Studio: international art (37.1906)

Reviews and Notices

Apart from these horrors, there are minor climatic
disagreeables that interfere with the artist's pro-
longed out-of-door work. The extreme variability
of sky and weather make it impossible for one to
count for any length of time on the same effects
of light, to say nothing of the sudden torrential
downpours of rain, which ruin canvas, clothes,
and temper, and recur as frequently as three or
four times in a day. On that subject I would
warn the intending traveller against the folly of
bringing with him the clothing which at home he
probably considers becoming and appropriate for
a trip to the tropics.

The larger towns on the coast are quasi-
European in their comfort and their cleanliness.
The hotels offer spotless white-washed rooms and
excellent food, and the negro who waits on you
disappears for frequent and unexpected ablutions
at all hours of the day. The painter will find
Bahia far more interesting than Rio, where the
old picturesque negro costume has had to give
way to the superior fascination of la mode de Paris.
But in Bahia the negress still drapes her tall slender
figure in clean linen ; her arms are bare, a white
turban crowns her shapely head, and she walks
serenely, holding her dark blue mantilla tightly
round her hips, conscious that she still represents
at its purest the type of beauty of the African race.

V. B.

REVIEWS AND NOTICES.

The Nonvich School of Painting. By William
Frederick Dick.es. (London and Norwich:
Jarrold & Sons.) £2 2s. net.—A true enthusiast
with an encyclopaedic knowledge of his subject,
the author of this exhaustive and copiously illus-
trated volume has spared no pains to make it
thoroughly complete. He begins, of course, with
the founder ot the school and first president of the
Norwich Society, the hard-working John Crome,
who shares with his predecessors, Wilson and
Gainsborough, and his contemporary, Constable,
the honour of having laid the foundations of
English landscape-painting, and, having examined
his work, passes on to consider that of his
gifted sons. The Ladbrookes, the Hodgsons, the
Silletts, Robert Dixon and John Thirtle all come
in for careful notice before the clever marine-
painter, John Sell Cotman, who was the first vice-
president of the Norwich Society, is brought
forward. To him, however, and to his sons no
less than six long chapters are devoted, for Mr.
Dickes evidently admires his work even more than
274

that of Crome himself. The latter portion of the
book deals with men who have hitherto been
scarcely known outside their native county, in-
cluding the Stannards, some of whose sea-pieces
are very beautiful, Alfred Priest, whose Pishing
Boats in a Storm is a fine rendering of a difficult
subject, Thomas Lound, whose landscapes are
full of the feeling of open air, and Henry Ninham,
whose street scenes and architectural drawings
have an historical as well as a local interest. The
accounts of the lives of the various artists are
supplemented by lists of all their exhibited works,
with the names of their present owners; and full
completeness is given to a book which will be
most useful to future art-historians by a carefully
compiled subject-index.

English Domestic Architecture of the XVII.
and XVIII. Centuries. By Horace Field and
Michael Bunney. (London: G. Bell & Sons.)
£2 2s. net.—In their introduction to this amply
illustrated volume the authors point out, that in
spite of all that has been written on the subject of
Renaissance work in England, little attention has
hitherto been given to the domestic architecture of
the period, the style of which is as distinctly
national as that of the churches, public halls,
&c. Moreover, the homes of the people un-
doubtedly reflect far more than do their public
buildings, the conditions of the time at which they
were built, as well as the taste of their owners ; so
that a study of them is of infinite service to the
student of social life as well as to the historian.
In the opinion of Messrs. Field and Bunney, it is
to tradition that the buildings they have chosen as
typical of the Renaissance in domestic architecture
owe their general high level of excellence, an
influence, they add, often lacking in the more
ambitious buildings of the period ; but they do not
seem to have noted what is nevertheless a self-
evident truth, that this love of tradition was often the
very thing that militated against progress, as will be
proved by an examination of many of the examples
given by them of Renaissance houses, some of
which certainly suffer from the too slavish repro-
duction of traditional features. For all that, how-
ever, the new volume is a most noteworthy one,
and the brief sketch of the Renaissance evolution
in England is full of valuable data, which if
thoroughly mastered by architects and builders
should aid in bringing about a revival of all that
was best in the past, modified in accordance with
aesthetic and hygienic principles, to meet the
requirements of the present. The reproductions
of photographs, numbering over a hundred, include