DOI Heft:
No. 239 (February 1913)
DOI Artikel:Baldry, Alfred Lys: The paintings and drawings of Frank Mura
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21160#0026
Frank Mura
breadth of view has resulted from the unusually
wide experience of places and things he gained in
his early youth. Born—in i86r—in Alsace, he
was while still a child taken by his parents to
America, and he was brought up in New York,
becoming in due course a naturalised American
citizen. At the age of twenty he returned to
Europe and began seriously to study art at Munich
under the masters Herterich and Loeftz. From
Munich, where he worked for some time, he pro-
ceeded to The Hague, attracted by the power and
significance of the work of the modern Dutch
masters and seeking to obtain on the spot a closer
acquaintance with their methods.
This change in his place of study had a very
definite influence on the manner of his evolution
as an artist. To-day it is evident that what he
learned at The Hague had much more effect than
the teaching he received at Munich, in fixing the
direction of his development and in deciding the
character of his expression. In the style he has
formed there is little trace to be detected of
German training; but there are, on the other
hand, many evidences to be noted of his contact
with modern Dutch art—in his breadth and free-
dom of technical treatment, for instance; in his
freshness and luminous delicacy of colour, and in
his expansive subtlety of atmospheric quality.
What the Dutch masters taught him was how to
look at Nature, how to seize upon her essential
facts and how to select from among these facts
those, and only those, which would fill out and
make properly coherent the pictorial scheme he
had in his mind.
From The Hague he came to England, in 1891 ;
he settled first at Hampstead, but after a while he
moved into the country and took up his abode
near Dunmow, in Essex, and more recently he has
migrated to Sussex—wisely, with his love of Nature,
preferring "a country life to residence in a town.
During the score or so of years he has been among
us he has taken his place very definitely in the
ranks of that small company of painters who are
striving not so much for the favour of the public as
for the appreciation of the few lovers of art who
can understand the higher type of artistic aspira-
tion. He has deviated not at all from the course
he marked out for himself in early life, but has
kept with commendable consistency to the pursuit
of his ideals.
" autumn j:
4
from the oil painting by frank mura
breadth of view has resulted from the unusually
wide experience of places and things he gained in
his early youth. Born—in i86r—in Alsace, he
was while still a child taken by his parents to
America, and he was brought up in New York,
becoming in due course a naturalised American
citizen. At the age of twenty he returned to
Europe and began seriously to study art at Munich
under the masters Herterich and Loeftz. From
Munich, where he worked for some time, he pro-
ceeded to The Hague, attracted by the power and
significance of the work of the modern Dutch
masters and seeking to obtain on the spot a closer
acquaintance with their methods.
This change in his place of study had a very
definite influence on the manner of his evolution
as an artist. To-day it is evident that what he
learned at The Hague had much more effect than
the teaching he received at Munich, in fixing the
direction of his development and in deciding the
character of his expression. In the style he has
formed there is little trace to be detected of
German training; but there are, on the other
hand, many evidences to be noted of his contact
with modern Dutch art—in his breadth and free-
dom of technical treatment, for instance; in his
freshness and luminous delicacy of colour, and in
his expansive subtlety of atmospheric quality.
What the Dutch masters taught him was how to
look at Nature, how to seize upon her essential
facts and how to select from among these facts
those, and only those, which would fill out and
make properly coherent the pictorial scheme he
had in his mind.
From The Hague he came to England, in 1891 ;
he settled first at Hampstead, but after a while he
moved into the country and took up his abode
near Dunmow, in Essex, and more recently he has
migrated to Sussex—wisely, with his love of Nature,
preferring "a country life to residence in a town.
During the score or so of years he has been among
us he has taken his place very definitely in the
ranks of that small company of painters who are
striving not so much for the favour of the public as
for the appreciation of the few lovers of art who
can understand the higher type of artistic aspira-
tion. He has deviated not at all from the course
he marked out for himself in early life, but has
kept with commendable consistency to the pursuit
of his ideals.
" autumn j:
4
from the oil painting by frank mura