DOI Heft:
No. 215 (February, 1911)
DOI Artikel:West, W. K.: Some examples of recent work by Mr. Frank Brangwyn, A.R.A.
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20972#0037
Recent Work by Frai
Mill, Winchelsea ; figures occur in them all, but
they play a part entirely subordinate to the far
more important details by which the artist's inten-
tion is explained. In work of this character his
object is frankly to fill a given space with lines,
tones, or colours harmoniously ordered; and
whether he uses trees and rocks, as in the Street of
Letoganni, and The Valley of the Lot, picturesque
buildings, as in The Village of Long, or groups of
human beings, as in the other examples, to provide
the necessary incidents in his pattern, it is simply
with the exigencies of space-filling that he is
concerned.
There is the same kind of impersonality even in
those of his compositions in which the figure
appears as the predominant interest. Susannah
and the Eldeis, treated in accordance with his
point of view, assumes as a subject an aspect very
unlike that which has been given to it by the
general run of painters who have chosen as a
motive this scene from Biblical tradition. Most
men have seized upon the chances it offered of re-
presenting character, emotion, or the effectiveness
of a dramatic situation ; most men have thought of
k Brangwyn, A.R.A.
it as eminently suitable for the display of their
powers of appealing to the popular love of sensa-
tion, or as a means of pointing a moral with a due
degree of didactic effect. But Mr. Brangwyn has
found in it material for a very seductive pattern of
colour which arrests and fixes the attention even
before the meaning of the subject itself is appre-
ciated. That he has painted the subject, that he
has made it entirely intelligible, and that he has
put into it a full measure of appropriate suggestion,
no one could deny ; but the supreme charm of the
picture and its convincing strength are due to his
attainment of qualities of design and technical treat-
ment which the ordinary pictorial story-teller hardly
ever takes into serious account. Mr. Brangwyn
has started from a different standpoint, and he has
certainly achieved a very characteristic result — one
which differs as much from that which other men
have accustomed us to expect as his methods do
from those of either his predecessors or his con-
temporaries.
His large tempera panel, The Fruits of Industry,
and his sketch for a frieze of standing figures are in
no sense subject-pictures as the term is ordinarily
'5
Mill, Winchelsea ; figures occur in them all, but
they play a part entirely subordinate to the far
more important details by which the artist's inten-
tion is explained. In work of this character his
object is frankly to fill a given space with lines,
tones, or colours harmoniously ordered; and
whether he uses trees and rocks, as in the Street of
Letoganni, and The Valley of the Lot, picturesque
buildings, as in The Village of Long, or groups of
human beings, as in the other examples, to provide
the necessary incidents in his pattern, it is simply
with the exigencies of space-filling that he is
concerned.
There is the same kind of impersonality even in
those of his compositions in which the figure
appears as the predominant interest. Susannah
and the Eldeis, treated in accordance with his
point of view, assumes as a subject an aspect very
unlike that which has been given to it by the
general run of painters who have chosen as a
motive this scene from Biblical tradition. Most
men have seized upon the chances it offered of re-
presenting character, emotion, or the effectiveness
of a dramatic situation ; most men have thought of
k Brangwyn, A.R.A.
it as eminently suitable for the display of their
powers of appealing to the popular love of sensa-
tion, or as a means of pointing a moral with a due
degree of didactic effect. But Mr. Brangwyn has
found in it material for a very seductive pattern of
colour which arrests and fixes the attention even
before the meaning of the subject itself is appre-
ciated. That he has painted the subject, that he
has made it entirely intelligible, and that he has
put into it a full measure of appropriate suggestion,
no one could deny ; but the supreme charm of the
picture and its convincing strength are due to his
attainment of qualities of design and technical treat-
ment which the ordinary pictorial story-teller hardly
ever takes into serious account. Mr. Brangwyn
has started from a different standpoint, and he has
certainly achieved a very characteristic result — one
which differs as much from that which other men
have accustomed us to expect as his methods do
from those of either his predecessors or his con-
temporaries.
His large tempera panel, The Fruits of Industry,
and his sketch for a frieze of standing figures are in
no sense subject-pictures as the term is ordinarily
'5