Studio: international art (33.1905)

Frederick Sandys

England—masterly in the beauty of its design, canvases of Frederick Sandys are among the very
unexcelled in the strength and suavity of its line. finest fruits of the wonderful days of Pre-

The last fifty years are notable in British art for Raphaelism.
one thing—they are years that have been fruitful, One of the ablest of our younger generation of
and over-fruitful, in the production of pen-drawings, artists once said to me, that to paint like Van Eyck
From 1850 to 1900 extends the epoch of the rise was to setback the clock, that the method of the
and culmination of the art of pen-drawing among great primitives was not suited to the necessities of
us, and from amid all the practitioners of the artistic expression in the nineteenth century, and
method there stand out four unequalled men of still less in the twentieth, and that the man who
genius—Phil May, Charles Keene, George Reid, handled paint as Sandys did perpetrated an artistic
and Frederick Sandys. The achievement of each anachronism. Of course, if this is admitted, the
is in its way unique, and Sandys is not the least whole of the pictures produced by the English Pre-
notable of the four. Had we no other work by raphaelites are dismissed as monstrosities, Burton's
which to judge him but these marvellous woodcuts Wounded Cavalier, Millais' Proscribed Royalist,
—as virile, as accomplished, and as charged with Wallis' Chatterton, and Windus Burd's Hele?i are
emotion as Diirer's own—we must have hailed him consigned with Sandys' Medea to the limbo of
great; and his other work, his paintings and his futility, and this is surely sufficiently absurd. But
chalk drawings, are far from justifying any weaken- even if the intrinsic quality of such pictures were
ing of the epithet.

One of these woodcuts,
the notable illustration en-
titled Harald Harfagr, posses-
ses in addition to its intrinsic ' •&■» •.' , J&L
beauty the extrinsic interest Jfe*
of being the basis of one of
his delightful works in oils,

a charming panel known as /.••'<■
The Valkyrie, in which he ad-
ded to the dignity of the black- f
and-white the beauties of
colour fine and pure, of band-
ling at once delicate and
strong. Had he similarly
transformed others of his de-
signs, how welcome they would
have been ! What a picture
Amor Mundi would be, en-
dowed with the charm of rich
colour that delights us in
Vivien, with the precise and
exquisite manipulation and the

beautiful treatment of acces- )

sories that are so notable in

Morgan-le-Fay ! For, indeed,

we have too few of his pictures

for our delight; and if there

were more they might be

better known—and to a wider .,
circle of admirers — even
though they could not be
more sincerely appreciated.
For, closely and delicately
painted, searching in draw-
ing and rich in colour, the a study (By permission of Harold Hartley, Esq.) by Frederick sandys

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