DOI issue:
No. 201 (December, 1909)
DOI article:Bayes, Walter: The landscape paintings of James Aumonier, R. I.
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20968#0200
James Aumonier, R.I.
in Mr. Aumonier's later work, might seem to the
casual observer approximate draughtsmanship, and
it is important to keep strongly before the lay
public the fact that, however debarred from
photographic literalness such work may be, it
has its own very exacting standards of pre-
cision. To make of drawing a comparison of the
character of such forms as naturally compare by
similarity of apparent scale, so that a bough in the
foreground compares with a tree in the middle
distance, and that again with a whole hillside
on the skyline, implies a science not really
less exact, though certainly less rigid, than the
copyist's monotonous analysis of the form of
every object in the picture. At the same time,
while few English landscape painters to-day
have a surer sense of the enclosing rhythms visible
through the tangle of nature's form, few are less
doctrinaire—less self-conscious in their pursuit
of such abstractions — than Mr. Aumonier.
Accustomed to work for a public whose standards,
consciously at least, were those of realism, and
not having had in youth much of that specialised
art education which tempts a painter to take up a
position on the dangerous pinnacle of disdain for
the ignorant crowd, he has remained careful that
bis picture should conform to what for the plain
man is probable and natural.
This differentiates his work from that of so
typically more recent a painter as, say, Mr. Wilson
Steer, who came to his heritage from Constable by
way of the French Impressionists. While these
latter were at work acting and re-acting on one
another in a way which gave a certain solidarity to
their effort, there were painters of the open-air in
England also, but their development was charac-
teristically British by the hole-and-corner fashion
in which it proceeded. Painters like Mark Fisher,
Buxton Knight, Holloway, and the subject of this
essay, may be said to belong to the same school,
but hardly as Monet and Sisley belonged to the
same school. Each seems to have worried out his
principles and practice independently, and because
of this some of them preserved in their work odd
peculiarities, the accidents as well as the essence
of their life of original experiment. I must say
that I have strong relish for this personal quality,
which recalls to me the tough fibre of a tree which
has grown slowly under difficulties. Their younger
followers, advantaging by their example, may grow
straighter, develop their art more logically, but
they hardly promise to develop along with it the
in Mr. Aumonier's later work, might seem to the
casual observer approximate draughtsmanship, and
it is important to keep strongly before the lay
public the fact that, however debarred from
photographic literalness such work may be, it
has its own very exacting standards of pre-
cision. To make of drawing a comparison of the
character of such forms as naturally compare by
similarity of apparent scale, so that a bough in the
foreground compares with a tree in the middle
distance, and that again with a whole hillside
on the skyline, implies a science not really
less exact, though certainly less rigid, than the
copyist's monotonous analysis of the form of
every object in the picture. At the same time,
while few English landscape painters to-day
have a surer sense of the enclosing rhythms visible
through the tangle of nature's form, few are less
doctrinaire—less self-conscious in their pursuit
of such abstractions — than Mr. Aumonier.
Accustomed to work for a public whose standards,
consciously at least, were those of realism, and
not having had in youth much of that specialised
art education which tempts a painter to take up a
position on the dangerous pinnacle of disdain for
the ignorant crowd, he has remained careful that
bis picture should conform to what for the plain
man is probable and natural.
This differentiates his work from that of so
typically more recent a painter as, say, Mr. Wilson
Steer, who came to his heritage from Constable by
way of the French Impressionists. While these
latter were at work acting and re-acting on one
another in a way which gave a certain solidarity to
their effort, there were painters of the open-air in
England also, but their development was charac-
teristically British by the hole-and-corner fashion
in which it proceeded. Painters like Mark Fisher,
Buxton Knight, Holloway, and the subject of this
essay, may be said to belong to the same school,
but hardly as Monet and Sisley belonged to the
same school. Each seems to have worried out his
principles and practice independently, and because
of this some of them preserved in their work odd
peculiarities, the accidents as well as the essence
of their life of original experiment. I must say
that I have strong relish for this personal quality,
which recalls to me the tough fibre of a tree which
has grown slowly under difficulties. Their younger
followers, advantaging by their example, may grow
straighter, develop their art more logically, but
they hardly promise to develop along with it the