Tom Mostyn
ment of the fancies which are in his mind, and for
the working out of schemes of pictorial production
which are deliberately considered and exactly
arranged.
It would be easy to call art of this character
artificial, and in a sense such an epithet could be
justly applied to it. But it is just this artificiality,
when directed by a man of great gifts and rightly
balanced judgment, that helps to raise an artist’s
work above the ordinary, commonplace level and
to put it on the plane in which the full value of its
inspiration can be appreciated. It is not by the
absolute imitation of nature that the painter shows
his intelligence ; realism may be proof of his acute-
ness of observation or of the shrewdness of his
selective sense, but it is not necessarily to be taken
as evidence of his capacity to handle the greater
problems of artistic practice. The deep thinker
looks to nature for his raw material, for the matter
which he intends to transmute into art, and for the
suggestions which stimulate and make active his
inventive faculties. When he has collected this
material he shapes and arranges it in the manner
that seems to him to be best calculated to help him
to reach the final result that mentally he has in
view, and he employs the artifices of his craft to
make more certain the right development of his
intention.
How far Mr. Mostyn is under obligation to
nature in his work and how much he uses artifices
of practice in his pictorial production can be
realised well enough by examination of any group
of his landscape designs. In such canvases as
The Garden of Memory, The Castle, Silence, and
Whither 1 here reproduced, it is not by any means
nature as ordinary men know her that is repre-
sented ; it is rather a sort of dream world that he
sets before us, a dream world wherein realities are
changed into something new and strange and
undergo fantastic transformations which alter
“the hill-top” from the painting by tom mostyn
268
ment of the fancies which are in his mind, and for
the working out of schemes of pictorial production
which are deliberately considered and exactly
arranged.
It would be easy to call art of this character
artificial, and in a sense such an epithet could be
justly applied to it. But it is just this artificiality,
when directed by a man of great gifts and rightly
balanced judgment, that helps to raise an artist’s
work above the ordinary, commonplace level and
to put it on the plane in which the full value of its
inspiration can be appreciated. It is not by the
absolute imitation of nature that the painter shows
his intelligence ; realism may be proof of his acute-
ness of observation or of the shrewdness of his
selective sense, but it is not necessarily to be taken
as evidence of his capacity to handle the greater
problems of artistic practice. The deep thinker
looks to nature for his raw material, for the matter
which he intends to transmute into art, and for the
suggestions which stimulate and make active his
inventive faculties. When he has collected this
material he shapes and arranges it in the manner
that seems to him to be best calculated to help him
to reach the final result that mentally he has in
view, and he employs the artifices of his craft to
make more certain the right development of his
intention.
How far Mr. Mostyn is under obligation to
nature in his work and how much he uses artifices
of practice in his pictorial production can be
realised well enough by examination of any group
of his landscape designs. In such canvases as
The Garden of Memory, The Castle, Silence, and
Whither 1 here reproduced, it is not by any means
nature as ordinary men know her that is repre-
sented ; it is rather a sort of dream world that he
sets before us, a dream world wherein realities are
changed into something new and strange and
undergo fantastic transformations which alter
“the hill-top” from the painting by tom mostyn
268