Studio: international art (55.1912)

Edmond G. Reuter

disposed to fill the panel. Here is a beautifully
painted tapestry representing the Geneva of the
past, a walled and turreted little city seated upon
a hill, with the lake and mountains in the back-
ground, the whole framed in ornamental borders
with Gothic scrolls and the arms and motto of the
city, Post teneb?-as hex. Amongst other things of
great interest are examples of the artist’s achieve-
ments in the practice of illumination, and one is not
surprised that they should have elicited William
Morris’s praise—they are things of beauty. As has
already been said in The Studio, “the means
M. Reuter employs are simple enough, to wit,
ordinary water-colours, mixed with Chinese white
for the first coats ; while the gilding is of gold-leaf
laid over a preparation of the artist’s own invention.
The Gothic lettering is executed with a pen made
of a reed gathered in the Lake of Geneva; the
paper used is either ‘papier Ingres’ or
vellum.” The great desideratum in modern
illumination, in M. Reuter’s opinion, is an
intimate combination of mediaeval feeling
with individual originality. Many elements
of design can be introduced from Persian
or Indian art, for instance, which will har-
moniously combine with late mediaeval
forms and bring variety and freshness to
hackneyed modern Gothic illuminations.

There are artists who, having achieved no
success in pictorial art, have turned to
ornamental design for their living. M.

Reuter is not of these. He was apparently
born with an instinctive love for abstract
ornament. A curious example of this is
the series of hundreds and hundreds of
semi-geometrical patterns he has recently
designed in play, with no practical purpose
in view, and cut out in squares or hexagons
of black tissue paper folded up. Another
series consists of patterns cut out of paper
folded in parallel folds like textile patterns.

“ Now if a sheet of white paper is tinted
with a pigment mixed with ‘ bichromate
de potasse’ and exposed to the action of
sunlight under one of those lace-like sheets
of black paper a sort of photographic re-
production of the pattern will be obtained
in any colour, which will appear as soon
as the exposed sheet is washed in hot
water.” These sheets may be applied to
covering or lining books, or even to
decorating screens. Another development
of the process consists in patiently painting
the negative in some opaque pigment
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instead of cutting it out. By this means a greater
variety of patterns, more minute and delicate, can
be obtained, not only conventional ornaments, but
pictorial subjects. M. Reuter has discovered
and employed these processes with the happiest
results.

When we turn from his achievements in the
decorative arts to the study of his landscape-
painting we are not only struck by his mastery of
water-colour, but by the strange beauty of his ideal
compositions. He was at an early age attracted
by landscape, and filled many sketch-books with
pencil sketches of old churches and castles, old
towns, towers, and bridges. And gradually he
took up water-colour in greater earnest and filled
many portfolios with his sketches from nature,
views of Geneva and the neighbourhood, the
banks of the Rhone, the Arve, &c., and innumer-

PANELS PAINTED ON LINEN BY EDMOND G. REUTER