DOI Heft:
No. 231 (June 1912)
DOI Artikel:Wood, T. Martin: The paintings of Wilfrid G. von Glehn
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21157#0029
IV. G. von Glehn
his portraits in keeping an element of charm in the
canvas. This was a secret of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century art; and it is one at least of the
elements that induce an ordinary person to regard
a portrait as a work of art. There is much to be
said for the ordinary point of view in this matter
too. It has remained for our own age to produce
an infinite quantity of portraits possessing no single
element necessary to a picture—the sort of portrait
that rests its whole claim upon its likeness to a
sitter who has probably never been seen or heard
of by us. The likeness is said to be there if the
expression is caught, though in “ flesh ” colour
that resembles nothing human. Less than a
century ago even quite unknown painters, whose
work is to be found in country houses, understood
that portrait-painting was a branch of picture-
making. Mr. von Glehn to-day does not fail his
sitters in this respect. They go to him as an artist,
and perhaps after their experiences of portrait-
painters in general they are surprised to find he
is one.
Part of Mr. von Glehn’s success in the province
of portraiture is no doubt due to the fact that he is
so successful with the figure. In pictures of land-
scape surroundings he is accustomed to introduce
groups in spontaneous action. When then it is
a question of a portrait, more easily than many
artists he can capture a spontaneous pose. That
his technique is particularly suitable for securing
the elusive and indefinite traits upon which facial
expression depends has been proved by the success
of the school to which his method of painting a
portrait obviously belongs.
In his out-of-doors figure-pictures the artist has
used two kinds of subjects, those in which women
in fairy-white dresses enter into the life of a summer
day; and those more formal, improbable decora-
tions with a background of garden architecture.
Except for the nude in the latter, we have practi-
cally the Watteau subject up to date, with the
less romantic modern outlook, and the distinction
between what is matter-of-fact and what is matter
of imagination, which all but modern art has striven
so sincerely to obscure. To give the illusion that
things too beautiful to be real were real was the
“THE MILL-RACE, ESSEX
his portraits in keeping an element of charm in the
canvas. This was a secret of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century art; and it is one at least of the
elements that induce an ordinary person to regard
a portrait as a work of art. There is much to be
said for the ordinary point of view in this matter
too. It has remained for our own age to produce
an infinite quantity of portraits possessing no single
element necessary to a picture—the sort of portrait
that rests its whole claim upon its likeness to a
sitter who has probably never been seen or heard
of by us. The likeness is said to be there if the
expression is caught, though in “ flesh ” colour
that resembles nothing human. Less than a
century ago even quite unknown painters, whose
work is to be found in country houses, understood
that portrait-painting was a branch of picture-
making. Mr. von Glehn to-day does not fail his
sitters in this respect. They go to him as an artist,
and perhaps after their experiences of portrait-
painters in general they are surprised to find he
is one.
Part of Mr. von Glehn’s success in the province
of portraiture is no doubt due to the fact that he is
so successful with the figure. In pictures of land-
scape surroundings he is accustomed to introduce
groups in spontaneous action. When then it is
a question of a portrait, more easily than many
artists he can capture a spontaneous pose. That
his technique is particularly suitable for securing
the elusive and indefinite traits upon which facial
expression depends has been proved by the success
of the school to which his method of painting a
portrait obviously belongs.
In his out-of-doors figure-pictures the artist has
used two kinds of subjects, those in which women
in fairy-white dresses enter into the life of a summer
day; and those more formal, improbable decora-
tions with a background of garden architecture.
Except for the nude in the latter, we have practi-
cally the Watteau subject up to date, with the
less romantic modern outlook, and the distinction
between what is matter-of-fact and what is matter
of imagination, which all but modern art has striven
so sincerely to obscure. To give the illusion that
things too beautiful to be real were real was the
“THE MILL-RACE, ESSEX