Studio: international art (58.1913)

Mr. Walter Wests Landscapes

tion as a figure painter. The opinion that
landscape painting requires less of the artist than
figure painting is, generally speaking, quite an
erroneous one, but it is not always so easily refut-
able as it is in the case of Mr. Walter West. With
Mr. West we have to deal with an artist who has
firmly established his right to be regarded as one
of the most skilful and accomplished figure
draughtsmen of to-day. His highly finished and
delightful water-colour drawings of eighteenth-
century life have been for some years among the
chief attractions of the exhibitions of the Royal
Society of Painters in Water Colours. Such an
artist does not turn to landscape painting as a
refuge for the incompetent. He turns to it because
it offers him an opportunity of using his powers in
a new and delightful way.

When one considers the long hours of careful and
anxious labour within the four walls of the studio
which the production of Mr. Walter West's
elaborate little drawings of figure subjects demands,
it is easy to imagine the pleasure with which the
artist must turn to the two or three months of
painting and drawing in the open air which he
allows himself each year. The series of water-
colours and oil paintings from which the illustrations

to the present article have been chosen, were the
outcome of two holidays spent in Yorkshire, in
the neighbourhood of Richmond, and among the
Italian lakes, chiefly near Bellaggio on Lake Como.
The zest with which the artist threw himself into
the study of atmospheric effects and the fresh, pure
colouring of the open-air is evident in all his work.
He was clearly out for his own amusement—not
the frivolous amusement of the Bank-holiday
person, but the high and serious amusement of the
poet and artist who nourishes and exalts his
imagination with his disinterested study of the
wonders and beauties of nature.

The beautiful oil painting of: Twilight in Italy
was exhibited last year at the Royal Academy. It
represents the view on Lake Como from the heights
above Lenno, looking in the direction of Varenna,
but the topographical features of the scene are of
slight importance compared with the thrilling silence
of the twilight. The chief feature of the picture is
the ghostly cloud of leaves of the olive tree in the
foreground. They seem to have no local colour
or form of their own. They gleam like silver when
seen against the dark masses of the cypresses, but
against the faintly glowing sky they tell as some-
thing darkly mysterious, like a cloud or a flock of

MOONLIGHT ON COMO " (WATER-COLOUR) BY J. WALTER WEST, R.W.S.

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