DOI Heft:
No. 236 (November 1912)
DOI Artikel:Gauffin, Axel: Anders Zorn's recent paintings and sculpture
DOI Artikel:Gibson, Frank W.: David Muirhead, landscape and figure painter
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21158#0120
David Muirhead
showery windy skies, trees heavy with midsummer
foliage, and the wet sparkle and glitter of English
landscape under such effects, all of which he ren-
dered with so much truth and spirit and such
freshness of style. These apparently are the
qualities in the great landscapist’s work that seem-
ingly have attracted Mr. Muirhead; but it is an
attraction that has made for good, for it has
filled him with a high ambition, it has made him
fastidious in his search for forms, but it has not
made him in any degree a copyist of the great
English landscape painter whose work caused such
excitement when it was exhibited at the Salon of
1824, and whose art, by its aspects and feeling,
must undoubtedly have helped to plant firmly and
vivify French landscape painting. In England his
influence has been equally great, if one studies his
contemporaries, David Cox and Peter de Wint,
whose water-colours had the same feeling for air
and freshness; and later Cecil Lawson showed in
his work Constable’s largeness and dignity of view ;
whilst in our own generation the influence has
come back from France in certain of Mr. P. Wilson
Steer’s landscapes.
As a colourist Mr. Muirhead is entirely original;
his tones seem to be derived from the close study
of nature’s colour, and give the idea of reality—
open-air reality—and also of decorative effect. It
is one of the essentials in a painting that it should
be decorative, otherwise its reason for hanging in a
room is not very clear. Of course a painting may
have other qualities, such as a feeling for character
or for sentiment, like that which Millet possessed.
Even in the work of artists who have used symbolism,
or those who have illustrated legends or historical
events or everyday occurrences of their own time,
it will be surely found that their work only lives by
its possessing decorative qualities; and bound up
with this is that unity of purpose that the artist
gets from selecting only such forms as he can weave
into a decorative whole.
Mr. Muirhead has gone very much his own way
showery windy skies, trees heavy with midsummer
foliage, and the wet sparkle and glitter of English
landscape under such effects, all of which he ren-
dered with so much truth and spirit and such
freshness of style. These apparently are the
qualities in the great landscapist’s work that seem-
ingly have attracted Mr. Muirhead; but it is an
attraction that has made for good, for it has
filled him with a high ambition, it has made him
fastidious in his search for forms, but it has not
made him in any degree a copyist of the great
English landscape painter whose work caused such
excitement when it was exhibited at the Salon of
1824, and whose art, by its aspects and feeling,
must undoubtedly have helped to plant firmly and
vivify French landscape painting. In England his
influence has been equally great, if one studies his
contemporaries, David Cox and Peter de Wint,
whose water-colours had the same feeling for air
and freshness; and later Cecil Lawson showed in
his work Constable’s largeness and dignity of view ;
whilst in our own generation the influence has
come back from France in certain of Mr. P. Wilson
Steer’s landscapes.
As a colourist Mr. Muirhead is entirely original;
his tones seem to be derived from the close study
of nature’s colour, and give the idea of reality—
open-air reality—and also of decorative effect. It
is one of the essentials in a painting that it should
be decorative, otherwise its reason for hanging in a
room is not very clear. Of course a painting may
have other qualities, such as a feeling for character
or for sentiment, like that which Millet possessed.
Even in the work of artists who have used symbolism,
or those who have illustrated legends or historical
events or everyday occurrences of their own time,
it will be surely found that their work only lives by
its possessing decorative qualities; and bound up
with this is that unity of purpose that the artist
gets from selecting only such forms as he can weave
into a decorative whole.
Mr. Muirhead has gone very much his own way