Studio: international art (55.1912)

Reviews and Notices

Professorship was not founded until 1871, when
Frederick Barff was appointed; he was succeeded
in 1879 by Sir Arthur Church. The need for such
a Professorship had been apparent for years before
its actual foundation, and Watts in 1863 declared
that one of the most important functions of the
Royal Academy should be “ the study and appli-
cation of chemistry to the purpose of art.” Ruskin
went so far as to advise that the Academy should
go into the colour-making business and establish a
sort of Apothecaries’ Hall where pigments in the
purest state could be obtained.

Miss Louisa Gann, whose death at the age of
ninety-six was announced at the recent prize dis-
tribution of the Royal Female School of Art, was
for many years the head of this school, and was
one of the pioneers in the movement for the better
art education of women that was commenced in
the middle of the nineteenth century. When the
original Government School of Design was removed
from Somerset House the women students were
accommodated in premises taken for the purpose
in Gower Street. Miss Gann, who was herself a
student at Gower Street, was appointed Superin-
tendent of the school in 1859, and her appointment
was followed almost immediately by a notification
from the Treasury that the Government would no
longer pay the rent of the house. The school
must have collapsed if it had not been for the in-
defatigable efforts of Miss Gann, who organised a
committee under the presidency of Sir Charles
Eastlake, with the result that in a few months the
house was secured in Queen Square in which the
Royal Female School of Art was carried on until
it was taken over two or three years ago by the
London County Council. W. T. W.

BIRMINGHAM. — The death of Mr.

Edward R. Taylor, for so many years
associated with the Birmingham School
of Art, should not be allowed to pass with-
out some notice in these columns. A native of
Hanley, after working with his father, who was an
earthenware manufacturer, he studied at the Burslem
School of Art and afterwards at the South Kensing-
ton Art Training Classes. In 1862 he was ap-
pointed to organise a new School of Art at Lincoln,
which he did with complete success, some of his
pupils, Wm. Logsdail, Frank Bramley, and Stanhope
Forbes, being now well known. But his real life’s
work was accomplished at Birmingham, whither he
came in 1878, as headmaster of the School of Art,
then controlled by the Society of Artists. When

the school was taken over by the municipality his
abilities had real scope, and from that time onward
rapid progress was made until the school attained
to the first position in the National Competition,
a position it has occupied ever since. Many of his
pupils are now familiar names: Walter Langley,
W. J. Wainwright, A. J. Gaskin, E. S. Harper, H. A.
Payne, and C. M. Gere, to mention only a few.
After nearly twenty-five years’ hard work at the
school Mr. Taylor retired on reaching the age or
sixty-five, and it is not too much to say that he was
almost entirely responsible for its success, not only
in the complete way he organised it at its incep-
tion, but in the faculty he possessed of inspiring his
students with enthusiasm for their work. Mr. Taylor
was an artist of no mean order, some of his pictures
being well known at the Academy and other exhi-
bitions, but it is as a great art master that he will be
best remembered, and his chief memorial will be the
Birmingham School of Art. A. McK.

REVIEWS AND NOTICES.

A History of Architectural Development. By
F. M. Simpson, R.I.B.A. (London: Longmans,
Green, and Co.). 21s. net.—The third and last

volume of the erudite Professor Simpson’s work on
the evolution of architecture brings to a satisfactory
close a publication that will no doubt at once take
the position of a standard authority on the subject
of which it treats. Necessarily considerably con-
densed in view of the vast amount of material to be
dealt with, it yet brings into prominence in every
case the leading principles governing each suc-
cessive style, considered with the divergences
resultant from different national idiosyncrasies.
Resisting the temptation, which he confesses was
very strong, to include in this final study other
countries as well as Italy, France, and England, the
writer has been able to devote to each one of these
sufficient space to do full justice to it. “ After all,”
he says, “Italy and France were the two main
arteries through which the Renaissance flowed, and
nearly all the phases of development can be traced
to them alone.” He explains that he has treated
French work with considerable fullness, partly
because it has long been a special favourite of his,
and partly because no reliable books on it have
hitherto been available. This was of course written
before the appearance of the monumental mono-
graphs by Blom field and Ward, both recently
reviewed in The Studio. Fortunately the Pro-
fessor has also devoted considerable space to
Renaissance architecture in England, although he

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