DOI Heft:
No. 199 (October, 1909)
DOI Artikel:Wood, T. Martin: A picture collector's experiment
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20968#0039
A Picture Collector s Experiment
have one picture after another wheeled before him
for inspection. Occasionally, however, one meets
with a collector who buys pictures and hangs them in
his living rooms solely for the sake of enjoying their
daily companionship—to live with them in fact.
It is thus that his Honour Judge William Evans,
Judge of County Courts for Mid Wales, enjoys a
collection, not large but curiously interesting as an
experiment in bringing modern pictures and those
of older masters together on the same walls in his
house in Southwick Place, near Hyde Park.
Judge Evans has not, as a rule, collected large
pictures, preferring rather those of cabinet size,
and in this way has encouraged what needs to be
encouraged as much as anything nowadays—the
return to canvases of a size which is proportionate
to that of an ordinary room. Gradually on the
walls the older art is being supplanted, and this
encouragement to the young generation sets a
fashion for others. Let us say it here, it is the
collectors who will determine the future of English
painting by what they elect to encourage or
despise in it and by the conditions which their
attitude is to bring about in the future, for, as we
know, it is that which is best adapted to existing
conditions, and not that which is best in itself, that
survives. One wonders—since those who pay call
the tune—what it is that withholds the modern
rich man from the ambition of calling in his own
name for the finest art of his time, in emulation
of Venetian merchants. It is his to do this, or,
on the other hand, to stifle rising art between his
close-packed frames of "the wrong things."
But let us return to the collection under review,
where the preferences are the expression of a single
taste. Inside the rooms a keynote of stillness is
given by the lakeside scenes of Wilson; outside
the windows is a London street. Music would
give one over to just such a dream as a Wilson
picture, but with his art it is a dream that is not
coming to an end. One notices more than one
picture by Conder, who was derived from Wilson,
even more than from Watteau—though this has
not been pointed out—in what is more than sub-
ject, namely, the spirit in which the subject is
conceived. The art of Wilson and Conder shows
them both as visionaries, wishing to see things
even of this world only in a certain light. Watteau
was more matter-of-fact, took things more as they
were, believed altogether in life, at least on
summer mornings. All the three painters found
their way into remote gardens which they imagined
always to belong to a race superior to themselves
—a race of aristocrats, about whom they could
not help keeping their illusions, having themselves
the aristocratic cast of mind into which the com-
CLASSICAL LANDSCAPE
BY RICHARD WILSON, R.A.
17
have one picture after another wheeled before him
for inspection. Occasionally, however, one meets
with a collector who buys pictures and hangs them in
his living rooms solely for the sake of enjoying their
daily companionship—to live with them in fact.
It is thus that his Honour Judge William Evans,
Judge of County Courts for Mid Wales, enjoys a
collection, not large but curiously interesting as an
experiment in bringing modern pictures and those
of older masters together on the same walls in his
house in Southwick Place, near Hyde Park.
Judge Evans has not, as a rule, collected large
pictures, preferring rather those of cabinet size,
and in this way has encouraged what needs to be
encouraged as much as anything nowadays—the
return to canvases of a size which is proportionate
to that of an ordinary room. Gradually on the
walls the older art is being supplanted, and this
encouragement to the young generation sets a
fashion for others. Let us say it here, it is the
collectors who will determine the future of English
painting by what they elect to encourage or
despise in it and by the conditions which their
attitude is to bring about in the future, for, as we
know, it is that which is best adapted to existing
conditions, and not that which is best in itself, that
survives. One wonders—since those who pay call
the tune—what it is that withholds the modern
rich man from the ambition of calling in his own
name for the finest art of his time, in emulation
of Venetian merchants. It is his to do this, or,
on the other hand, to stifle rising art between his
close-packed frames of "the wrong things."
But let us return to the collection under review,
where the preferences are the expression of a single
taste. Inside the rooms a keynote of stillness is
given by the lakeside scenes of Wilson; outside
the windows is a London street. Music would
give one over to just such a dream as a Wilson
picture, but with his art it is a dream that is not
coming to an end. One notices more than one
picture by Conder, who was derived from Wilson,
even more than from Watteau—though this has
not been pointed out—in what is more than sub-
ject, namely, the spirit in which the subject is
conceived. The art of Wilson and Conder shows
them both as visionaries, wishing to see things
even of this world only in a certain light. Watteau
was more matter-of-fact, took things more as they
were, believed altogether in life, at least on
summer mornings. All the three painters found
their way into remote gardens which they imagined
always to belong to a race superior to themselves
—a race of aristocrats, about whom they could
not help keeping their illusions, having themselves
the aristocratic cast of mind into which the com-
CLASSICAL LANDSCAPE
BY RICHARD WILSON, R.A.
17