DOI Artikel:
Baldry, Alfred Lys: J. R. Weguelin and his work
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20710#0210
/. A3. IVeguelin
JR. WEGUELIN AND HIS and to enjoy to the utmost the poetic charm of
WORK. BY ALFRED LYS Pagan fancy. He used the motives of antiquity
BALDRY with a freshness and daintiness of touch which
• gave to them a living interest, and with the keenest
It is by no means an easy matter to define appreciation of the opportunities which he found
exactly the place which Mr. J. R. Weguelin in them of presenting beautiful things and attractive
occupies among present day artists. At one time, incidents in an essentially personal manner. As
it is true, he might have been ranked with the his art has matured the tendency of it to insist
classicists, for he showed some tendency to upon beauty for beauty's sake has become more
attempt those reconstructions of the life of the pronounced. It has lost the leaning which it had
Greeks and Romans which have engaged the at first towards classic episode and has grown more
attention of many painters in this country and imaginative and more truly expressive of his innate
abroad. But this phase of his art was not a lasting aestheticism. A student of the classics he was, and
one, and even while it continued was not marked is still, but his study is directed now not so much
by pedantic insistence upon the dry facts of to the acquisition of details in the domestic history
archaeology. He was content for the most part to of the ancients as to the perfecting of his own taste
realise the classic atmosphere by a comparatively by examination of the principles by which their
free adaptation of the records of the antiquarians exquisite achievement was controlled,
and to deal in a more or less irresponsible way with Therefore, he can best be described to-day as a
the material which he collected from the history of painter of classic abstractions, who has absorbed
ages long past. At no period of his career did he so completely the poetic feeling of the men who
fix himself down to strict observation of the lived t in remote centuries that he can amid the
particular formula which satisfies the archaeological materialism of the modern world think and work
painter. as these men did. The delightful sensuousness of
Instead, he preferred to choose subjects which his art, its pure enjoyment of delicacies of form
allowed him to work in the true spirit of classicism and subtleties of colour, its charmingly illogical
■
f i
"old love renewed"
XXXIII. No. 141.—December, 1904.
by j. r. weguelin
193
JR. WEGUELIN AND HIS and to enjoy to the utmost the poetic charm of
WORK. BY ALFRED LYS Pagan fancy. He used the motives of antiquity
BALDRY with a freshness and daintiness of touch which
• gave to them a living interest, and with the keenest
It is by no means an easy matter to define appreciation of the opportunities which he found
exactly the place which Mr. J. R. Weguelin in them of presenting beautiful things and attractive
occupies among present day artists. At one time, incidents in an essentially personal manner. As
it is true, he might have been ranked with the his art has matured the tendency of it to insist
classicists, for he showed some tendency to upon beauty for beauty's sake has become more
attempt those reconstructions of the life of the pronounced. It has lost the leaning which it had
Greeks and Romans which have engaged the at first towards classic episode and has grown more
attention of many painters in this country and imaginative and more truly expressive of his innate
abroad. But this phase of his art was not a lasting aestheticism. A student of the classics he was, and
one, and even while it continued was not marked is still, but his study is directed now not so much
by pedantic insistence upon the dry facts of to the acquisition of details in the domestic history
archaeology. He was content for the most part to of the ancients as to the perfecting of his own taste
realise the classic atmosphere by a comparatively by examination of the principles by which their
free adaptation of the records of the antiquarians exquisite achievement was controlled,
and to deal in a more or less irresponsible way with Therefore, he can best be described to-day as a
the material which he collected from the history of painter of classic abstractions, who has absorbed
ages long past. At no period of his career did he so completely the poetic feeling of the men who
fix himself down to strict observation of the lived t in remote centuries that he can amid the
particular formula which satisfies the archaeological materialism of the modern world think and work
painter. as these men did. The delightful sensuousness of
Instead, he preferred to choose subjects which his art, its pure enjoyment of delicacies of form
allowed him to work in the true spirit of classicism and subtleties of colour, its charmingly illogical
■
f i
"old love renewed"
XXXIII. No. 141.—December, 1904.
by j. r. weguelin
193