Studio: international art (54.1912)

Sir James Guthrie, P.R.S.A.

were titters heard in the pit. But however much
other painters earned this criticism Guthrie from the
very beginning was hors concours to it. For he did
not take up revolt simply for its own sake. He
was the interpreter of the present, but he did not
forget the inheritance of the past. He approached
art as he approached nature, in a spirit not of
criticism but of appreciation. He was too culti-
vated, too humble, too refined to be a mere
busybody incubating thunder.

It is difficult to interpret the ideal of an artist
like Sir James Guthrie in the language of literary
expression, but the present writer sees in the work
of the distinguished Scotsman an attitude which
the late Robert Buchanan held was the only
one possible to the real artist. The great artist
carries his own artistic distance with him. If he
has no artistic distance or aim of his own he can

MASTER^NED MARTIN BY SIR JAMES GUTHRIE

only be a photographer, not an artist. To him
there is only one mystery—the ever-present reality
—and in its mystery lies its fascination and beauty.
A portrait painter like Guthrie looks into the eyes
of his sitter, and what distance does he not find
there? The moment he seizes for examination is
the spiritual moment when the sitter is at his
highest and best. He sees the model spiritualised,
in the dim strange light of whatever soul or per-
sonality the creature possesses. That has always
been Guthrie's method. He cannot begin to " feel "
his canvas until he has seen his sitter in this light
of high spiritualisation. He must grasp the
significance of the man or woman before him. He
becomes a realistic mystic, who, seeking to pene-
trate deepest of all into the character of the
individual, and to represent him in his best and
finest mood, eliminates all accidental externals
and presents him at his apotheosis. This is one
aspect of the painter—the painter as psychologist.
Hand in hand with this is the painter as designer
and colourist. What kind of scheme does the sitter
suggest ? Some occult people would argue that
every sitter has his colour aura. We will not
pause to discuss that, but one thing is certain—the
picture must be as consistent in the colour vision
as in the mental one.

Now in approaching his canvases Guthrie does
not, like Sargent and other more daring painters,
make a bold excursion into his imagination and
recall some striking contrast of light and shade, in
which he has seen man in his environment. Some
find in this lack of daring a weakness, some a
strength. The style of a painter is the expression
of his habitual manner of thinking and feeling.
He possesses his ideas, which may be powerful and
imaginative. But there is something more potent
than ideas, it is the mind that admits and assimi-
lates them. The central note of Guthrie's por-
traiture, as of his character, is discretion, and he
seldom permits his imagination to glorify his colour-
scheme at the risk of interfering with that discreet
dignity which is so characteristic of his work.
There arc no brass bands playing nor pipes
squealing in the canvases of the Scottish President.
There is nothing' flamboyant, reckless, experi-
mental. He could never have painted such a
canvas as Sargent's Daughters of Percy Wyndham.
Occasionally, as in The Velvet Cloak, he makes a
stride in that direction, but even in that brilliant
painting—regarded by many as the greatest portrait
painted in Scotland since Raeburn's Mrs. Campbell
of Baltimore—there is no idle loosing of the bonds
of sober discretion. Guthrie's work is nearly

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