Studio: international art (55.1912)

Reviews and Notices

If we would learn something of the substance of a
great critic’s heart, what could be better than this :
“If the great Tintoret here [Venice] were to be
destroyed, it would be precisely to me what the
death of Hallarn was to Tennyson.”

Twenty-five years before the establishment of
the Slade Chair at Oxford, which Ruskin was called
to fill, the desirability of a Chair of Fine Arts had
been mooted and Ruskin, then twenty-five, had
written : “ There appears to be but one obstacle in
your way : you may get your pictures, your gallery,
your authority, and your thirty thousand pounds—
but what will you do for a Professor ? Where can
you lay your fingers on the man who has at once
the artistical power to direct your taste in matters
technical, and the high feeling and scholarship
necessary to show the end of the whole matter ? ”
Eventually it was Ruskin who claimed for art its
full place among the Humanities. And, the Master
of the Temple is quoted, “ Many members of the
University date from that period their first awaken-
ing to a sense' of the beauty of Italian Art, and it
may be doubted whether the interest of the
University in painting and sculpture has ever again
been so keen or so widely spread as it was then.”

A Romney Folio. With sixty-eight plates in
photogravure, and an Essay and Descriptive Notes
by Arthur B. Chamberlain. (London : Methuen
and Co. Ltd.) 15 guineas net.—This sumptuous
and portly tome is a handsome tribute not only to
the charm of Romney’s gracious art, but also to the
fact that the fashion of the picture-market nowa-
days is to appraise, in terms of many thousands
sterling, the appealing pictures by “ the man in
Cavendish Square,” as Reynolds is said to have
named contemptuously his quiet-living rival, who
was content, at the height of his vogue, to make
the modest charge of eighty guineas for a whole-
length portrait. It is an imposing book, this
Romtiey Folio, reminding one of those stately
eighteenth-century publications, such as “ The
Houghton Gallery,” which one invariably finds in
the libraries of1 old English mansions; but with
a difference, and that a very important one
artistically. Here the painter makes his appeal
through the medium ot an impersonal photographic
process; no engraver intervenes, as inevitably in
the old days, with personal interpretation. Now
Mr. Chamberlain has wisely selected his examples,
for the most part, among pictures that have not
become familiarly known through the prints of the
eighteenth-century engravers. At the same time
he has included a few of those pictures by the
master which, rendered in terms of stipple or
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mezzotint, are so highly esteemed by print-col-
lectors, and, in fine impressions, command sums
many times greater than those Romney received for
his original paintings. And here those of us who
are familar with the prints are afforded the oppor-
tunity of comparing the representations in photo-
gravure with the interpretations through the
engraver’s art. A decidedly interesting study this,
which, while generally enhancing our ad miration for
the artistic qualities of the masters of mezzotint,
in no way lessens our respect for the capacity of
photogravure to reproduce the tones of the painter
with the suggestion of his colour. So the possessor
of this Folio may welcome with particular satisfac-
tion the charming plate of the fascinating Miss
Bendetta Ramus, when he recalls that a First State of
Dickinson’s lovely mezzotint was rare enough to
fetch ^672 at Christie’s last summer. But even
if he be the fortunate owner of J. R. Smith’s exquisite
mezzotints of the delightful Clavering Children, the
piquantly charming Mrs. Robinson (Perdita) with
her muff, and Lady FUamilton as Nature, or Henry
Meyer’s still rarer and larger plate of the last-named,
or Charles Knight’s stipple of the captivating Emma
as a Bacchante with a Dog and a Goat, or John
Jones’s beautiful stipple of the lovely Serena Read-
ing, he will still be glad to judge their faithfulness
of interpretation by comparison with the accepted
accuracy of the camera. As he turns the pages,
however, he will be delighted to find the other
handsome Miss Ramus, one of Romney’s most
classically beautiful portraits, which, as far as we
know, is to be found in no contemporary engraving.
Then the Mrs. Jordan is not Romney’s well-known
portrait of the bewitching actress as the hoydenish
Peggy in The Country Girl, so familiar in Og-
borne’s stipple print; but that very beautiful pre-
sentment of this irresistible woman with the large
and joyous heart, in the Cuthbert Quilter collection,
which makes one feel that one could have seen eye
to eye, and felt heart to heart, with Charles Lamb
and Hazlitt, and William, Duke of Clarence him-
self. The plate is one of the best in the Folio,
and we can recall no old mezzotint of the picture.
Of Romney’s innumerable Lady Hamilton portraits,
all painted, of course, when she was Emma Lyon,
Mr. Chamberlain gives us a dozen, and the selection
is representative and adequate. She was a wonder-
ful model; Cassandra, Circe, Euphrosyne, Contem-
plation, A Bacchante dancing on a FUeath—she could
pose for anything. When we look at the plate that
shows her posing as a Nun, we can imagine how
well she played her part in the little comedy ot
deception with which, during her education period