Studio: international art (25.1902)

Studio- Talk

STUDIO-TALK this thought in mind wished to imply that Mr.

Rich, owing to his sympathy for earlier methods,
had lost touch with the present-day tendencies of
ONDON.—Mr. A. W. Rich is a water- English water-colour.

(From our own Correspondents.)

colourist of great merit, and yet his

I

|, | drawings are not appreciated as they Space does not suffice here to disprove this
ought to be. Some persons, indeed, miss charge, but it will be easy and convenient to
their significance altogether, and say that their art return to the matter at a later date, in a review of
is nothing but "a conscious return" to old the exhibition which Mr. Rich will hold early in
traditions, and especially to those which are March at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly. Mean-
associated with the great name of Dewint. In this time, let it be noted that the art of English water-
criticism, if criticism it can be called, there are two colour is not a thing which can be criticised at
misunderstandings. In the first place, "a return" random; it needs some recognition of the fact that,
to old traditions cannot itself be either "conscious" since the end of the eighteenth century, its progress
or "unconscious," for it is not a living and breathing has been along two lines, either in direct lineal
thing subject to a mental condition that makes it descent from the founders of the art in England,
either conscious of its character or the reverse, or else in such collateral branches of the parent
But students of art, old as well as young, are stock as have been greatly affected by the influences
rather inclined to put themselves at their ease in a of a sister art, the art of oil painting. Now, Mr.
bad habit of thinking without real thought, Rich continues the lineal succession, and anyone
applying to mere qualities such adjectives and who studies his work carefully, with unbiassed
phrases as belong to the painters by whom the judgment, will perceive clearly that, within his
qualities were produced. Thus, then, the criticism sympathy for Dewint and Cotman, he not only
on the work of Mr. Rich must be expressed in a shows his own ■ individuality, but displays at the
different way. Let it run thus : that Mr. Rich same time not a little of the knowledge won from
proves in his landscapes that he is conscious of a Nature by impressionists of a later age than Dewint's.
return to earlier methods. The writer who had -

' GREENWICH '

FROM A WATER-COLOUR BY A. W. RICH

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