Studio: international art (57.1913)

Reviews and Notices

four in number, did not represent work done
in the institution so much as the result of
summer sketching expeditions and home-
work in which individual characteristics had
scope for expression. The result was a
display of work which gave evidence of the
soundness of the teaching, the good guidance
of the student in craftsmanship without at-
tempting to lay down any conventional form
of expression. The best feature was the
feeling for colour, ever a distinguishing mark
of the Scottish school, while the weakness
was the lack of sufficient importance given
to accurate draughtsmanship. The exhibi-
tion as a whole showed a considerable
advance over last year. A. E.

REVIEWS AND NOTICES.

Ballads Weird and Wonderficl. Drawings
by Vernon Hill. (London : John Lane.)
2i5. net.—Mr. Vernon Hill is not a super-
ficial craftsman ; he has something better on
hand than the search for a short cut to im-
mediate effectiveness. He does not seek to
evade difficulties of constructive drawing by
resorting, wherever such difficulties occur,
to those friendly if often trivial devices of
pattern-making that can always afterwards
be labelled “decoration.” His work is very
“hotei” (wood sculpture) by ishimoto gyokai classical in feeling, very cold and sculp-

fifty. While a mere boy he took lessons from
Takamura Toun, and later became a monjin of
Tamaruka Koun, who is now the head professor
in clay-modelling at the Tokyo School of Fine
Arts. Biun did much in the way of making
replicas of ancient wood sculpture, especially the old
Buddhistic images of Nara, and a number of them
are now kept in the Imperial Household Museum.
At one time he was a teacher at the Art School of
Kyoto, but for the last fourteen years of his life he
taught wood-carving at the Tokyo School of Fine
Arts. He was awarded a second prize at the Paris
Exposition of 1900. Harada Jiro.

ART SCHOOL NOTES.

Edinburgh.—The College of Art

Students Club, which numbers about a
couple of hundred members, held an ex-
hibition of paintings, water-colour and
chalk drawings in the college at the end of
November. The exhibits, one hundred and forty-
346

turesque in result; it expresses a great taste
for the horrible—which always lies so very close
to the ugly—but its horror is that of intellec-
tual invention rather than that of feeling ; horror
and ugliness are deliberately exploited, it seems
to us, as a certain way of making an impression
on the spectator. In its precision the drawing
is almost Pre-Raphaelite, and at every point it is
wholesomely certain in its intention. The illus-
tration to “ Hugh of Lincoln ” does not betray the
prevalent thirst for unpleasant form, but it in no
point falls beneath the other illustrations, in fact it
is an improvement on many, thus showing that the
artist’s range is not as narrow as one might at first
suppose, not so limited to the repulsive as the first
impression of his book conveys. The ballads
illustrated are taken from ancient legendary collec-
tions, and the volume is bound in grey leather with
cover design in gold.

The Life and Letters oj Frederic Shields. Edited
by Ernestine Mills. (London: Longmans,Green
and Co.) iot. 6d. net.—The claim put forward by
his latest biographer that Frederic Shields was