DOI Heft:
Nr. 244 (July 1913)
DOI Artikel:Hurst, Oakley: The landscape paintings of Charles M. Gere
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21159#0110
Charles M. Gere
either on canvas or silk. It is of course essentially
a studio medium, and it leads him to the habit
of making merely pencil notes out of doors and
training the memory to make the most of these.
He is convinced that this is a sound plan for
the landscape painter, whose best material' has
often vanished before a palette can be set.
Mr. Gere’s art is most frequently seen at the
exhibitions of the New English Art Club, of which
he is a member. The pictures we are reproducing
are among those which have attracted attention to
his name at these exhibitions during recent years
and have established his position as a landscape
painter of great individuality. Various other ex-
amples of his work have been reproduced in recent
issues of this magazine in connection with notices
of the New English exhibitions, and thus readers
have ample material for studying his achievements
in this direction.
This painter’s method of working much from
memory enables him to preserve the essential and
memorial features of the places which he depicts,
and it enables him to retain just those rare effects
brought about by changeable weather which
impress themselves upon the imagination. He
gives us the spirit of a scene before everything, and
this means the mood of weather as well as the
topography of place. But he is constantly attracted
to one neighbourhood through his affection for
a certain class of scenery, and thus it is that his art
is almost sentimental in feeling and full ot the
fascination of local associations. Before everything
he is regardful of truth to an impression received
direct from nature. His results are never faked,
and in his interpretation of the English countryside
his tradition is that of English landscape art, a
tradition unconsciously framed to express local
sentiment. Both his method and the nature of the
materials he employs gives to Mr. Gere’s art some
of the simplicity of style of the great English water-
colourists who presented the main features of a
landscape with a careful subordination of detail,
influencing the mood of the spectator by the
emotional control of broad effects, and by a
really marvellous skill in suggesting geographical
characteristics.
There is a great spaciousness in the class of
country Mr. Gere selects for representation. We
are impressed in all of his pictures by the dramatic
play of light and shadow upon broad stretches
of down-land and upon heavily foliaged trees. He
has the gift of introducing an intimate human note
by the skill with which he defines figures in the
foreground. And these invariably take their place
as a real part of the landscape, an inevitable part of
the scene. His success in this last particular is
a point which his art has in common with the land-
scape art of the eighteenth century.
One of the artist's most remarkable canvases is un-
doubtedly the picture called A Cotswold Hill-Side,
“ LAGO MAGGIORE” (TEMPERA PAINTING)
90
BY CHARLES M. GERE
either on canvas or silk. It is of course essentially
a studio medium, and it leads him to the habit
of making merely pencil notes out of doors and
training the memory to make the most of these.
He is convinced that this is a sound plan for
the landscape painter, whose best material' has
often vanished before a palette can be set.
Mr. Gere’s art is most frequently seen at the
exhibitions of the New English Art Club, of which
he is a member. The pictures we are reproducing
are among those which have attracted attention to
his name at these exhibitions during recent years
and have established his position as a landscape
painter of great individuality. Various other ex-
amples of his work have been reproduced in recent
issues of this magazine in connection with notices
of the New English exhibitions, and thus readers
have ample material for studying his achievements
in this direction.
This painter’s method of working much from
memory enables him to preserve the essential and
memorial features of the places which he depicts,
and it enables him to retain just those rare effects
brought about by changeable weather which
impress themselves upon the imagination. He
gives us the spirit of a scene before everything, and
this means the mood of weather as well as the
topography of place. But he is constantly attracted
to one neighbourhood through his affection for
a certain class of scenery, and thus it is that his art
is almost sentimental in feeling and full ot the
fascination of local associations. Before everything
he is regardful of truth to an impression received
direct from nature. His results are never faked,
and in his interpretation of the English countryside
his tradition is that of English landscape art, a
tradition unconsciously framed to express local
sentiment. Both his method and the nature of the
materials he employs gives to Mr. Gere’s art some
of the simplicity of style of the great English water-
colourists who presented the main features of a
landscape with a careful subordination of detail,
influencing the mood of the spectator by the
emotional control of broad effects, and by a
really marvellous skill in suggesting geographical
characteristics.
There is a great spaciousness in the class of
country Mr. Gere selects for representation. We
are impressed in all of his pictures by the dramatic
play of light and shadow upon broad stretches
of down-land and upon heavily foliaged trees. He
has the gift of introducing an intimate human note
by the skill with which he defines figures in the
foreground. And these invariably take their place
as a real part of the landscape, an inevitable part of
the scene. His success in this last particular is
a point which his art has in common with the land-
scape art of the eighteenth century.
One of the artist's most remarkable canvases is un-
doubtedly the picture called A Cotswold Hill-Side,
“ LAGO MAGGIORE” (TEMPERA PAINTING)
90
BY CHARLES M. GERE