DOI Heft:
No. 201 (December, 1909)
DOI Artikel:Bayes, Walter: The landscape paintings of James Aumonier, R. I.
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20968#0198
James Atimonier, R.I.
his studio from time to time any work he was doing
and get advice on it. The invitation was promptly
accepted, and at the outset of his career substantial
assistance was thus given to the artist by men who,
though his juniors, were older painters. Mr. W. L.
Wyllie was astonishingly precocious, painting bril-
liantly even as a boy, while Mr. Aumonier frankly
admits that Waterlilies, the first picture he had
at the Royal Academy, owed its being not a little
to the friendly assistance of Mr. Lionel Smythe,
who—a half-brother of the Wyllies—was working
in the same studio.
Though later in date, the picture of a similar
subject now reproduced in colour shows the style
built up on these early influences. In the very
extensive foreground the eye is adroitly led through
an elaboration of charming detail, the thread of
interest, if somewhat tenuous, being well held
throughout. It is agreeable and ingenious, but
not at bottom powerful in structure. At. any rate,
the structure is used only as a binding element
for .detail which the artist is bent on introduc-
ing, whereas in his later work we shall find it
to be the rule that only such detail is admitted
as naturally arises out of the pictorial structure.
This distinction is of great importance. The
number of tones a picture may have is limited by
the range of the palette and the subtlety of dis-
tinction permitted by the artist's method of
handling paint. Multiplicity of form is unlimited
—may be carried to any pitch by enlarging the
scale of the canvas and reducing that of the brush.
A painter whose interest is primarily in the struc-
ture of a complicated passage of natural form will
tend thus to elaborate forms, and many Academy
landscapes are yearly produced by this method.
While, however, such efforts may occasionally have
the charm which belongs to sincerity, even in a
juvenile outlook, yet anyone with a keen sense of
the dignity of a picture will feel that it is the
number of its tones which must be the measure of
its proper degree of elab jration. To distribute
these broadly over the canvas, strongly articulated
one with the other, is to paint soundly. To sub-
divide them into minute forms for purposes of
naturalistic rendering is almost inevitably to over-
develop the design at its extremities at the expense
of mass and unity.
An ever-increasing dislike of such invertebrate
pictorial structure is at the bottom of much which,
"AT WRANGLE, LINCOLNSHIRE "
176
BY TAMES AUMONIER
his studio from time to time any work he was doing
and get advice on it. The invitation was promptly
accepted, and at the outset of his career substantial
assistance was thus given to the artist by men who,
though his juniors, were older painters. Mr. W. L.
Wyllie was astonishingly precocious, painting bril-
liantly even as a boy, while Mr. Aumonier frankly
admits that Waterlilies, the first picture he had
at the Royal Academy, owed its being not a little
to the friendly assistance of Mr. Lionel Smythe,
who—a half-brother of the Wyllies—was working
in the same studio.
Though later in date, the picture of a similar
subject now reproduced in colour shows the style
built up on these early influences. In the very
extensive foreground the eye is adroitly led through
an elaboration of charming detail, the thread of
interest, if somewhat tenuous, being well held
throughout. It is agreeable and ingenious, but
not at bottom powerful in structure. At. any rate,
the structure is used only as a binding element
for .detail which the artist is bent on introduc-
ing, whereas in his later work we shall find it
to be the rule that only such detail is admitted
as naturally arises out of the pictorial structure.
This distinction is of great importance. The
number of tones a picture may have is limited by
the range of the palette and the subtlety of dis-
tinction permitted by the artist's method of
handling paint. Multiplicity of form is unlimited
—may be carried to any pitch by enlarging the
scale of the canvas and reducing that of the brush.
A painter whose interest is primarily in the struc-
ture of a complicated passage of natural form will
tend thus to elaborate forms, and many Academy
landscapes are yearly produced by this method.
While, however, such efforts may occasionally have
the charm which belongs to sincerity, even in a
juvenile outlook, yet anyone with a keen sense of
the dignity of a picture will feel that it is the
number of its tones which must be the measure of
its proper degree of elab jration. To distribute
these broadly over the canvas, strongly articulated
one with the other, is to paint soundly. To sub-
divide them into minute forms for purposes of
naturalistic rendering is almost inevitably to over-
develop the design at its extremities at the expense
of mass and unity.
An ever-increasing dislike of such invertebrate
pictorial structure is at the bottom of much which,
"AT WRANGLE, LINCOLNSHIRE "
176
BY TAMES AUMONIER