Studio: international art (36.1906)

Reviews

find the 1905 Exhibition of the Royal Art Society
of New South Wales strengthened by “ other-state ”
artists, making the exhibition national in a marked
degree.

To the art of the year, as revealed by the
exhibition, Mr. Percy F. S. Spence, furnishes the
most important work in his clever study The Cold
Blast, in which three Shetland ponies are shown
standing on a wind-swept hill. The scheme of
colour though subdued is extremely effective. This
artist also achieves considerable success with an
excellently modelled Portrait of Livingston Hopkins.
Esq.

Mr. Norman Carter in The ’Cellist provided the
most important figure-painting in the exhibition.
The intense yet subdued vitality of the musician
is well suggested and the tone treatment of the
quiet browns of the instrument and the player’s
hair, with the deep, mysterious dark-greens of the
background, sounds a grand and telling chord of
colour harmony that is most pleasing.

In art, more than in anything else Australian, the
English instinct is very noticeable. As our con-
stitution is founded on British methods, so
Australian art has its roots deep in the ideals and
methods of our English kinsmen, but there are
phases in our life in which the originality of
Australian nature requires originality of treatment.
Hence in Sunshine and Shadow, by Mr. Hans
Heysen, we find the ethereal aspect of spring mist
developing in the heart of the Australian bush
admiiably realised—the quaint twisted young
shoots of the Eucalypti assisting in imparting an
additional air of fantasy to the picture. Mr. B.
E. Minns is an Australian artist who is at present
in England. This year his delicately toned Dutch
studies win wide appreciation. The transparency
of his colour and the excellent suggestion ot
distance, make his work always of interest. His
most important picture, Old Friends, depicts a
war-worn veteran examining his old flint-lock, and
was deservedly purchased by the National Gallery.
A Sea Fantasy, a daintily treated seascape by Mr.
J. W. Tristram; The Swine-herd, a Bushey mono-
type by Mr. R. J. Randall; Winters Eve, Paris, a
clever treatment of frosty atmosphere by Mr. Will
Ashton; Lady Gwendolene, by Miss Helen
Hambridge; The Morning Toilet, a clever equine
study by Mr. Douglas Fry, and a miniature by
Miss Bernice Edwell were also purchased for the
National collection.

Australian art aspirations are akin to those of
the mother-land, not only because of our Imperial
brotherhood, but from the fact that we send the
best of our artists to England, whence they return
and imbue Australian art with the bast of English
methods. Our artists thus flitting back and forth
are as shuttles weaving British and Australian
artists into one common brotherhood, each working
out his individual ideals, but uniting in the grand
object of brightening and cultivating the better
side of human nature. L. R. M.

REVIEWS.

The Royal Collection of Paintings at Buckingham
Palace and Windsor Castle. With an introduction
and descriptive text by Lionel Cust, M.V.O.,
and 180 photogravures. (London: Heinemann.)
In cloth portfolios, 20 guineas; bound in two
vols., full morocco, 26 guineas.—The enjoyment
of the beautiful works of art in the possession of
the Royal family, which was long the exclusive
privilege of their owners and the few who were
able to see them at rare intervals in the Royal
galleries, may now be said to be practically extended
to the public at large by the publication of this
superb series of reproductions from the finest of
the paintings in Windsor Castle and Buckingham
Palace, of which the first volume has just been
issued. The collections from which the paintings
have been chosen date back for many centuries,
references having been made to certain of the
earlier portraits in the inventory of the pictures
owned by Henry VIII., and during the reigns of
his successors many important additions were made
to them, including works by Holbein, Antonio
Moro, and Pourbus, with others of less aesthetic
but great historical value. The first Stuart to
occupy the English throne was not exactly an art
patron, but his eldest son Henry, Prince of Wales,
was a true connoisseur, and from him the future
Charles I. inherited a number of fine paintings and
statues to which, both before and after his accession,
he made constant additions, receiving as gifts
several Spanish masterpieces and purchasing en
masse the famous collection of the Duke of
Mantua. During the earlier portion of his reign
he added to the royal galleries the seven cartoons
of Raphael, and a very great number of paintings
by his beloved Court Painter, Sir Anthony Van
Dyck. Ere long, however, his troubles with his sub-
jects absorbed all his attention and energies, many
of his most treasured possessions were sold to
meet his ever-increasing necessities, and after his
death nearly all the fine collections in the

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