DOI Heft:
Nr. 221 (August 1911)
DOI Artikel:Salaman, Malcolm C.: The pictures and prints of Edward L. Laurenson
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20973#0240
E. L. Laurenson
'THE THAMES, WATERLOO BRIDGE " BY E. L. LAURENSON
a small private class directed by Mucher, the
poster-painter. Mucher's method was to draw,
in the presence of his pupils, a whole nude figure,
explaining as he proceeded how each individual
part should be drawn, and teaching scientifically
how to look for beauty in odd proportions.
Having learnt all that he could from this teaching,
Mr. Laurenson went next to Holland, to the
village of Egmond, where he studied landscape
painting with Mr. George Hitchcock.
After this brief artistic training he came to
London and "commenced painter." For two or
three years London offered its scenic allurements
to his busily responsive brush and pencil. To his
lively sense of colour its streets, its parks, its river,
presented harmonies of tone that he had seen
nowhere but in the London atmosphere. So from
his motor-studio he painted London assiduously,
in all its lights and moods, and often inartistic
policemen would urge that his car should " move
on," while the street-waifs and the early workmen,
seeing him sitting in it in the small morning
hours, painting Downing Street, for example,
would jeer at him as at some incomprehensible
eccentric.
Then farther afield he has gone with his car,
painting on the Continent, in France principally,
as well as in the English counties. And every-
where he sees his picture primarily in terms of
colour, generally influenced by some romantic
effect of light. And he sees it with the eye of the
true colourist, sensitive to the subtlest harmonies
as well as to broad and simple impressions of tone.
His choice of subject, in fact, is determined
chiefly by the opportunities it offers him as a
colourist. The ancient castle, with its mellow
tones of the centuries, has a real fascination for Mr.
Laurenson. So he has painted Stokesay Castle,
and Ludlow in Shropshire, and Barnard Castle
in Durham, with its stone bridge and the factory,
under various lights of the passing day and night,
and so he has painted the castle at Falaise in
Normandy, in which William the Conqueror was
born. At Falaise, too, he found an appealing
subject in Ariettas Well, where, as the legend
goes, the Conqueror's ducal father and humbly
born mother first met, and where now noisy
washerwomen do their work, with no conscious-
ness of the picturesque scene which Mr. Laurenson's
richly toned canvas conveys to us. The mediaeval
219
'THE THAMES, WATERLOO BRIDGE " BY E. L. LAURENSON
a small private class directed by Mucher, the
poster-painter. Mucher's method was to draw,
in the presence of his pupils, a whole nude figure,
explaining as he proceeded how each individual
part should be drawn, and teaching scientifically
how to look for beauty in odd proportions.
Having learnt all that he could from this teaching,
Mr. Laurenson went next to Holland, to the
village of Egmond, where he studied landscape
painting with Mr. George Hitchcock.
After this brief artistic training he came to
London and "commenced painter." For two or
three years London offered its scenic allurements
to his busily responsive brush and pencil. To his
lively sense of colour its streets, its parks, its river,
presented harmonies of tone that he had seen
nowhere but in the London atmosphere. So from
his motor-studio he painted London assiduously,
in all its lights and moods, and often inartistic
policemen would urge that his car should " move
on," while the street-waifs and the early workmen,
seeing him sitting in it in the small morning
hours, painting Downing Street, for example,
would jeer at him as at some incomprehensible
eccentric.
Then farther afield he has gone with his car,
painting on the Continent, in France principally,
as well as in the English counties. And every-
where he sees his picture primarily in terms of
colour, generally influenced by some romantic
effect of light. And he sees it with the eye of the
true colourist, sensitive to the subtlest harmonies
as well as to broad and simple impressions of tone.
His choice of subject, in fact, is determined
chiefly by the opportunities it offers him as a
colourist. The ancient castle, with its mellow
tones of the centuries, has a real fascination for Mr.
Laurenson. So he has painted Stokesay Castle,
and Ludlow in Shropshire, and Barnard Castle
in Durham, with its stone bridge and the factory,
under various lights of the passing day and night,
and so he has painted the castle at Falaise in
Normandy, in which William the Conqueror was
born. At Falaise, too, he found an appealing
subject in Ariettas Well, where, as the legend
goes, the Conqueror's ducal father and humbly
born mother first met, and where now noisy
washerwomen do their work, with no conscious-
ness of the picturesque scene which Mr. Laurenson's
richly toned canvas conveys to us. The mediaeval
219