Studio: international art (40.1907)

The International Society's Seventh Exhibition

name one of those whose contributions claim the
most careful attention. This success of his arises
from the fact that he has never yet failed to be
interesting in a canvas, though he sometimes may
be incomplete or only bizarre. He contributes
several works to the present exhibition; only
one of them is for him of an important nature,
though all of them by their accomplishment make
us wonder how it was possible to continue so long
the dispute as to whether he is a painter as well as
a draughtsman.

Mr. Conder has in this exhibition a canvas which
is a large one for him. Shapelessness in more than
one of the figures is apt to make us dismiss this
canvas too readily. Here a great imagination has
gone astray; it has come upon reality and fought
with it unsuccessfully, and a strange courage has
been evinced in an attempt to make actual life
conform with fantasy—which it sometimes will do
with sounder drawing. It would seem that com-
plete mastery of form is essential for the interpreta-
tion of what is actual, and, unsupported by this,
Mr. Conder’s great mastery of colour has been
unavailing. He is wholly successful in a small
picture of an imaginative order in another room.

It is as a subject-painter that Mr. C. H. Shannon

is to us most interesting. Like Watts and Burne-
Jones, in each canvas he extends the boundaries of
a new country which he has made his own. Here
it is always the Golden Age, and in giving this
name to his picture he has been happy, for as well
as any that he has painted it reveals to us the
splendours of that country. Here are pleasant
fields, the curse of this world is removed, the
supreme virtue is indolence. The sunlight is
filtered through rainbows, and it steals into the
cool glades to illumine with faint iridescent
harmonies the nudity of happy figures—we would
have written classic figures if we could, but not all
of them are classic in form. A great command of
colour, an imagination that finds its rest in dreams,
these are the qualities that give to his art an
extraordinary and personal character which makes
us look for it each year as one feature of the
International Exhibition.

Landscape art is not so important this year as
usually. There is the picture by Emile Claus
which we have mentioned; a notable canvas by D. Y.
Cameron called The Clyde; two very interesting
canvases by Mr. Grosvenor Thomas, one of which,
entitled simply Landscape, is among our illustra-
tions, and both of which show in their softly-

11 THE MAGPIE ”

BY JOSEPH CRAWHALL