Studio: international art (64.1915)

Studio-Talk

members and associates of the Royal Society of
Painters in Water Colours, the funds of the Red
Cross Society and the St. John Ambulance Associa-
tion have been augmented to the extent of more than
two thousand pounds. After being on view at the
society’s galleries in Pall Mall, where preliminary
bids were received, the drawings were shown for
more than a week at the sale rooms of Messrs.
Christie, by whom the entire proceeds of the sale
have been handed over to the funds mentioned
without any deduction.

We produce three charcoal drawings by Miss
Stella Langdale in which the use of the medium
for the purpose of pictorial expression is effectively
exemplified. As a student at the Brighton School
of Art the artist acquired facility in handling it,
but not until she came in contact with the work ot
Mr. A. F. Palmer, R.B.A., did she become fully
alive to the range of its possibilities.

Owing to the fact that some of its most important
members are at present serving in the army, the
Modern Society of Portrait Painters felt the neces-
sity of making its exhibition this year, at the Insti-
tute of Oil Painters, retrospective in character. This
afforded an opportunity for gauging the merits of
the Society as a whole, and of forming an authori-

tative impression of its attainments. No one could
fail to be struck by the eagerness and modernity of
its spirit, which so well justifies its name, or by the
great amount of real talent in the younger men,
which promises much for the future of portraiture in
England. But the visitor was also regrettably made
conscious of an intense note of self-consciousness,
a straining to appear clever at all costs. It almost
seemed as if no artist in the exhibition was himself,
and that hardly any sitter was allowed to appear
himself. Some of the people who sat for the
portraits must have the most charming dispositions
in the world to have tolerated the treatment they
received at the artist’s hands. One artist in par-
ticular, a painter of indisputable talents, seemed
to have taken advantage of a good-natured sitter
to present him with a caricature; for a painting can
be a caricature in spirit without gross exaggeration.
The best of Mr. Lambert’s portraits was Mrs. G.
Crawley, a work possessing every beauty except
naturalness—one could almost picture the painter
arranging the sitter’s fingers on the crystal globe
which she holds on her lap. Going round the
exhibition generally the painters seemed to us to be
always coming, so to speak, obtrusively between us
and the sitter, with every conceit and mannerism it is
possible to imagine. This is a pity since it alienates
the public from our modern artists, who reduce

“fishing-boat on lake como”
136

FROM A CHARCOAL DRAWING BY STELLA LANGDALE