Studio: international art (49.1910)

Reviews and Notices

information is given concerning practically all the
painters, foreign as well as French, living at the
beginning of this year, whose works have been on
view at the Salons and other important exhibitions
in Paris. In a large number of cases the notices
of these artists run to considerable length and
contain references to all their principal works,
while in other cases the information consists of no
more than the name and address, a brevity which
considerably mars the usefulness of the book,
especially as not a few of those thus enumerated
are painters of undoubted distinction. The book
is illustrated by numerous portraits and reproduc-
tions of paintings, drawings, etc.

Lives of the British Architects. By E. Beres-
ford Chancellor. (London: Duckworth &
Co.). 7s. 6d. net.—There have been numerous
works devoted to the history of architecture in
this country, and several biographies of the most
famous architects, but so far no work has appeared
that gives in handy and compact form the lives of
all those great men whose names are honoured
in the history of the art in Great Britain. Mr.
Chancellor supplies, and in a very comprehensive
manner, the want of such a work. He gives con-
cise epitomes of the life and works of the great
architects from William of Wykeham to Sir William
Chambers, and his book, interestingly written and
well illustrated, should be in the hands of every
student of architecture.

By Divers Paths: A Notebook oj Seven Way-
farers. (London : Gay & Hancock.) 35. 6d. net.
—The purpose of this little volume of charming
extracts from the writings of Messrs. C. C. Cot-
terill, C. H. Herford, Greville MacDonald, and
Mesdames Annie Matheson, Maude Egerton King,
May Sinclair, and Eleanor Tyrrell is best described
in the words of Miss Matheson’s preface : “ Its aim
is of the humblest. It asks only for odd moments,
those chance moments that come all too seldom,
when for a few seconds the rush and clamour of
the road are less insistent, and the wayfarers may
take an instant’s rest.”

Die Batikfdrberei. Von Wilhelm Zimmer-
mann, Farberei-Chemiker (Barmen : published by
the Author.) 3 Mks. 50.—The process known as
batik is, as most of our readers probably know,
one which for centuries has been employed by the
women of Java for ornamenting their textile
fabrics with colour dyes. Only of late years has
it been introduced into Europe, but now it has
pretty firmly established itself, and not only in
Holland, where it natuially made its first appear-
ance, but also in Germany, numerous artists prac-

tise this method of decoration, and in various
public and private schools of applied art it forms
part of the curriculum. The chief difficulty con-
nected with the process is the employment of suit-
able colours, i.e., colours which can be fixed in a
cool bath, for in a hot dye-bath the wax used for
covering those portions which are not to be dyed
would, of course, melt. The aim of Herr Zimmer-
mann’s handbook is to guide the artist in the
choice of colours, and he enumerates 120 or more
which answer the requirements. He also gives
many useful hints in relation to other details.

Monthly Gleanings in a Scottish Garden. By
L. H. Soutar. (London: T. Fisher Unwin.)
6s. net.—The authoress starts her book by speak-
ing of a quaint story which tells how Christ as the
Shepherd and the months as the sheep strayed upon
the Hills of Time, and for her chapter headings she
takes the names of those twelve sheep. Each
chapter is devoted to a month, to the birds, the
flowers and the trees that herald its coming, and
she weaves her fancies, thoughts and observations
to form a fair tapestry of the story of the year in
her garden.

The “ International Art Series ” which Mr.
Fisher Unwin is publishing in this country is
a series of monographs of large format, written
by critics of repute, and treating most of them
of the work of a distinguished artist or group of
artists, numerous examples of which are reproduced
by way of illustration. Among recent additions
to the series are Hodler and the Swiss, by Rudolf
Klein; Constantin Guys, by Georges Grappe;
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, by Arthur Symons; and
Japanese Art, by Laurence Binyon—the last an
excellent sketch of the great Kano School of
Japanese painting. The translations of the essays
by Herr Klein and Herr Grappe leave much to be
desired ; the literalness of the rendering seems to
point to their having been made by a foreigner,
and this impression is strengthened by the bad
punctuation, though this and the frequency of
misspelt words may be due to the fact that the
letterpress, like the rest of the matter, has been
printed abroad. The price of each part is 5s. net.

The “ Holdinslide ” mount—patented and made
by J. Wright & Co., of Kew—is a simple but
ingenious contrivance by which a succession of
sketches, prints, etc., can be shown mounted with
much greater facility than that afforded by the
ordinary “slip-in” mount. The mounts are made
with openings corresponding in size to those of
sketch blocks, and being reasonable in price, should
be popular with artists.

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