Studio: international art (31.1904)

The Work of George Henry, R.S.A.

and the two, finding they had much in sympathy, artistic convention—the result ot centuries of
painted a couple of pictures together, The Druids and elimination of the vulgar and the meretricious—
The Star in the East. But even before both were appealed at once to Henry as delightful, beautiful,
completed, the artists were going different ways, and true. There is no doubt that the use of pure
were developing on diverse lines, and so the colour, thus sparsely employed amid a delicate
artistic partnership was short-lived. The large environment, results in an effect of preciousness ;
canvas—it is some six feet square—called The and, carrying this idea a step farther, Henry
Druids, is a curiously interesting. applied it to portraiture. What should be the

It was in 1893 that Henry stayed in Japan, a most precious thing in a portrait? Undoubtedly
stay that was to have momentous results on his the face of the sitter. There the interest of the
art both as a decorator and a portrait painter. He picture is focussed, there the artist has most to
found himself a visitor to a highly cultured race; express, there he succeeds or he fails ; and no dis-
a race of artists who had evolved in their isola- traction of extraneous details, or emphasis of
tion an art alien from, but as complete as, colour elsewhere on the canvas, should be per-
that of the West. He was quick to observe the mitted to interfere with the aspect of beauty or of
Japanese sense of colour; he saw that their finest character in the countenance depicted. Henry
things were almost monochromes, subtly and does not for a moment claim to have been the first
infinitely varied schemes of tertiaries and sub- to feel this. Whistler, Rembrandt, and Velasquez,
tertiaries, with notes of pure colour used as to name no others, have worked along similar lines,
sparingly and as effectively as jewels. And this treating the face as the jewel of the composition,

the rest being but set-
ting ; but it was the art of
Japan that helped him
to observe the analogy, to
formulate the idea, and to
put it into practice.

But before passing to
Henry's portraits, allusion
must be made to one of
the most interesting and
most characteristic phases
of his art, which is
exemplified in such pic-
tures as Goldfish. These
canvases are frankly and
beautifully decorative; they
are works in which the
artist seeks to express the
sentiment of his subject,
not by inventing a story
to depict, but by the
arrangement of colour and
line; they are pictures
which exist simply as lovely
things. For a short time
the art of Rossetti appealed
to George Henry, at any
rate so far as his richness
of colour and power of
sumptuously decorative
treatment are concerned.
But this was modified
by what he learnt in
portrait of professor a. c. bradley by george henry, r.s.a. Japan ; and while in the

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