DOI Heft:
No. 215 (February, 1911)
DOI Artikel:The interior pictures and landscapes of F. H. S. Shepherd
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20972#0054
F. H. S.
Shepherd
which is not tenable with the complete embrace-
ment of the newer point of view—in which every-
thing is broken up into the restless play of inter-
reflected lights. Mr. Shepherd is still trying, as it
seems to us, to cling to local form and local colour
in the face of new difficulties ; negotiating up to
the last for terms with newly appreciated pheno-
mena. It is his compromise which attracts our
attention; there are schemes of colour which he
will not let go.
In his painting The Music Room we come into
contact with work which has responded to the local
beauty of objects—a beauty that would have some-
times to be compromised were an intenser realism
of light aspired to. And such a picture well empha-
sises this artist's position, as between those with whom
everything is the expression of light with its modi-
fications in play from the surface of one object
to another, and those with a pre-raphaelite-like
love of objects for themselves. Mr. Shepherd is
perhaps affected in his decision by the "associa-
tions " which cling to objects in themselves as the
direct witnesses to human drama. The interior
painter with this susceptibility to the associations
of things will show us, as Mr. Shepherd does,
something more in an " interior" painting than
some figures attitudinising in the middle of a
huge " still-life " group. Every frame will contain
an invitation to come and see some people
"as they are." My own attitude towards the
" interior" composition which is merely an
extended still-life affair is very much that of a
visitor to a room arranged to impress him, but
which he guesses is utterly irrelevant to the real
habits of its occupiers. I am even willing to give
up acquaintance with the pretty Victorian dress
made so much use of by the New English Art
Club painters, because its irrelevant introduction
into up-to-date canvases, for the sake of its
charming lines, is an intellectual rather than an
emotional performance—shown in failure of re-
sponse to the spirit of things that too readily
Shepherd
which is not tenable with the complete embrace-
ment of the newer point of view—in which every-
thing is broken up into the restless play of inter-
reflected lights. Mr. Shepherd is still trying, as it
seems to us, to cling to local form and local colour
in the face of new difficulties ; negotiating up to
the last for terms with newly appreciated pheno-
mena. It is his compromise which attracts our
attention; there are schemes of colour which he
will not let go.
In his painting The Music Room we come into
contact with work which has responded to the local
beauty of objects—a beauty that would have some-
times to be compromised were an intenser realism
of light aspired to. And such a picture well empha-
sises this artist's position, as between those with whom
everything is the expression of light with its modi-
fications in play from the surface of one object
to another, and those with a pre-raphaelite-like
love of objects for themselves. Mr. Shepherd is
perhaps affected in his decision by the "associa-
tions " which cling to objects in themselves as the
direct witnesses to human drama. The interior
painter with this susceptibility to the associations
of things will show us, as Mr. Shepherd does,
something more in an " interior" painting than
some figures attitudinising in the middle of a
huge " still-life " group. Every frame will contain
an invitation to come and see some people
"as they are." My own attitude towards the
" interior" composition which is merely an
extended still-life affair is very much that of a
visitor to a room arranged to impress him, but
which he guesses is utterly irrelevant to the real
habits of its occupiers. I am even willing to give
up acquaintance with the pretty Victorian dress
made so much use of by the New English Art
Club painters, because its irrelevant introduction
into up-to-date canvases, for the sake of its
charming lines, is an intellectual rather than an
emotional performance—shown in failure of re-
sponse to the spirit of things that too readily