DOI Heft:
No. 224 (November 1911)
DOI Artikel:Salaman, Malcolm C.: Pictures and etchings of the Hon. Walter James, A. R. E.
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21155#0125
Hon. IValter James, A.R.E.
ICTURES AND ETCHINGS OF
THE HON.WALTER JAMES, A.R.E.
BY MALCOLM C. SALAMAN.
In a memorial article on the great Italian painter
Giovanni Costa, published in The Studio in 1903,
the sympathetic writer suggested that a " study of
the other artists of the Etruscan School founded
by Costa would afford much interesting matter,"
naming among these in England the late Lord
Carlisle, Sir William Richmond, the late Ridley
Corbett, and the Hon. Walter James. Now the
time is ripe to speak of Mr. James by himself, to
■consider the achievement of his art; for, if a study
of his work eight years ago would have proved
interesting, how much more so must it be to-day
when, independent of any group or school of
painters, he stands by himself, definitely an artistic
personality, master of his own pictorial vision,
master of his own artistic expression ? Nor is it too
much to say that at the present time we have no
truer or more expressively individual artist in-
terpreting English landscape on canvas or copper-
plate. That his art was sympathetically and bene-
ficially influenced by Costa, directly, and by him
indirectly through the nearer disciple, that poetic
painter Corbett, Mr. James is proud and grateful
to acknowledge. Having learnt the painter's craft,
and learnt it thoroughly, from Davis Cooper, a
respected old animal-painter, he found the spirit
and manner of Costa's art most congenial to the
development of his own. The Italian master's in-
fluence encouraged in him a broad romantic vision
of landscape—the vision that, grasping all the
pictorial essentials which make for beauty and
interpret the spirit and character of the place, finds
in these essentials of form and atmosphere the
poetic significance of the scene. But always
naturally an out-of-doors man, Walter James has
been all his life an intimate lover of the hills and the
moorlands, the burns and the woodlands ; so in his
temperament the sportsman and the artist elements
have agreed harmoniously, and from the beginning
his outlook as a landscape-painter has been his own,
his selection of subject being guided ever by a fine
artistic feeling for design. And just as Costa painted
"'the fringe of the wood"
from an etching by the hon. walter james, a.r.e.
I°3
ICTURES AND ETCHINGS OF
THE HON.WALTER JAMES, A.R.E.
BY MALCOLM C. SALAMAN.
In a memorial article on the great Italian painter
Giovanni Costa, published in The Studio in 1903,
the sympathetic writer suggested that a " study of
the other artists of the Etruscan School founded
by Costa would afford much interesting matter,"
naming among these in England the late Lord
Carlisle, Sir William Richmond, the late Ridley
Corbett, and the Hon. Walter James. Now the
time is ripe to speak of Mr. James by himself, to
■consider the achievement of his art; for, if a study
of his work eight years ago would have proved
interesting, how much more so must it be to-day
when, independent of any group or school of
painters, he stands by himself, definitely an artistic
personality, master of his own pictorial vision,
master of his own artistic expression ? Nor is it too
much to say that at the present time we have no
truer or more expressively individual artist in-
terpreting English landscape on canvas or copper-
plate. That his art was sympathetically and bene-
ficially influenced by Costa, directly, and by him
indirectly through the nearer disciple, that poetic
painter Corbett, Mr. James is proud and grateful
to acknowledge. Having learnt the painter's craft,
and learnt it thoroughly, from Davis Cooper, a
respected old animal-painter, he found the spirit
and manner of Costa's art most congenial to the
development of his own. The Italian master's in-
fluence encouraged in him a broad romantic vision
of landscape—the vision that, grasping all the
pictorial essentials which make for beauty and
interpret the spirit and character of the place, finds
in these essentials of form and atmosphere the
poetic significance of the scene. But always
naturally an out-of-doors man, Walter James has
been all his life an intimate lover of the hills and the
moorlands, the burns and the woodlands ; so in his
temperament the sportsman and the artist elements
have agreed harmoniously, and from the beginning
his outlook as a landscape-painter has been his own,
his selection of subject being guided ever by a fine
artistic feeling for design. And just as Costa painted
"'the fringe of the wood"
from an etching by the hon. walter james, a.r.e.
I°3