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#0126
Hon. Walter James, A.R.E.
' NORTHBOURNE ABBEY GARDEN FROM AN ETCHING BY THE HON. WALTER JAMES, A.R.E.
the sombre pictorial poetry of the Roman Cam-
pagna or the Carrara Mountains with that large
impressive simplicity which governed his art and
stamped his style, Mr. James has looked pictorially
in his own way at the noble lines and spacious
undulations of his beloved Northumbrian moor-
lands, with all their vast and lonely dignity, their
desolate beauty; and, reading in them the poetry of
light and shade and colour that the northern skies
write there in lyric or epic form, he has interpreted
them with almost filial affection and with a direct-
ness, breadth and simplicity worthy of the great
traditions of English landscape-painting, yet with a
sense of style entirely individual.
Mr. James knows the bold expansive North-
umberland country as intimately as Constable
knew the gentler, homelier landscape of Southern
England, or as Crome knew his rustic Norfolk,
and, when he leaves his London home and studio
in South Kensington, he responds to the call of a
second, and perhaps more deeply rooted, home in
the midst of the hills and dales, " away from every-
where," except where nature, for the most part
104
in her wild and spacious aspects, reveals herself
in elemental moods. There Mr. James finds
material for nearly all his pictures, and sketches
or paints or etches in the open, direct from nature.
There he has learnt to know the skies as in-
timately as the land, to distinguish between
the characters of northern and southern skies, to
understand the forms and ways of clouds, and
how they play with light and shadow and govern
the lines and hues of the country, so that he can
compose sky and landscape into one harmonious
whole, as all landscape art should do. In this
Mr. James is entirely at one with Constable when
he said that the " landscape-painter who does not
make his skies a very material part of his composi-
tion neglects to avail himself of one of his greatest
aids." Mr. James never neglects this ; on the con-
trary he realises, with the great English master,
that in every class of landscape the sky is " the
keynote, the standard of scale, and the chief organ
of sentiment." Indeed, so important a part in his
pictures does the sky invariably play, he will often
allow its character to dictate the medium he shall
' NORTHBOURNE ABBEY GARDEN FROM AN ETCHING BY THE HON. WALTER JAMES, A.R.E.
the sombre pictorial poetry of the Roman Cam-
pagna or the Carrara Mountains with that large
impressive simplicity which governed his art and
stamped his style, Mr. James has looked pictorially
in his own way at the noble lines and spacious
undulations of his beloved Northumbrian moor-
lands, with all their vast and lonely dignity, their
desolate beauty; and, reading in them the poetry of
light and shade and colour that the northern skies
write there in lyric or epic form, he has interpreted
them with almost filial affection and with a direct-
ness, breadth and simplicity worthy of the great
traditions of English landscape-painting, yet with a
sense of style entirely individual.
Mr. James knows the bold expansive North-
umberland country as intimately as Constable
knew the gentler, homelier landscape of Southern
England, or as Crome knew his rustic Norfolk,
and, when he leaves his London home and studio
in South Kensington, he responds to the call of a
second, and perhaps more deeply rooted, home in
the midst of the hills and dales, " away from every-
where," except where nature, for the most part
104
in her wild and spacious aspects, reveals herself
in elemental moods. There Mr. James finds
material for nearly all his pictures, and sketches
or paints or etches in the open, direct from nature.
There he has learnt to know the skies as in-
timately as the land, to distinguish between
the characters of northern and southern skies, to
understand the forms and ways of clouds, and
how they play with light and shadow and govern
the lines and hues of the country, so that he can
compose sky and landscape into one harmonious
whole, as all landscape art should do. In this
Mr. James is entirely at one with Constable when
he said that the " landscape-painter who does not
make his skies a very material part of his composi-
tion neglects to avail himself of one of his greatest
aids." Mr. James never neglects this ; on the con-
trary he realises, with the great English master,
that in every class of landscape the sky is " the
keynote, the standard of scale, and the chief organ
of sentiment." Indeed, so important a part in his
pictures does the sky invariably play, he will often
allow its character to dictate the medium he shall