Studio: international art (30.1904)

Lewis Baumer

the beauty of bright touches of colour on a ground
of sombre tone; and his pictures were never agres-
sively bright, nor marked by striking contrasts, but
showed rather a refined understanding of the possi-
bilities that lie in the sympathetic handling of
pale tones. To this sense of delicacy in colour
treatment the artist owes his present distinction in
his new-found field.

Coming upon a collection of the coloured chalk

are done altogether in chalk, but the idea is
largely the same—the introduction of delicately
harmonizing colour touches on otherwise monoto-
nously sombre drawings, and the result is altogether
charming and artistic.

The expressing in a few lines of that which most
men can only achieve by the closest attention to
detail is Baumer's idea of a successful chalk study ;
and although the work looks sketchy, it is not

"one summer from the drawing in coloured

afternoon " chalks by lewis baumer

studies by Baumer one is at first inclined to
believe that they have come down from some past-
century worker, so old-world are they in feeling
and treatment. The first thought on seeing them
is of some intangible reminiscence of certain
drawings by Cosway, which were in reality done in
quite a different way, being first outlined in chalk,
and the features worked up in water-colour, with
perhaps a touch of colour thrown on a knot of
ribbon or dainty flounce. The Baumer drawings

done so quickly as might be imagined, but is
often the result of the most careful thinking out
beforehand, while his little introductions of colour
are triumphs in artistic introspection. His feminine
studies are amongst the most captivatingly
dainty and refined conceptions imaginable, full
of grace, and reminiscent of the days of lavender
and old-fashioned English rose-gardens, and flower-
scented air; and yet, in some mysterious way,
the artist has shown them quite of to-day as

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