DOI Heft:
No. 217 (April, 1911)
DOI Artikel:Mr. Arthur Wardle's paintings and drawings of animal life
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20972#0221
Arthur
JVirdle
Mr. Arthur Wardle has made himself conspicuous
during recent years by the consistent soundness
of his work and by the attractive originality he has
displayed in his selection of subjects. He has
chosen a direction in which he has been able to
find opportunities of a rather unusual kind, and
in turning these opportunities to account he has
exercised his capacities of invention and obser-
vation in a way that calls for sincere approval.
His pictures have the great merit of being as
true in suggestion as they are unconventional
in manner, and they have, also, qualities of
intelligent and well-considered naturalism which
make them interesting in the highest degree as
records of fact rightly analysed and shrewdly
interpreted.
It is especially this atmosphere of naturalism
that marks the difference between Mr. Wardle's
point of view as an artist and that of the men
who dealt with a similar class of subject two
or three generations ago. The earlier animal
painters were always possessed with the idea that
they had to introduce into their work a certain
element of sentimentality ; they credited animals
with something like human emotions and repre-
sented them generally under artificial conditions
which were, more often than not, exceedingly
inappropriate. They painted pictorial dramas
in which wild beasts played leading parts with
about as much conviction and sense of fitness
as are displayed by the members of a troupe of
performing dogs ; and the result was, as might-
have been expected, decidedly unreal and in-
effective.
This fashion in animal painting was, it
would seem, the consequence not merely of
insufficient study of the models themselves, but
also of study that was misdirected and mis-
applied. The artists thought more about the
story-telling possibilities of the subjects they
elected to deal with than about the chances
which these subjects offered them of investi-
gating animal character and of learning how
the beasts which were to be depicted would be
likely to behave in a natural state. They used
a convention which no doubt saved them a
good deal of trouble but which, all the same,
led them away from intelligent actuality into an
empty abstraction which was unsatisfying be-
cause it represented a half-hearted compromise
between fact and fancy. There was a pretence
of reality about it—that was perhaps its worst
LION WALKING " (PASTEL) BY ARTHUR WARDLE
199
JVirdle
Mr. Arthur Wardle has made himself conspicuous
during recent years by the consistent soundness
of his work and by the attractive originality he has
displayed in his selection of subjects. He has
chosen a direction in which he has been able to
find opportunities of a rather unusual kind, and
in turning these opportunities to account he has
exercised his capacities of invention and obser-
vation in a way that calls for sincere approval.
His pictures have the great merit of being as
true in suggestion as they are unconventional
in manner, and they have, also, qualities of
intelligent and well-considered naturalism which
make them interesting in the highest degree as
records of fact rightly analysed and shrewdly
interpreted.
It is especially this atmosphere of naturalism
that marks the difference between Mr. Wardle's
point of view as an artist and that of the men
who dealt with a similar class of subject two
or three generations ago. The earlier animal
painters were always possessed with the idea that
they had to introduce into their work a certain
element of sentimentality ; they credited animals
with something like human emotions and repre-
sented them generally under artificial conditions
which were, more often than not, exceedingly
inappropriate. They painted pictorial dramas
in which wild beasts played leading parts with
about as much conviction and sense of fitness
as are displayed by the members of a troupe of
performing dogs ; and the result was, as might-
have been expected, decidedly unreal and in-
effective.
This fashion in animal painting was, it
would seem, the consequence not merely of
insufficient study of the models themselves, but
also of study that was misdirected and mis-
applied. The artists thought more about the
story-telling possibilities of the subjects they
elected to deal with than about the chances
which these subjects offered them of investi-
gating animal character and of learning how
the beasts which were to be depicted would be
likely to behave in a natural state. They used
a convention which no doubt saved them a
good deal of trouble but which, all the same,
led them away from intelligent actuality into an
empty abstraction which was unsatisfying be-
cause it represented a half-hearted compromise
between fact and fancy. There was a pretence
of reality about it—that was perhaps its worst
LION WALKING " (PASTEL) BY ARTHUR WARDLE
199