Studio: international art (46.1909)

Reviews and Notices

interpretation by engraving, and certainly none
was ever more intimately associated with his inter-
preters. For Turner being himself learned and
accomplished in the art of engraving, and prac-
tically versed in its various technical methods—a
valuable asset which he owed to his early training
in the workshop of John Raphael Smith—was not
only able to adapt his drawings exactly to the
capabilities of the point, the graver or the scraper,
but knew also how to educate his engravers
to see eye to eye with him in the balancing
of light and shade. So he formed a school
of engravers who made line engraving, under
his inspiration, do for the interpretation of land-
scape more than Vivares, Canot, Thomas Major,
or even the great Woollett himself, had ever
dreamed of. Nothing is more instructive than
to read the critical injunctions and practical
suggestions which Turner used to write on the
progress proofs submitted to him by the engravers,
and then to compare these with the finished
engravings, as one may happily do in the Print
Room at the British Museum. For the engravers
regarded all these suggestions in the light of
commands, knowing the master was always artisti-
cally right—right, at least, from the engraver’s
point of view. On the other hand, as Mr.
Rawlinson justly points out, for the sake of
brilliancy or “ sparkle ” in the engraving, Turner
would sometimes over-accentuate the small lights
to the detriment of pictorial breadth and unity of
effect. In his interesting Introduction Mr. Raw-
linson tells chronologically the history of Turner’s
work in connection with the engraver’s art,
incidentally showing us the great painter’s personal
and business relations with those patient, indus-
trious, and often hardly-used artists of the copper-
plate and the steel. And, surprisingly, Mr.
Rawlinson acclaims, as an almost unqualified gain
for line engraving, the substitution of the hard
steel for the soft copper—a change of which
Turner did not avail himself for more than ten
years after the introduction of steel plates. Chrono-
logical also in arrangement is Mr. Rawlinson’s
catalogue, and in the same order one may find the
prints themselves at the British Museum. So,
with this excellent book for guide, the true lover
of landscape in pictures may spend his time the
more pleasantly and advantageously among the
Turner portfolios.

Notes on the Science of Picture Making. By
C. J. Holmes. (London: Chatto & Windus.)

7s. 6id. net.—To all students of art, to professional
workers and to amateur enquirers into aesthetic

questions, this careful and exhaustive treatise on the
science of picture making by the Slade Professor
of Fine Art at Oxford can be unhesitatingly com-
mended. If the book is a little pedantic in manner,
and suffers somewhat from the anxiety of the
writer to explain and account for the endless
varieties of artistic activity, these at any rate are
only minor defects and do not appreciably diminish
its value as a guide to the better understanding of
the principles by which all memorable achieve-
ment in pictorial art must be directed. The
argument throughout is sane and temperate, in-
spired by sincere conviction, and presented with-
out any of those affectations and obscurities which
have been so often adopted by theorists on artistic
practice. It is not too dogmatic even when it
seeks to establish a series of exact definitions and
to classify formally the many components which go
to the compounding of the perfect picture ; and it
is explained and illustrated by a great number of
thoughtful references to the methods of those
ancient and modern masters who have founded or
carried on great traditions. The special merit of
the book is that it makes no concessions to popular
fallacies, but criticises impartially the art that is
emptily conventional and that which aims at ex-
travagant novelty ; it wisely advocates originality
and intelligent experiment as essentials for real
artistic progress, but it demands that all good
painting, whatever its subject or intention, should
have as its foundation decorative qualities of the
highest type. In making this demand Professor
Holmes sets himself healthily in opposition to that
common delusion concerning the worth of decora-
tion—the delusion which has induced so many
people to under-estimate the importance of decora-
tive art—and he shows himself, as might, however,
have been expected from a thinker of his breadth
of mind, keenly appreciative of the value of well-
considered design and properly adjusted colour in
the making of a picture that claims to be taken
seriously. The chapters on the use of materials
will be particularly helpful to artists and amateurs,
on account of the large amount of information
contained in them about the properties of different
mediums and the explanations given of the manner
in which the various painting processes can most
advantageously be employed.

Rombout Verhulst, Sculpteur, 1624—1698. By

M. Van Notten. Translated into French by
Mme. Marie Wijk. (The Hague : Martinus
Nijhoff) 75 Frs.—It seems strange that whilst
pretty well every painter of note should have been
honoured with a separate monograph, the great

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