DOI Heft:
No. 174 (September, 1907)
DOI Artikel:The landscape paintings of Mr. Grosvenor Thomas
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20775#0296
Grosvenor Thomas
a credible and honest likeness. Realistic land- summer evening could be pleasantly lounged away,
scape of this sort, and handled by such an artist, Even Corot, though he fell far short of Turner in
could never be passed by as unimportant; it has, artistic intelligence and had nothing like his power
and must always have, a right to the most serious of perceiving what were the possibilities of nature
attention. study, could rise on occasions far above the
Yet to the imaginative man the landscape commonplaces of detail into dainty suggestion,
painting which concerns itself less with detailed If Turner's mental image took on the form of a
reality and more with the larger truths makes a goddess that of Corot was visualised as a nymph,
more stirring appeal. The painter who has a graceful and alluring, but still too remote for
knowledge of facts, but uses them only so far as harmless intimacies.
they will help him to complete his mental impres- The artist to whom this aloofness of nature
sion of the subject he has chosen, is better able to seems so evident admires her instinctively from
satisfy the student of great abstractions. Turner afar off, and never seeks to come too near to her
seems to many people more unquestionably a for fear that he might by closer contact destroy an
master than Millais, not, perhaps, because his impression that he values. He understands that
observation of little things was more accurate, his affections are fixed upon a being that is, and
but because he thought more about the largeness must be, out of his reach, and that if this being
and dignity of nature and less about her incidental were brought to his own fireside the glamour of
details. She appeared to him habitually as a kind distance would be gone. He might even find that,
of vision, exquisite, imposing, sometimes terrible, in possessing the object of his adoration he had
as a goddess to worship, not as a merely agreeable lost for ever the power to see anything in her that
companion with whom an autumn afternoon or a would be either inspiring or satisfying. So in his
'ravey's mill, cluden "
258
by grosvenor thomas
a credible and honest likeness. Realistic land- summer evening could be pleasantly lounged away,
scape of this sort, and handled by such an artist, Even Corot, though he fell far short of Turner in
could never be passed by as unimportant; it has, artistic intelligence and had nothing like his power
and must always have, a right to the most serious of perceiving what were the possibilities of nature
attention. study, could rise on occasions far above the
Yet to the imaginative man the landscape commonplaces of detail into dainty suggestion,
painting which concerns itself less with detailed If Turner's mental image took on the form of a
reality and more with the larger truths makes a goddess that of Corot was visualised as a nymph,
more stirring appeal. The painter who has a graceful and alluring, but still too remote for
knowledge of facts, but uses them only so far as harmless intimacies.
they will help him to complete his mental impres- The artist to whom this aloofness of nature
sion of the subject he has chosen, is better able to seems so evident admires her instinctively from
satisfy the student of great abstractions. Turner afar off, and never seeks to come too near to her
seems to many people more unquestionably a for fear that he might by closer contact destroy an
master than Millais, not, perhaps, because his impression that he values. He understands that
observation of little things was more accurate, his affections are fixed upon a being that is, and
but because he thought more about the largeness must be, out of his reach, and that if this being
and dignity of nature and less about her incidental were brought to his own fireside the glamour of
details. She appeared to him habitually as a kind distance would be gone. He might even find that,
of vision, exquisite, imposing, sometimes terrible, in possessing the object of his adoration he had
as a goddess to worship, not as a merely agreeable lost for ever the power to see anything in her that
companion with whom an autumn afternoon or a would be either inspiring or satisfying. So in his
'ravey's mill, cluden "
258
by grosvenor thomas