Studio: international art (49.1910)

Henry

Personally he is attached to a story, a subject,
in the anecdotal sense or in the analytic. This we
have seen illustrated in his pictures of children,
and of firelight phenomena. His success with
these is not, I think, comparable with that of
the others I have named. His sympathy with or
rather his comprehension of children does not
enable him to reach their queernesses and elusive
qualities in the degree that he can suggest the
mysterious humanity of girlhood when it is opening
or just has opened into the full flower. And
while it is this quality that calls out his instinctive
sense of romance and poetry, it is to his analytic
vein that the questions of firelight appeal. So that
in these subjects he most nearly approaches the
impressionism of Monet or Pissarro—an impres-
sionism that deals less with pictorial conditions of
unity and repose than with the science of optics.

Tonks

It may perhaps be objected that one of his most
charming creations is the little girl carrying with
concentrated care a tray across the foreground of
The Strolling Players. But her charm, I think,
lies not in her active childishness ; rather in the
patent fact that she has early assumed the serious-
ness and business of life. And the yet smaller
child seated on the left, is of another timbre com-
pared with those I have in mind.

The heads of these two children represent Mr.
Tonks’ most personal expression in pigment; they
are in point of technique his special signature.
Contrasting with them his painting of the Toilets,
Blind Man's Buff and The Girl with a Parrot, all
belonging to the late nineties, one notes that his
gain in richness, in device, and purity of colour has
been striking. The most fastidiously painted of
them all, I think, is the last named, a picture much

PORTRAIT OF MRS. HAMMERSLEY

[In the possession of Hugh Hammersley, Psij.)

BY HENRY TONKS