Studio: international art (40.1907)

Oliver Hall, Landscape Painter

as is demanded from the sonnet maker who elects
to frame his idea in so prescribed a shape. From
this standpoint we look for fine surface quality, for
a pleasant quality of paint. Next to his sense of
composition this charm in the workmanship makes
itself apparent in the work of the artist of whom we
write.

We cannot help feeling, however, that these two
perfections, that of composition and of quality,
are secured in his art, on occasion, by some sacri-
fice of atmosphere. Pleasant spaces of white-walled
houses against the sky, as in the picture of Knares-
borough, would seem to attract the artist by their
colour and shape; and then thegraceful arching of the
bridge attracts him, but the atmosphere which nature
everywhere interposes, veiling one kind of beauty
with another, he does not always remember. This
is the fault we could sometimes find if upon fault-
finding bent. We may well be answered that in
this respect Mr. Hall sins in the company of the
old masters. It is the point which gives Mr.
Hall’s work its attractive significance. Tiring of
the almost brutal spontaneity of the later impres-
sionists, perhaps one values at this moment more
than anything else an attempt to return to the

beauty of art as the old masters understood it,
without undervaluing the truths which the science
of modern painting has won. Mr. Hall makes an
attempt in nearly every painting. His faults are
a modification only, they do not negative his success
in these attempts which constitute the originality
and attractiveness of his work. Landscape painting
can hardly justify itself where there is not charm of
colour. For that charm is of the sun and the air,
clothing the nakedness of form. The landscape
artist who fails in this quality struggles with an out-
line of the earth as it has not been since the
utterance, “ Let there be light.” Landscape paint-
ing cannot be written about as such where a gift of
colour is not displayed, so though colour is the first,
the essential thing, we have referred first to other
things in the work of which we write.

Of the aspect of nature to which Mr. Hall seems
drawn, the reader who does not yet know the artist’s
work will inform himself best from the illustrations.
It is work in which graceful shape, bended boughs
of trees, the picturesque, find adequate apprecia-
tion. We cannot easily recall a picture by the
artist where pleasant form has escaped him. It is
this definite hold on the structure of things that

“PARHAM FOREST

RY OLIVER HALL