DOI issue:
No. 249 (January 1914)
DOI article:Baldry, Alfred Lys: A romanticist painter: W. Russell Flint
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21208#0276
A Romanticist Painter: IV. Russell Flint
adequately his aesthetic creed. By the way in
which he can assert himself in his work the degree
of his capacity is measured; the more plainly he
proves it to be his, and his alone, the more evident
is his right to be counted as a master of his craft.
It is because the work of Mr. Russell Flint
satisfies these conditions to an unusual extent that
he has a special claim upon the attention of ah
serious students of modern art. He is very
definitely a painter with a temperament, an artist
who looks at nature in a manner that is quite his
own, and whose personal taste is amply apparent in
every phase of his production. But, at the same
time, he does not allow this display of his personal
preferences to degenerate into a mannerism or to
become simply a stereotyped trick which saves him
from the exertion of thinking out new ways of
expressing himself. He keeps his mind alive to
fresh suggestions and allows the fullest scope to his
receptivity; all that he does with the suggestions
he receives is to bring them into agreement with
the artistic convictions by which he is guided and
to clothe them with the sentiment that seems to
him to be appropriate.
When this sentiment is analysed it is seen to be
a kind of delicate romanticism : there is in every-
thing that Mr. Russell Flint produces a romantic
atmosphere which makes itself felt quite as much
in the way he treats his material as in his choice
of subject. His love of romance leads him often
into the selection of motives from the life of past
ages when people behaved picturesquely and veiled
the commonplaces of existence with sumptuous
pageantry ; but it colours quite as obviously his
view of the modem world. It enables him to
realise scenes from the age of chivalry with all the
charm and pictorial persuasiveness that must—as
we like to think—have distinguished them ; but it
helps him, also, to prove that there are romantic
possibilities even in the life of our own times, and
that the artist who is keen to recognise these
possibilities need not revert to the past to find
scope for his fancy.
For instance, if such picturesque inventions as
his well-conceived fantasies, The Huntresses and
the Knight, The Interruption, and The Mock Europa,
are compared with an evident subject from modern
life, like Conversation, or with a scene like Bathers
on a Mediterranean Beach, which might belong to
any period, the fact that the atmosphere with which
‘THE MOCK EUROPA”
254
WATER-COLOUR BY W. RUSSELL FLINT
adequately his aesthetic creed. By the way in
which he can assert himself in his work the degree
of his capacity is measured; the more plainly he
proves it to be his, and his alone, the more evident
is his right to be counted as a master of his craft.
It is because the work of Mr. Russell Flint
satisfies these conditions to an unusual extent that
he has a special claim upon the attention of ah
serious students of modern art. He is very
definitely a painter with a temperament, an artist
who looks at nature in a manner that is quite his
own, and whose personal taste is amply apparent in
every phase of his production. But, at the same
time, he does not allow this display of his personal
preferences to degenerate into a mannerism or to
become simply a stereotyped trick which saves him
from the exertion of thinking out new ways of
expressing himself. He keeps his mind alive to
fresh suggestions and allows the fullest scope to his
receptivity; all that he does with the suggestions
he receives is to bring them into agreement with
the artistic convictions by which he is guided and
to clothe them with the sentiment that seems to
him to be appropriate.
When this sentiment is analysed it is seen to be
a kind of delicate romanticism : there is in every-
thing that Mr. Russell Flint produces a romantic
atmosphere which makes itself felt quite as much
in the way he treats his material as in his choice
of subject. His love of romance leads him often
into the selection of motives from the life of past
ages when people behaved picturesquely and veiled
the commonplaces of existence with sumptuous
pageantry ; but it colours quite as obviously his
view of the modem world. It enables him to
realise scenes from the age of chivalry with all the
charm and pictorial persuasiveness that must—as
we like to think—have distinguished them ; but it
helps him, also, to prove that there are romantic
possibilities even in the life of our own times, and
that the artist who is keen to recognise these
possibilities need not revert to the past to find
scope for his fancy.
For instance, if such picturesque inventions as
his well-conceived fantasies, The Huntresses and
the Knight, The Interruption, and The Mock Europa,
are compared with an evident subject from modern
life, like Conversation, or with a scene like Bathers
on a Mediterranean Beach, which might belong to
any period, the fact that the atmosphere with which
‘THE MOCK EUROPA”
254
WATER-COLOUR BY W. RUSSELL FLINT