impression of having when one sees The Rainbow in the present exhibi-
been painted with a whole heart—freely from the tton, that is rather because the mind must travel back
bottom, as it were—with nothing affected or wilful —over much beautiful landscape—still back to
intervening; and if one remarks differences between Constable before it meet again the grand, unmoved
pictures which have that depth and directness, it landscape, the picture in which the action of the
is natural, if not logical, to conclude that the natural scene has been so realised that it can be
differences must also be fundamental. projected whole, severed from this or that tie of

It would be less surprising to meet variety in a sentiment, and left, almost coldly, to speak to the
painter whose work had all along revealed the spectator ot such things as he has ears to hear,
character of facility, and whose source of inspiration The French romantic painters of landscape, and
seemed to be pictures rather than the appearances Cecil Lawson with his fellows in England, had a
of nature. But the
fluency of The Rainbow,
the eager run of touches
astonishingly just, the dig- 1
njty, the deep brilliance
and the stillness with which
the river glows beneath us
in the sudden break of
sunshine—here is a power
of expression which, on the
face of it, the painter has
won and not slipped into.
Nor did this painter's handi-
work at any time seem light
of achievement, or pro-
duced without an ever
more and more practised
concentration of energy.
There is a sharpness in
Mr. Steer's work, an edge,
and an eagerness, that
mate not at all with the
idea of facility.

Neither has Mr. Steer's

work looked as if its source .<, .... HV,4,i Se'-'f'i ■'■ tt* Hflfll

were in other pictures 'jfiito ^Si-- • kv? * * IbSr

rather than in the world as j • ^ i '7 *•' V, *'

we can see it, and do see | ( ' *" .. 7. : •'•

it, at this moment. In | 1 1 >,„ • $yV--jt'!i . '. >'"'**". ;JsVE

what he produces there is j , t '\ > ~ '■<■' *| %*

a vigour and a happi- ' ^j£lJ

ness that are the very

note of the smart per- "a window in a london street" by w. orpen

264