Studio: international art (32.1904)

Moffat P. Lindner

like Mr. Brabazon and Mr. Francis James, has Painters in Water-Colours abundantly shows. Each
drunk at the Turnerian stream; but he has member goes his own way, and the electing and
retained his individuality, and he has kept always selecting council are as catholic in their tastes as
before him the idea of beauty, steadily loyal to it, the proprietor of a draper's shop in Oxford Street,
expressing only those things that appeal to his The frame of Mr. S. J. Hodgson's patient repre-
artistic sense, phases of the loveliness of the world, sentation of the Market-place at Verona touches
I am aware that the artists who hold that the the frame of one of Mr. Robert W. Allan's impul-
province of water-colour is the rendering of atmo- sive sketches. You may choose between Mr.
spheric effects, notes of aerial colour, luminous Allan's free, blottesque manner, with its running
tones, in a word, the transitory beauty of nature, colour and gaiety, and Mr. Glindoni's suave-
are few in number. In water-colour, as in all the coloured anecdotes ; between Mr. Arthur Melville's
other branches of art, the man of genius or strong whirl of arbitrary colour called The Music Boat and
talent, may, and does, over-ride tradition and Mr. Arthur Hopkins's precisely imagined and pre-
theory, and convince us that his method is the cis&\y At&ym Eavesdropper; between Miss Fortescue-
right one for himself. Sir John Gilbert has not Brickdale's minutely wrought allegory called The
convinced me that water-colour was the right Posthumous Child, so pregnant with meaning that
method to adopt for his Guy Fawkes before James one forgets all about the craftsmanship, and Mr.
the First, a reproduction of which lies before me. Arthur Rackham's grey-blue fancy, which he calls
Neither does Charles Green persuade me that Covent Garden Market, but which might be called
the elaborate detail of A Fascinating Volume is anything; between Mr. Paterson's Moniaive, which
suitable for water-colour. But before Whistler's could only have been expressed in water-colour,
Little Sea Piece—all atmosphere and light—hints and Sir Ernest Waterlow's Mill, which ninety-nine
of boats sailing under a suggested sky, on the out of a hundred painters would have executed in oil.
slightest indication of a sea, there I feel at home You may see Mr. Robert Little using water-colour
again. Water-colour has been used to express an to produce an effect—decorative and very pleasing
aerial effect, wet and wide, loose and large, that to look upon, that can only be described as first
only water-colour was able to express. cousin to the Titian glamour; Mr. J. M. Swan

That there is not the remotest possibility of an giving us in this medium the hue and texture of
agreement among artists as to the kind of subjects leopards, and Mr. J. S. Sargent—well, he shows
that should be treated by water-colour, a visit to five drawings, and three of them are of Venice,
the centenary exhibition of the Royal Society of Not the Venice that Turner dreamed, losing him-
self in her loveliness, and
painting his own interior
vision of beauty quite as
often as the actual sight
that unrolled before his
eyes; not Mr. Lindner's
Venice, half hiding in her
dawn or sunset mists, or
shimmering in heat under
the intense Venetian sky;
but the Venice of one
who looked, admired, and
smote her on his sketch-
board, so sure of eye,
so certain that he can
do just what he means to
do, that you can almost
feel the touch of contempt
under the mastery of the
performance. And yet in
the line of development
of Turner's later use of
"gesnati: venice " by moffat p. lindner water-colour — the line in

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