Studio: international art (42.1908)

Ambrose McEvoy s Pictures

division of his mind disastrous to craftsmanship, as in the life to-day around him he never selects. One
some—Max Nordau, for one, I believe—would wonders why. The art of which we have been
have us think. It is in vain even for so clever a speaking is, after all, a very subtly-arranged
writer to ask for this inhuman divorce between an intellectual mood, sustained elaborately by a clos-
artist's imagination and his sense of sight, the ing of the eyelids when anything vividly modern
sense which throws most light into the soul. It is goes by, when anything passes which belies what
to ask him not to equip or to express his spirit to I think Mr. McEvoy likes to believe, viz., that he
the full as other men, lest he lose a machine-like has never let King Edward ascend the throne,
power. He cannot sacrifice himself thus for others, that he has kept the late Queen for ever at middle
even were it possible for his art to help their age, kept only the earliest form of horse-'bus, and
development thus at the cost of his own. arrested fashion. It is true that a powerful artist is

Though Mr. McEvoy seems to me eminently a as powerful as that—that whilst the rest of the
painter of interiors, his spirit has not been shut in world is carried swiftly to a noisy destiny, he just
by doors and windows. All his landscapes have drops behind and refuses to go on; and then find-
that freshness, that sense of the sun and wind, ing that he is left alone, that all the people he
which perhaps no one enjoys so acutely as one wished to remain with are dead, he raises their
who is accustomed to the artificial weather of a spirits in his art. We have just spoken of the
London room. In the painting of JBessborough houses he has painted and called Bessborough Street.
Street we are shown the outside of houses, such For once he was not an artist, or he would not in
as were once inhabited by the ladies whose spirits this picture have given a name to that street. Go
in his art he invokes, and whose bodies are long softly by such windows—behind them some one
since dead of one of those graceful illnesses with a temperament may be raising ghosts !

which, if there is any truth

in fiction, belonged to that

age, and, we think, to that
age alone. There is little
indication of weather in this

painting. Why should there

be ? It is the portraiture of
some two or three houses.
No doubt somewhere a

house is commemorated, as

that in which Thackeray

lived. With greater genius

Mr. McEvoy has com-
memorated in this painting

the kind of house in which

a Thackeray character

would live.

It is perhaps worthy of

comment that Mr. McEvoy

has not, as far as I can re-
member, taken a character

or situation from an author.

Recognising that his own

art meets the fiction writers

on their own ground, he

has created his own charac-
ters and situations. And

at this point we come, I

think, upon the limitation

of his art—if it is a limita-
tion. From the situations

which arise every moment " autumn " by Ambrose mckvoy