Studio: international art (55.1912)

Tom Mostyn

their character without in any way destroying
their credibility. Mr. Mostyn does not present
to us an impossible perversion of facts, a con-
tradiction of nature, but he eliminates, modifies,
and rearranges, always with the intention of
making more apparent the romantic and decora-
tive purpose that guides him. In his management
of detail, in his use of colour, in his actual handling
and technical method, he keeps consistently to
this intention, using the resources of his craft with
masterly confidence and applying the mechanism
of painting with admirable skill. Just as the
sentiment of his art is never tainted with the
theatrical suggestion, so the quality of his crafts-
manship is never affected by any vulgar leaning
towards executive demonstrativeness. Vigorous,
decisive, and masculine he can be when the
subject demands, but equally he can be exquisitely
tender and restrained when the subtlety of his
motive calls for daintiness of feeling and lightness
of touch. The way in which he suits his method
to his mood is, indeed, to be regarded as one of the
most attractive characteristics of his work, and it
is at the same time one of the best evidences of
his sensitiveness as an artist.

This applies quite as much to his figure work as
to his landscape fantasies. When he is painting
the human subject he recognises frankly the limita-
tions which it is necessary he should respect, and
in such pictures as The Critic, or The Hill-top,
he deals properly and logically with actualities
which his common sense tells him cannot be evaded.
Yet he does not miss the romantic and decorative
note even when he records facts as he sees them;
he allows his personal preference, his innate and
individual taste, to determine the manner in which
the material is shaped into its final pictorial form,
and he reaches his result by mental and technical
processes which are perfectly consistent and wholly
appropriate.

For such an artist, so intelligent, so competent,
and, above all, so original and unspoiled by the con-
ventional fallacies of our times, we have every reason
to be thankful; in a decadent age, in a period
when gross and vicious mateiialism is rampant in
our art, he stands as a kind of apostle of artistic
purity, and proves in the clearest possible way
that original and imaginative accomplishment of
the highest type is possible without any departure
from sane tradition. A. L. Baldry.

“the castle”
270

FROM THE PAINTING BY TOM MOSTYN