DOI Heft:
No. 251 (March 1914)
DOI Artikel:Salaman, Malcolm C.: The water-colour drawings of James McBey
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21209#0103
James McBey s
compelled its expression with a pictorial vivacity
that was inevitable to his personality in that par-
ticular moment. Personality indeed is eloquent in
all these drawings ; there is none in which one feels
he has not been absolutely true to his own vision,
none that has been done to please any but his own
artistic taste and feeling.
If we look at the drawings he has made in
Holland we shall perceive with how freshly ob-
servant a pictorial sense he has enjoyed that country
of canals, drawing just whatever has appealed to him,
and in the only possible way he could feel it. To
look from one to the other of these Dutch subjects
is to realise Mr. E. V. Lucas's ideal of a reposeful
holiday on a Dutch canal-boat, being carried
" between the meadows; under the noses of the
great black and white cows ; past herons fishing in
the rushes ; through little villages, with dazzling
milk-cans being scoured on the banks, and the good
wives washing, and saturnine smokers in black velvet
slippers passing the time of day : through big towns,
by rows of sombre houses seen through a delicate
screen of leaves ; under low bridges crowded with
children; through narrow locks; ever moving,
moving slowly and surely, sometimes sailing, some-
times quanting, sometimes being towed, with the
IVa ter- Colours
wide Dutch sky overhead, and the plovers crying in
it, and the clear west wind driving the windmills,
and everything just as it was in Rembrandt's day,
and just as it will be five hundred years hence."
Take the typical examples reproduced here.
The Flower-market on the Singel, Amsterdam ; in
this we see some of the countless iron barges that
gather at the Monday flower-market with their
floral and vegetable freight, and in the foreground
is doubtless the prow of the boat from which Mr.
McBey surveyed this characteristic scene. With
what charm of spacious design and atmospheric
truth of tint he has drawn it, with what vivacity of
impression he has suggested its easygoing activity !
What an unerring instinct forthe suggestive detail has
placed in the centre of the picture the man in blue
quanting on his barge ! Does it not give a sense of
quiet movement to the whole ? Let us turn to
the remarkable and sombre Grimnessesluis—a
mysteriously appealing glimpse of a backwater in
the Jewish quarter in Amsterdam. The eye is
carried curiously past these dark dismal-looking
houses to the dark depths under an archway that
would surely have tempted Whistler to the copper-
plate, as indeed it has already tempted Mr. McBey
himself. In a mirror projecting from the house on
'OLD HOUSES, ENKHUISEN
98
BY JAMES MCBEY
compelled its expression with a pictorial vivacity
that was inevitable to his personality in that par-
ticular moment. Personality indeed is eloquent in
all these drawings ; there is none in which one feels
he has not been absolutely true to his own vision,
none that has been done to please any but his own
artistic taste and feeling.
If we look at the drawings he has made in
Holland we shall perceive with how freshly ob-
servant a pictorial sense he has enjoyed that country
of canals, drawing just whatever has appealed to him,
and in the only possible way he could feel it. To
look from one to the other of these Dutch subjects
is to realise Mr. E. V. Lucas's ideal of a reposeful
holiday on a Dutch canal-boat, being carried
" between the meadows; under the noses of the
great black and white cows ; past herons fishing in
the rushes ; through little villages, with dazzling
milk-cans being scoured on the banks, and the good
wives washing, and saturnine smokers in black velvet
slippers passing the time of day : through big towns,
by rows of sombre houses seen through a delicate
screen of leaves ; under low bridges crowded with
children; through narrow locks; ever moving,
moving slowly and surely, sometimes sailing, some-
times quanting, sometimes being towed, with the
IVa ter- Colours
wide Dutch sky overhead, and the plovers crying in
it, and the clear west wind driving the windmills,
and everything just as it was in Rembrandt's day,
and just as it will be five hundred years hence."
Take the typical examples reproduced here.
The Flower-market on the Singel, Amsterdam ; in
this we see some of the countless iron barges that
gather at the Monday flower-market with their
floral and vegetable freight, and in the foreground
is doubtless the prow of the boat from which Mr.
McBey surveyed this characteristic scene. With
what charm of spacious design and atmospheric
truth of tint he has drawn it, with what vivacity of
impression he has suggested its easygoing activity !
What an unerring instinct forthe suggestive detail has
placed in the centre of the picture the man in blue
quanting on his barge ! Does it not give a sense of
quiet movement to the whole ? Let us turn to
the remarkable and sombre Grimnessesluis—a
mysteriously appealing glimpse of a backwater in
the Jewish quarter in Amsterdam. The eye is
carried curiously past these dark dismal-looking
houses to the dark depths under an archway that
would surely have tempted Whistler to the copper-
plate, as indeed it has already tempted Mr. McBey
himself. In a mirror projecting from the house on
'OLD HOUSES, ENKHUISEN
98
BY JAMES MCBEY