DOI Heft:
Nr. 119 (February 1903)
DOI Artikel:Image, Selwyn: Mr. Frank Brangwyn's landscapes and still-life
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.19878#0023
Frank Brangwyn s Landscapes and Still-Life
favour with our contemporary critics and con-
noisseurs, though their day will come round again
by-and-by, and perhaps it is already beginning to
dawn. But William Hunt, especially, has been
in our own time much under a cloud, so that
our advanced and more subtle critics have
seldom mentioned him, or have mentioned him
only somewhat contemptuously. I am not say-
ing that van Huysum and Hunt were equally
fine artists, for this kind of comparison is at
the moment irrelevant; but I do say that both
of them in their own way produced fruit and flower
pieces that were legitimate and fine performances
in their particular line of art, and anyone, in
judging them, who fails to recognise and to allow
this must, be either prejudiced or incompetent.
To come to our immediate subject. We are
concerned at the moment with Mr. Brangwyn's still-
life paintings, and these raise in one's mind the
remembrance of van Huysum and William Hunt,
merely because they deal in a masterly manner with
objects dealt with also by van Huysum and Hunt,
but in a way totally dissimilar. And there is
the interesting point. That is what a critic looking
at Mr. Brangwyn's onions and melons and baskets,
and the like, has to take count of, and to be
thankful for, and to try to make his public appre-
ciate. If he is a foolish or ill-equipped critic,
coming across things so dissimilar, he is like to fall
back upon either praising William Hunt, say, at
the expense of Mr. Brangwyn, or upon praising
Mr. Brangwyn at the expense of William Hunt.
And at once he is out of court, not perhaps as an
acute advocate, but as a serious judge. He amuses
us, he may even incidentally instruct us, but to
his conclusions we pay no heed, because, though
dealing with a subject multifarious in its pheno-
mena as life itself, of this diversity he shows
himself, for all his acuteness, either heedless or
ignorant.
I have already spoken of Mr. Brangwyn's sense
and power of designing in broad masses—it was
" IN PICARDY "
FROM THE ETCHING BY FRANK BRANGWYN
II
favour with our contemporary critics and con-
noisseurs, though their day will come round again
by-and-by, and perhaps it is already beginning to
dawn. But William Hunt, especially, has been
in our own time much under a cloud, so that
our advanced and more subtle critics have
seldom mentioned him, or have mentioned him
only somewhat contemptuously. I am not say-
ing that van Huysum and Hunt were equally
fine artists, for this kind of comparison is at
the moment irrelevant; but I do say that both
of them in their own way produced fruit and flower
pieces that were legitimate and fine performances
in their particular line of art, and anyone, in
judging them, who fails to recognise and to allow
this must, be either prejudiced or incompetent.
To come to our immediate subject. We are
concerned at the moment with Mr. Brangwyn's still-
life paintings, and these raise in one's mind the
remembrance of van Huysum and William Hunt,
merely because they deal in a masterly manner with
objects dealt with also by van Huysum and Hunt,
but in a way totally dissimilar. And there is
the interesting point. That is what a critic looking
at Mr. Brangwyn's onions and melons and baskets,
and the like, has to take count of, and to be
thankful for, and to try to make his public appre-
ciate. If he is a foolish or ill-equipped critic,
coming across things so dissimilar, he is like to fall
back upon either praising William Hunt, say, at
the expense of Mr. Brangwyn, or upon praising
Mr. Brangwyn at the expense of William Hunt.
And at once he is out of court, not perhaps as an
acute advocate, but as a serious judge. He amuses
us, he may even incidentally instruct us, but to
his conclusions we pay no heed, because, though
dealing with a subject multifarious in its pheno-
mena as life itself, of this diversity he shows
himself, for all his acuteness, either heedless or
ignorant.
I have already spoken of Mr. Brangwyn's sense
and power of designing in broad masses—it was
" IN PICARDY "
FROM THE ETCHING BY FRANK BRANGWYN
II