Studio: international art (34.1905)

Studio-Talk

BOOKBINDING BY MRS. MACDONALD

order, apart from their execution, are in every case
her own. She is now engaged upon the seventh
Kelmscott Chaucer, a sense of fitness dictating
for the most part the binding of old and rare
books, except where modern covers, as in the case
of rolls and regimental books, are likely to be
handed down to the next generation. To Mrs.
Macdonald was awarded a bronze medal at The
Studio Exhibition, which was organised by this
paper in 1901.

The collection of pic-
tures and drawings by
G. F. Watts which the
Academy has brought
together for its winter ex-
hibition is on the whole an
adequate summary of his
life's achievement. The
series of works commences
with the portrait of himself
which he painted in 1834,
and ends with certain can-
vases on which he was
engaged at the time of
his death; and there are
besides pictures which
show practically all the
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phases through which he passed during the
intervening seventy years. The record provided
is wonderfully convincing ; it gives an excellent
idea of his steadfastness of purpose, of his
splendid conception of his artistic responsi-
bilities, and of his earnest study of the many
problems which seemed to him to call for
solution in connection with his profession.
Perhaps it can be objected against the exhibi-
tion that it is a little overweighted with portraits,
and hardly makes the most of the artist's
capacities as an imaginative painter; but this
slight want of balance was inevitable, because
the majority of his imaginative compositions
have found their way into permanent collec-
tions which could not be drawn upon by the
Academy. Sufficient, however, have been
obtained to prove that there is ample founda-
tion for the claims which have been advanced
on his behalf to a position in the front rank of
artistic thinkers ; and that in the British school,
at all events, he was without a rival on his
own ground.

To note even a tithe of the two hundred
and fifty works which have been hung at
Burlington House, is by no means possible.
There are some of exceptional importance, like
the portraits of The Countess Somers, Sir E.
Burne-Jones, Henry Thoby Prinsep, John Stuart
Mill, and Sir Edward Sabine, and the pictures,
Hope, The Childhood of Zeus, The Eve of Peace,
and Love and- Death; but there is a host of
others of hardly less significance. Unvarying
success was of course no more within his