Studio: international art (55.1912)

New School of Colour-Printing

“ healthy.” “ In all my art,” wrote George Meredith
to the present writer, “I have tried to take the
healthy estimate of life.” That from the introspec-
tive and searching mind of our greatest modern
novelist is sufficient for us. Look round the walls
of a present-day exhibition and there is much to
admire, a great deal to interest, not a little to
charm—art that alarms and sometimes offends.
Here is art dying, there is art springing into life.
We see art evolving out of itself to newer phases
of art, or harking back to some more certain stand-
points. Here is art sicklied o’er with the pale
cast of too much thought, there is art with no
thought at all. Here is form without colour, there
is colour without form. They each speak to us a
different message, proving not only their own worth
but our worth too. A portrait by Sir George Reid
comes to us with no uncertain note, reminding us
not of the museum or the dissecting-room, the
cockpit or the mortuary, but of life at its plenitude,
breast forward, strong of
limb, courageous at heart,
unconquered, unafraid.

There may be nothing
romantic, little even subtly
sympathetic, nothing calling
to us intimately; but there
is a clarion ring of strong
life, strongly portrayed, and
that is something which art
need not disdain. Man-
kind is not studied by Sir
George Reid as a god would
regard him from Mount
Olympus; neither is he
studied from the under-
world, from where not a
few of our craftsmen are
accustomed to take their
stand. He paints men who
seem, in the words of Mr.

Kipling,

To take their mirth in the joy
of the earth—

They dare not grieve for her
pain.

They know of toil and the end
of toil;

They know God’s law is
plain;

and who aspire to work out
their days not in peeping
and botanising on their own
graves, but doing their duty
“in honour and clean
mirth.”

178

Anew school of colour-
printing FOR ARTISTS. BY
MALCOLM C. SALAMAN.

Fashion, in its cult of the eighteenth century,,
having discovered, or, rather, rediscovered, the
decorative charm of the colour-printed stipple
engravings and mezzotints of the old English
engravers, and the aquatints of the French, has of
late years decreed that these things shall be keenly
sought for, and shall consequently become more
and more costly. So, while the convenient and
adaptable three-colour process—a mechanical
method of reproduction based on true artistic
principles—is answering the ever-increasing popu-
lar demand for the colour-print in book and
periodical, the amateur with the long purse, who-
can back his fancy—or what the collecting-fashion
tells him ought to be his fancy—at Christie’s or
the Bond Street dealers, points with pride, such as.

A CHILD OF THE PEOPLE

BY W. LEE HANKEY