Studio: international art (45.1909)

A rt School Notes

prize works, and the admirable reproductions
which have been made of them will serve as
a lasting memorial of this Jubilee Exhibition.

M. G.

ART SCHOOL NOTES.

LONDON.—At the Royal Academy Sir
Hubert von Herkomer, C.V.O., R.A.,
Mr. W. R. Colton, A.R.A , and Mr. Regi-
nald Blomfield, A.R.A., have been
re-elected to the Professorships respectively of
Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, and their
addresses to the students will be delivered early in
the coming year. The arrangement of the Lectures
will, however, differ in one respect from that of other
winters. It has long been the custom to give the
addresses on Painting, Sculpture and Architecture
in the order named, but in the forthcoming series
Mr. Colton’s lectures will, by his own wish, be
postponed until after those of Mr. Blomfield.

Professor Church commenced his lectures on
the chemistry of paints and painting immediately
after the re-opening of the Academy Schools last
month, but they attracted, unfortunately, smaller
audiences than the subject and treatment deserve.
It is much to be regretted that art students and
painters do not avail themselves more largely of
these opportunities to increase their knowledge of
the properties of the colours, grounds, mediums,
and varnishes used by them in the practice of their
art. In his opening address on “Grounds” the
r6o

Professor touched upon
the preparation and pre-
servation of canvases,
panels, and plaster surfaces
for mural painting, but the
larger half of the discourse
was devoted to the con-
sideration of the qualities
of the paper used by the
modern artist. In parti-
cular, he warned the stu-
dents who worked in water-
colours against using certain
papers in the composition
of which wood-pulp enters
largely. Some of this paper,
when new, has a pleasant,
creamy tone, but lengthy
exposure to light lowers the
tone of the woody constitu-
ent and by embrowning the
whole surface may destroy the relations of a delicate
drawing. Professor Church, not long ago, was
shown by an artist a water-colour painted on a
wood-pulp paper that had turned brown in this
fashion while hanging as one of the representative
British works at the St. Louis Exhibition.

Some curiously interesting mementoes of the
most famous, and probably the least intelligible, of
Royal Academy professors, are included in the
collection of relics of Turner that has been lent by
Mr. C. Mallord Turner to the National Gallery of
British Art. They are the manuscripts of two or
three of those remarkable lectures on perspective,
addressed to the Academy students of a century
or so ago, which were attractive not for their sub-
stance but for the drawings shown to illustrate
them. Of Turner’s delivery it was said by a
journalist who attended his first lecture, “There is
an embarrassment in his manner approaching
almost to unintelligibility, and a vulgarity of pro-
nunciation astonishing in an artist of his rank ; ”
and Redgrave declared that at least half of the great
painter’s muttered remarks were addressed to an
attendant behind him who was busy selecting from
a huge portfolio the drawings and diagrams needed
by the lecturer. The drawings shown by Turner
at these lectures included some of the most exqui-
site of his water-colours, then in all the bloom
of their unfaded freshness. The introduction to
the first lecture, which students can read for
themselves at the Tate Gallery, is confused
and muddled, and it is recorded that in its