Studio: international art (56.1912)

The Royal Academy Exhibition, igi2

The royal academy exhi-
bition, 1912.

The exhibitions of the Royal Academy
should sufficiently reflect the tendencies and
activities of the art world. They should have a
definite representative character, and should be of
value as illustrations of the art of the moment,
showing with clearness what are the chief influences
by which our artists are guided year by year. They
should sum up, too, the shades of opinion and the
varieties of practice which are to be found in the
modern school, and throw light upon the changes
of view and method which periodically affect the
workers in all branches of art. The Academy,
indeed, should be a kind of sensitive barometer
which records the vagaries of the artistic atmosphere
and responds very perceptibly to the influences
which are in the air. If it does not give much
countenance to the extravagant developments from
time to time engineered by the more irresponsible
members of the art community it is not on this
account to be reckoned as wanting in the right kind of
catholicity. Its exhibitions must reflect the convic-
tions of the sane majority who are carrying on intelli-
gently those traditions the value of which has been
proved by centuries of serious working; but they
must be open as much to the men who have found
new ways of interpreting these traditions as to those
who honestly believe that the old methods cannot be
improved upon. Its catholicity must be shown in
frank acceptance of everything that makes for progress
and is for the good of art, and in readiness to dis-
regard mere conventionality on the one hand and,
on the other, the eccentricity that is the outcome
of a fretful resentment of right discipline.

During the last few years we have been glad to
observe a marked improvement on these lines. The
Academy has in fact been getting less “academic”
and taking a broader view of its responsibilities.
In this respect little fault is to be found with the
present exhibition : most of the more serious phases
of artistic practice are represented, and the collec-
tion generally is quite acceptable as a summary of
the more salient features of the art of the present
day.

That the exhibition is not a particularly striking
one, however, can scarcely be denied, and perhaps
its most disappointing characteristic is the com-
parative absence of paintings which stand out
conspicuously as works of supreme merit. There
is much sound work which does credit to the
capacities of the men by whom it was produced,
and marks them as well-trained and skilful craftsmen

who have carefully studied the mechanism of their
art, but there are less things than usual which claim
instant attention by their originality of manner or
their novelty of outlook—and there are less things
which suggest that the younger artists to whom we
look for future developments in our art are keenly
alive to their responsibilities and anxious to give a
good account of themselves. Nearly everything that
can justly be said to deserve a place in the front
rank has come from one or other of the artists of
established reputation to whom we look as a
matter of course for notable achievements.

For example, the canvases which beyond all
question count as the chief things in the collection
are by Mr. Arnesby Brown and Mr. Sargent. Mr.
Arnesby Brown’s Norfolk Landscape is the most
commanding picture he has ever exhibited, a
splendid record of nature studied with the most
subtle sympathy and realised with the vigorous
directness of an absolute master of technical pro-
cedure. It is a magnificent addition to the series
of noble pastorals which he has painted during the
last few years, and it is certainly the finest picture
of its class that any modern painter has produced.
Mr. Sargent’s Bringing down 'Marble from the
Quarries to Carrara and his Cypresses are amazing
illustrations of his capacity for seeing things vividly
and setting them down with brilliant certainty.
The first one has more subtlety of tone and more
delicacy of colour than are usually to be found in his
open-air paintings; the other shows admirably his
ability to express complexities of illumination by
the most summary methods.

Mr. Waterhouse is another painter who keeps
consistently to a high level of accomplishment.
His Penelope and the Suitors has all the better
characteristics of his art, and his portraits of Miss
Betty Pollock and Mrs. Ronald McNeill have the
charm of pleasant unconventionality and are tech-
nically most persuasive. Mr. Sims, that master of
fantastic invention, is as fascinating as ever in his
pictures The Shower and A Spring Muse, and in
his delightful water-colour The Muses; and Mr.
Clausen, who has ranked for a long while among
the best of the painters who are in the modern
movement, is more than ordinarily successful in his
treatment of an interior subject, The Window, a
study in tones of white, and in his sunlit landscape
The Road. Mr. Hacker, again, has risen con-
spicuously to the occasion in his charmingly tender
painting Imprisoned Spring.

Then there are clever subject pictures like Mr.
Campbell Taylor’s The Song, Mrs. Laura Knight’s
The Flower, Mr. George Harcourt’s Fairy Tales,

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