DOI issue:
No. 184 (July 1912)
DOI article:Wood, T. Martin: The New English Art Club's exhibition
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20778#0162
The New English Art Club
gives the lie to the spread wings of a stuffed bird.
It is the fault as works of art of many impressionist
pictures, when there is in them no space as there is
in Mr. Steer’s picture devoted to a stationary thing
and an equal light.
We notice in the New English Art Club that the
face comes out worse than anything else in nine
“interior” pictures out of ten. The vampire
called “ technique ” often takes part of the life of
the faces and flowers it touches. It is so in the
interior by Mr. Orpen referred to above; his
brush never pausing once in its sustained clever-
ness for a concession to the things that are felt
rather than seen—the charm of childhood, for
instance. Mr. Wilson Steer’s brush has reverently
paused at the face in The Morning Rootn, but,
after all, the face is only pretty. In a beautiful
canvas it should have been beautiful. We experi-
ence a sense of waste of so much effort in the acces-
sories from this impression. Not being a still-life
painting, or only a figure study, we should expect
the character of the sitter to transcend, or for the
love of paradox even to contradict, but not to fail,
as it does here, altogether to come up to the
dignity of the rest of the conception.
Another fault which the Club seems to us to
exhibit is that the very old artistic pretence is not
kept up, which the great old painters believed it
necessary to keep up, that the scenes enacted
within their “ interiors ” had really happened—in
other words, that they were reproducing life itself,
and not merely arranging something in the studio.
Mr. Stabb’s picture, The Crumpled Tress, is to be
commended for its air of probability, though there
may not be in it any skill in the interpretation of
interior lighting approximating to that which
Mr. Orpen exhibits or Mr. Wilson Steer. A great
painter passes at once to life through his art, but
the vitality of a lesser one is often absorbed at
the easel.
We have derived the greatest pleasure from Miss
Gwen John’s pictures in this exhibition in that they
BY FREDERICK BROW'N
gives the lie to the spread wings of a stuffed bird.
It is the fault as works of art of many impressionist
pictures, when there is in them no space as there is
in Mr. Steer’s picture devoted to a stationary thing
and an equal light.
We notice in the New English Art Club that the
face comes out worse than anything else in nine
“interior” pictures out of ten. The vampire
called “ technique ” often takes part of the life of
the faces and flowers it touches. It is so in the
interior by Mr. Orpen referred to above; his
brush never pausing once in its sustained clever-
ness for a concession to the things that are felt
rather than seen—the charm of childhood, for
instance. Mr. Wilson Steer’s brush has reverently
paused at the face in The Morning Rootn, but,
after all, the face is only pretty. In a beautiful
canvas it should have been beautiful. We experi-
ence a sense of waste of so much effort in the acces-
sories from this impression. Not being a still-life
painting, or only a figure study, we should expect
the character of the sitter to transcend, or for the
love of paradox even to contradict, but not to fail,
as it does here, altogether to come up to the
dignity of the rest of the conception.
Another fault which the Club seems to us to
exhibit is that the very old artistic pretence is not
kept up, which the great old painters believed it
necessary to keep up, that the scenes enacted
within their “ interiors ” had really happened—in
other words, that they were reproducing life itself,
and not merely arranging something in the studio.
Mr. Stabb’s picture, The Crumpled Tress, is to be
commended for its air of probability, though there
may not be in it any skill in the interpretation of
interior lighting approximating to that which
Mr. Orpen exhibits or Mr. Wilson Steer. A great
painter passes at once to life through his art, but
the vitality of a lesser one is often absorbed at
the easel.
We have derived the greatest pleasure from Miss
Gwen John’s pictures in this exhibition in that they
BY FREDERICK BROW'N