Studio: international art (45.1909)

Reviews and Notices

ductions from photos of actual pieces, and a large
number of reproductions of pages from an original
maker’s catalogue, besides several illustrations of
pieces that belong to the second or silver mounted
period. There is a chapter devoted to electro-
plating, the later invention which has usurped the
place and killed the industry of Sheffield plating,
and a chapter dealing with the various methods of
faking. At the end the author gives a tabulated
list of the various marks and the makers’ names,
and a very long list, containing many hitherto un-
classified names, of makers in Sheffield, Bir-
mingham, London, Nottingham, Edinburgh, Glas-
gow, Dublin, and on the Continent. The book is
interesting to the general reader, but will be of
special value to the connoisseur and collector.

Ferdinand Georg Waldmiiller ; sein Leben, sein
Werk, und seine Schriften. Herausgegeben von
Arthur Roessler und Gustav Pisko. 2 vols.
(Vienna: Karl Graeser & Co.) Mk. 136.—The
Austrian painter whose œuvre, artistic and literary,
is presented to us in the two sumptuous volumes
bearing the above title, was one of those, unfor-
tunately not few in number, whose merits are not
appreciated adequately until long after they have
passed from the world. In Herr Roessler’s intro-
duction to the first volume—a bulky tome contain-
ing some hundreds of excellent reproductions of
Waldmiiller’s paintings and drawings—and in the
essays and other documents reprinted in the second
volume, we learn many interesting details of his
strenuous career, the predominating feature of which
was the unceasing optimism displayed by the artist in
the face of continual discouragement, beginning in
youth, when, in the teeth of parental opposition, he
preferred art with penury to an uncongenial
profession with plenty, down to his last years, when
straitened circumstances forced him to sell off an
accumulation of his pictures by auction. When a
few years before that, in preparation for a voyage
to America, he offered thirty-one of his works for
sale in Vienna, not one was sold ; but it so
happened that the British Ambassador, Lord
Seymour, visited his exhibition, and, being im-
pressed with the masterly qualities of his work, gave
him an introduction to Queen Victoria and her
illustrious Consort, who were the first purchasers
of his works in England. He spent a week in this
country on that occasion, and when during that
time the rest of the pictures he brought over were
put up for auction they were all sold—to his
complete satisfaction, as he tells us—a result which
greatly impressed him as showing how much better
art thrives where it is not, as it was in Vienna at
336

that date, dependent on bureaucratic patronage.
He has a good deal to say on this question of the
State patronage of art, but while in the case of
France he is pleased with the good results flowing
from it, he attributes the sterile condition of art in
his own country to the blighting influence of
officialism. The fact is that Waldmüller was in
advance of his time. He was a secessionist long
before secession as a name was ever heard of. By
precept and practice he strove to rend asunder the
fetters of Academicism which held Art prisoner. It
is very instructive to read of the methods of teach-
ing in vogue when he came on the scene. Students
were wont to serve eight or even ten years in the
schools, copying from sheets—Vorlegblätter—and
casts put in front of them. Very different was his
own method. He held that the student should not
spend more than a year or two at the school and
should begin to study direct from nature at the
very outset, and he particularly insisted on the
importance of studying closely the human form
from the living model, first in detail and then in
its entirety. He proved a very successful teacher
himself, but his ideas met with stubborn resistance.
As to his merits as a painter, the reproductions
contained in this work show that, curiously old-
fashioned as many of his pictures appear, especially
his genre subjects, there is underlying them all that
sincere love of nature which was the burden of his
teaching, and differentiated him from the mass of
painters who flourished in his day. As a worthy
tribute to a man who did so much to lift art on to
a higher plane these volumes deserve a cordial
welcome.

The Flowers and Gardens of Japan. Painted by
Ella Du Cane, described by Florence Du Cane.
(London : A. & C. Black.) 2os. net.—The Japanese
are probably the best gardeners in the world. Their
knowledge of plant-life and their appreciation of
its varied beauties are altogether unrivalled, and we
owe to them many of the choicest varieties of shrubs
and flowers that ornament our Western gardens.
The numerous reproductions of water-colour draw-
ings which ornament this work are its chief charm.
They enable those who have not seen the actual
gardens partly to realise their quaint beauty and the
wealth of blossoms which at certain seasons of the
year cast a halo of glory over the land. The
authoress of the text has made liberal use of Mr.
Conder’s great work on Landscape Gardening in
Tapan, and has added the results of her own careful
study of the subject in a readable and informing
account.

French Prints of the Eighteenth Century. By