DOI Heft:
No. 113 (August, 1902)
DOI Artikel:Watson, Walter R.: Miss Jessie M. King and her work
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.19876#0199
Jessie M. King
daintiness of treatment rarely met with. Thought
and execution form a complete ensemble, and the
stamp of a strong personality is seen on everything
that is produced. The drawings are the artistic
expression of an artistic spirit, but, in addition to
this, we find Miss King's work instinct with poetry
and imagination, and there would seem to exist in
her delicately balanced temperament a perpetual
endeavour to express the spirit of the thing, to pass
through and beyond the outward and merely physical
limitations, and to search the essential life and reason
which animate it. In some of her drawings, Miss
King discovers that what men value as substances
" THE ROMANCE OF BY JESSIE M. KING
THE SWAN'S NEST"
have a higher value as symbols, and to her
Nature presents immense and mystical shadows
of spiritual things. Her imaginations are. more
perfect and more minutely organised than what
is seen by the bodily eye, and she does not permit
the outward creation to be a hindrance to the
expression of her artistic creed. The force of
representation plants her imagined figures before
her ; she treats them as real, and talks to them
as if they were bodily there; puts words in their
mouths such as they should have spoken, and is
affected by them as by persons. Such creation
is poetry in the literal sense of the term, and Miss
King's dreamy and poetical nature enables her
to create the persons of the drama, to invest
them with appropriate figures, faces, costumes,
and surroundings; to make them speak after
their own characters. They speak to us,
and their depth of perception appeals to us not
less than their charming novelty of invention
and spontaneity.
It is in vain to say that most of the original work
of the last ten years has been executed under the
influence of the genius of Aubrey Beardsley. He
saw one aspect of Nature, and that often as she
appears vitiated and corrupted by the influence of
a city. But there are those, and Miss King is
among them, to whom Nature comes in the
perfume of the flowers and the songs of birds,
and is ever seen with the light of the country sun
in the eye, and the wind from the hills filling the
nostrils. Expression as a technical treatment is a
matter of little consequence, for line, as line, is
limited in its application, and the Japanese can yet
teach the European the secrets of a pen, and the
symbolic meaning of colour. And, further, to
Miss King comes also that love of fellow man
which Coleridge has so beautifully expressed :
" He prayelh well who loveth well
Both man, and bird, and beast."
The deep and pathetic ballads of her native
Scotland, the works of other poets, the fairy
tales which are the common heritage of our Aryan
stock, the naturalism of Zola, and the mysticism
ol Maeterlinck all find in her a ready response.
And whether illustrating their pages, or decorating
the covers of their works, the hidden meaning
stands revealed, and the artist translates into the
beauty of line and form the thoughts and ideas
which the pen has expressed. And it is no mean
task to present to the reader illustrations of a
poetic or imaginative text which shall equal the
power of that text itself. From how many of our
authors do we wish the disturbing illustrations
187
daintiness of treatment rarely met with. Thought
and execution form a complete ensemble, and the
stamp of a strong personality is seen on everything
that is produced. The drawings are the artistic
expression of an artistic spirit, but, in addition to
this, we find Miss King's work instinct with poetry
and imagination, and there would seem to exist in
her delicately balanced temperament a perpetual
endeavour to express the spirit of the thing, to pass
through and beyond the outward and merely physical
limitations, and to search the essential life and reason
which animate it. In some of her drawings, Miss
King discovers that what men value as substances
" THE ROMANCE OF BY JESSIE M. KING
THE SWAN'S NEST"
have a higher value as symbols, and to her
Nature presents immense and mystical shadows
of spiritual things. Her imaginations are. more
perfect and more minutely organised than what
is seen by the bodily eye, and she does not permit
the outward creation to be a hindrance to the
expression of her artistic creed. The force of
representation plants her imagined figures before
her ; she treats them as real, and talks to them
as if they were bodily there; puts words in their
mouths such as they should have spoken, and is
affected by them as by persons. Such creation
is poetry in the literal sense of the term, and Miss
King's dreamy and poetical nature enables her
to create the persons of the drama, to invest
them with appropriate figures, faces, costumes,
and surroundings; to make them speak after
their own characters. They speak to us,
and their depth of perception appeals to us not
less than their charming novelty of invention
and spontaneity.
It is in vain to say that most of the original work
of the last ten years has been executed under the
influence of the genius of Aubrey Beardsley. He
saw one aspect of Nature, and that often as she
appears vitiated and corrupted by the influence of
a city. But there are those, and Miss King is
among them, to whom Nature comes in the
perfume of the flowers and the songs of birds,
and is ever seen with the light of the country sun
in the eye, and the wind from the hills filling the
nostrils. Expression as a technical treatment is a
matter of little consequence, for line, as line, is
limited in its application, and the Japanese can yet
teach the European the secrets of a pen, and the
symbolic meaning of colour. And, further, to
Miss King comes also that love of fellow man
which Coleridge has so beautifully expressed :
" He prayelh well who loveth well
Both man, and bird, and beast."
The deep and pathetic ballads of her native
Scotland, the works of other poets, the fairy
tales which are the common heritage of our Aryan
stock, the naturalism of Zola, and the mysticism
ol Maeterlinck all find in her a ready response.
And whether illustrating their pages, or decorating
the covers of their works, the hidden meaning
stands revealed, and the artist translates into the
beauty of line and form the thoughts and ideas
which the pen has expressed. And it is no mean
task to present to the reader illustrations of a
poetic or imaginative text which shall equal the
power of that text itself. From how many of our
authors do we wish the disturbing illustrations
187