DOI Heft:
Nr. 148 (July 1905)
DOI Artikel:Wood, T. Martin: The water-colour art of H. B. Brabazon
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20712#0113
H. B. Brabazon
T
HE WATER-COLOUR ART OF
H. B. BRABAZON.
It will be seen that, with the exception
of the supplement in colour, the drawings here
illustrated are in Mr. Brabazon’s earlier manner.
There are two reasons for this. The first is
that a half-tone reproduction can give but the
ghost of Mr. Brabazon’s present-day art; his pic-
tures in black and white show nothing but the
death-mask of his colour, and obscure the issue of
his art, which is a beautiful sense of things only as
lending to an orchestration of colour. The second
reason is that to many the painter’s colour seems
to bring with it a strange forgetfulness of form, so
that some people have only thought of his work as
patterns of beauty made out of nothing — the
shadows of realities colouring a dream.
Perhaps the examples that are illustrated, and the
careful drawing in the picture of Capri, will show
that Mr. Brabazon’s brush escaped to its present
freedom only after its research was extended beyond
the precise outlines and definite shadows of an almost
geographical accuracy, escaped to the wider truths
of atmosphere and colour that often enough give a
transfiguring beauty to the most common things,
and defy the precise technique which pleases itself
not with the beauty of things as an impression, but
with construction and the beauty of shape.
Two ways there are in which artists share with us
what a scene has given them. One by imitation
of what has inspired them by showing us, as it
were, not their emotion but the source of it. They
refer us to the sources of their inspiration, believing
that in proportion to the success of their imitation
we also shall be inspired. That is the one school,
and the other, to which Mr. Brabazon undoubtedly
belongs, select for us only the precise notes that
have affected them in anything : some hint,
perhaps of colour and of a fading tone, or the
colour of a grey shadow. Their art has remembered
these things, recreated them and forgotten from
whence they came. And the truth which they
saved to their art may not show whether the
shadow fell on water or stone. They betray no
sense of water as something into which they
could dip their hands, no sense of the hardness
of stone. In the crucible of their art, water is
“CAPRI ”
XXXV. No. 148.—July, 1905.
FROM THE DRAWING BY H. B. BRABAZON
95
T
HE WATER-COLOUR ART OF
H. B. BRABAZON.
It will be seen that, with the exception
of the supplement in colour, the drawings here
illustrated are in Mr. Brabazon’s earlier manner.
There are two reasons for this. The first is
that a half-tone reproduction can give but the
ghost of Mr. Brabazon’s present-day art; his pic-
tures in black and white show nothing but the
death-mask of his colour, and obscure the issue of
his art, which is a beautiful sense of things only as
lending to an orchestration of colour. The second
reason is that to many the painter’s colour seems
to bring with it a strange forgetfulness of form, so
that some people have only thought of his work as
patterns of beauty made out of nothing — the
shadows of realities colouring a dream.
Perhaps the examples that are illustrated, and the
careful drawing in the picture of Capri, will show
that Mr. Brabazon’s brush escaped to its present
freedom only after its research was extended beyond
the precise outlines and definite shadows of an almost
geographical accuracy, escaped to the wider truths
of atmosphere and colour that often enough give a
transfiguring beauty to the most common things,
and defy the precise technique which pleases itself
not with the beauty of things as an impression, but
with construction and the beauty of shape.
Two ways there are in which artists share with us
what a scene has given them. One by imitation
of what has inspired them by showing us, as it
were, not their emotion but the source of it. They
refer us to the sources of their inspiration, believing
that in proportion to the success of their imitation
we also shall be inspired. That is the one school,
and the other, to which Mr. Brabazon undoubtedly
belongs, select for us only the precise notes that
have affected them in anything : some hint,
perhaps of colour and of a fading tone, or the
colour of a grey shadow. Their art has remembered
these things, recreated them and forgotten from
whence they came. And the truth which they
saved to their art may not show whether the
shadow fell on water or stone. They betray no
sense of water as something into which they
could dip their hands, no sense of the hardness
of stone. In the crucible of their art, water is
“CAPRI ”
XXXV. No. 148.—July, 1905.
FROM THE DRAWING BY H. B. BRABAZON
95