Studio: international art (55.1912)

James Cadenhead, A.R.S.A.

craftsman, it can be applied to the painting of
James Cadenhead. It is the distinction and
dignity of the design that are the prominent notes
of his work, as is shown markedly in those two
noteworthy water-colours, the property of the
Scottish Modern Arts Association, The Gordi
Stack (Shetland) and Moorland. But though,
more than most men, Cadenhead is “ scholarly ”
in the expression of his talent, though the most
casual observer cannot fail to be impressed by the
erudition that lies at the back of the artist’s brush-
work, there is no sign of what Matthew Arnold
would have called a merely “ laborious deliverance,”
a studied transcription of the facts of nature. No
one has written more against such a fallacious
interpretation of the ideal of the artist than Mr.
Cadenhead. He has long recognised the function of
art as the transmission of experience on the higher
emotional plane, and has emphatically refused to
consider nature as a fixed
quantity and art as a mere
transcription of it. “ So,”
he wrote, “ though we are
very likely justified in be-
lieving that our environ-
ments are identical with

those of others, that the «j

same nature surrounds us
all, we are none of us,
without presumption, justi-
‘ fied in asserting that we
know what nature is like.

We are entitled to our
delight at seeing a painting
that we consider ‘natural,’
for we then employ our
sympathies along the line
of least resistance and have
the pleasure of confirming
our own impressions and
finding a kindred spirit.

But in the converse case,
when we see a painting that
does not correspond with
our own impressions of how
things should look, we are
not entitled forthwith to
condemn it as untrue to
nature and take no more
interest in it. For this
may be an opportunity
for us to add a different,
and perhaps a finer, ex-
perience to our own : a
16

chance of extending our emotional horizon, of
widening our sympathies, of increasing our
knowledge. We have not got nature in our
pocket to apply as a test of this picture’s
veracity; neither has any one else, nor any
academical body, past or present. For nature is
not known, and this may be our chance of initia-
tion into one of her fascinating mysteries—the
emotional experience of another, and perhaps a
wiser man. His contemporaries would not look
at Monticelli’s work because they had never seen
anything like it. It was worth the suspension of
judgment. They were entertaining angels un-
awares.”

A study of a Cadenhead drawing never suggests
the impression of anything merely experimental,
tentative, risked, as one may find occasionally in
the masterly efforts of Mr. Wilson Steer or in the
more daring brilliances of Mr. Sargent. Yet there

‘FALKLAND

FROM A WATER-COLOUR BY JAMES CADENHEAD, A.R.S.A.