Studio: international art (57.1913)

Studio-Talk

cant figures in art in this country towards the close
of the nineteenth century. At this distance from
the date when first the art of the one and then
that of the other enjoyed a fashion it is possible to
reconsider judgments then influenced by the bitter-
ness of strife. Whistler’s supreme achievements—
the beautiful secrets of actuality of effect which,
without professing realism, he discovered in paint-
ing the Miss Alexander; the realism of the sea-
weather represented in his water-colours ; the frost-
like clearness of the atmosphere apparent in all his
out-of-door subjects, and brought twice home to us
when his pictures are approached from the adjacent
Turner rooms; the absence of purely rhetorical
play of colour such as Turner frequently indulged
in—all these things impress the visitor. The
limitations of his art reveal themselves only in
details. There is, for instance, in the portrait of
Miss Alexander the unlifelike child lips, while the
muslin dress is so lifelike ! and in the Little White
Girl the incident of the bright red and blue suddenly
vamped into an otherwise wonderful and elusive
painting—details certainly, but showing in the one
case incomplete sympathy and in the other triviality.
But there is always the style that perhaps will never
be rivalled for its intimacy with paint, the senti-
ment for the medium that is the sign of the greatest
art. It is this that is so sadly absent from the
painting of Burne-Jones. With him a method un-
pleasantly matter-of-fact has to work for an extrava-
gant imagination. In early paintings he succeeded
in presenting his subjects as imaginatively con-
ceived, but in later ones purely formal schemes of
colour are imposed. His art never regained what
was lost to it when from being conscience-stricken
54

about his form and colour he became self-conscious
in them both. The full worth of his inspiration is
only to be realised from his early works, many of
which are of high imaginative import and curiously
dramatic. In the unfinished The Magic Circle
there is almost a Maeterlinckian suggestion of im-
pending fate. But all this was before his desire
for a purely formal skill in execution deprived his
art of spontaneity.

EDINBURGH.—The banqueting hall of
the Civic Chambers having now been
fully decorated with pictorial representa-
tion of incidents connected with the past
history of Edinburgh, the work of embellishing the
Council Chambers in like manner has been com-
menced. The Guild Brethren have gifted one
panel, which represents James III. bestowing a
charter on the City Fathers of that period, and the
artist, Mr. G. Ogilvy Reid, R.S.A., has executed
a group in a brilliant scheme of colour. A second
panel, which forms the subject of our illustration
(p. 57), has been gifted by Councillor Inman, and
the subject is the presentation by the same monarch
in 1482 of the “Blue Blanket,” a banner for the
use of the craftsmen of the city. Though the pre-
dominant note is decorative, the artist, Mr. Robert
Hope, A.R.S.A., has given character to his figures
and has succeeded in expressing the mediaeval in
all the details. From the dull red garb of the
foreground figure on the right, the eye travels
pleasingly to the blue gown of the aged leader of
the craftsmen and then to the rich purple and
gold garments of the royal couple, backed by the
pale blue of the banner. The tapestry background,