Studio: international art (46.1909)

Charles Shannon

PAINTED FAN

bathing or playing on the sea-shore, one of his
favourite themes in painting and lithography,
although founded upon observation, are as subject
to his prepossessions of rhythmic beauty, and to
that “ sixth sense ” he cultivates so quietly and
persistently, as any of the ancient-world themes he
re-creates.

I hope my meaning may be made clear by an
examination of the pictures that illustrate this
article. Study the sea-pieces. This is the sea, not
the live sea of Henry Moore, nor the sullen sea
of Matisse, moaning with menacing movement
between two storms. The Shannon seas have
been brooded upon with the inner eye until the
pattern of waves and the crests of foam have
become “documents” (see The Dial, No. 2, p. 25).
Documentary, too, are the figures in The Sapphire
Bay, where water and nudes are controlled to
unite in a rhythmic design. His pictures must
always be rhythmic. Even when pathos intrudes
into them, the curious and catching pathos that in
the ancient world was associated with the idea of
half-realised humanity—mermaids, centaurs, herma-
phrodites—even then, as in the haunting picture
called The Mermaid, we feel that the emotional
tragedy could never have happened unless the loves
of these two, the eager and the awe-struck, had
agonised in a decorative setting.

Like Watteau, Mr. Shannon paints woman, not
any particular woman, except in his portraits where
his feeling is towards a certain type, a most difficult
type to paint, but in which he has achieved many
successes, a type whose pallor is made dramatic by
the alternating manifestations of emotion and mind.
In his subject pictures the individual is usually
merged in the type. The quiescent Delia in
Tibullus in the House of Delia is not so much an
individual as the central incident of a pageant that
16

belongs to myth or
history, but hardly to
life. Do we desire
incessantly to be re-
minded of life ? As-
suredly not. Connois-
seurs in the unreal real
realms of the pictorial
imagination must be
very material or hard
to please who do not
find instant pleasure in
the two circular pictures
from Mr. Shannon’s
brush called Hermes
and the Infant Bac-
chus and The Sleeping Nymph. Each is a
reasoned and intimate expression of the painter’s
temperament and talent. They are the pictures of
a dreamer who weaves his dream from the stuff of
life, but it must always be resolved, composed, and
coloured in the imagination.

I do not propose to deal here with Mr. Shannon’s
lithographs, as they have already been discussed in
this magazine with sympathy and [discernment by
Mr. Martin Wood (see The Studio, October, 1904).
Some of them repeat, with variations, the subjects
of the pictures, as The Cup of Tea, illustrated in
these pages, an austere intimacy, the arrested
moment which it pleases him often to portray.
If one is allowed to have preferences I would cite
the intensity of The Modeller, the mystical charm
of The Shepherd tending his lambs at dawn in a
nimbus of light out-shining from the rays of his
lantern, and the romance that his aptly-named
Romantic Landscape evokes.

There are many mansions in the house of art
and it is no small thing to say of Mr. Shannon
that he has kept his reserved and select. What
he is, he is, pursuing his own ideals, watchful of
the present but loving the older world. To sustain
its tradition of beauty, to add to the store : that is
his aim. In that environment he lives and works,
aloof from the world in his sky studio, but of it in
the rare records of the past that surround him.

The windows of the spacious studio are thrown
open; the murmur ascends from the creeping
traffic; the buildings rise and are nothing in the
vastness. There without is the world, near yet so
remote, all of it—unselected. Within are his selec-
tions, his choices. As he paints he forgets them ;
but their beauty colours the imagination of this child
of art process, as he resolves his dreams and fashions
them into pictures. Vivre sans reve, qu’est-ce l

BY CHARLES SHANNON