Studio: international art (40.1907)

fames Charles

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“APPLE BLOSSOM”

The fact remains that Mr. Charles’ art is nothing
like so well known as it should be, considering
that it is regarded by many as amongst the finest
of our time. The work collected for the col-
lective exhibition at the Leicester Galleries of
Messrs. Brown & Phillips should do much indeed
to remedy this. The memory of the painter
is honoured at the Royal Academy in this year's
Exhibition of Old Masters, by the hanging of
five of his works, an unusual acknowledgment.
Apart from the greatness of his achievement in
these works, it is pleasant to see this distinction
conferred, for one remembers Mr. Charles partly
by the ready acknowledgment, the sincere and
generous praise he delighted to give to the work
of fellow artists. One heard him praise another’s
work more often than he spoke of his own. The
freemasonry of art, the common cause, this he
understood so well. He seemed almost as pleased
that some other painter should have arrived at a
definite success, should have solved some common
difficulty of the art of painting, as if he had done it
himself. This generous spirit was part of the rich
nature which shared the fruit of its experience. It was
at the root of his rich art, with its varied resource.

The personality of Mr.
Charles suggested the land-
scape painter. He seemed
to enter an assembly of jaded
Londoners as an envoy from
the courts of nature. The
fresh Whitman-like quali-
ties of mind which he
revealed in conversation
suggested that such a type
of mind would find that to
be indoors was to be in
prison. If too much stress
has been here laid on the
landscape side of his work
it must still be understood
that it was only part of his
resourceful art. One would
not wish to lay stress upon
it at the expense of giving
some reader not acquainted
with his work a false impres-
sion as to its extent and
completeness. His genius
had assumed this shape,
landscape, in the pictures by
which I came to know it,
and so I am constrained to
write from a conception of
the nature of his genius which has since remained
with me. We have hardly had in England a better
painter of cattle pieces, yet his interests were so
wide, his loyalty to his own artistic nature so great,
that he could not limit himself merely to the
lucrative business which he might have driven
with the dealers in the role of “ A Cattle Painter.”
In the dismal town of Warrington James Charles
was born in 1851. Studying first at Hatherley’s
he passed to the Royal Academy Schools in 1872,
and at a later date he studied awhile in Paris, at
Julien’s. In 1875 he exhibited his first picture in
the Royal Academy, which was bought upon the
opening day • after this success he painted many
portraits of prominent Bradford citizens, and some
early portraits were painted for the Cavendish
family, to whom he was indebted for much
encouragement at this period. Of late he had
painted in the neighbourhood of his home at East
Ashling, in Sussex, many of those landscapes and
out-of-door figure subjects which are so curiously
English in feeling and which completed the reputa-
tion he had built with the most eminent of his
confreres and a discerning section of the public.

T. Martin Wood.


BY JAMES CHARLES

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