Studio: international art (64.1915)

Water-Colours and Paintings by S. J. Lamorna Birch

greater part of this time being devoted to sketching
up and down the Seine), Mr. Birch had no regular
artistic training, and has won all his knowledge and
developed his interesting and personal art by his own
close observation and study of nature. At the time
of his visit to Paris, when he had a picture accepted
and hung at the New Salon, Champ de Mars, the
artist was greatly interested in the work of Claude
Monet and his group; the effect of such admiration
may be traced in a work now reproduced in which
is evinced something of that fondness for broken
colour, and juxtaposition of bright contrasting pig-
ment that gives such a sparkle and luminosity, such
vibration and atmosphere to the work of Monet and
certain others of the great Impressionists. The
work in question is The River Course, near Montreuil,
seen at the International Society’s exhibition a year
ago, a painting of greater brilliance than one is
accustomed to find in Mr. Birch’s pictures ; and
yet the artist achieves a most harmonious result,
despite the bravura of brushwork in this richly
colouristic canvas.

As one who has been his own master in his art,
Mr. Birch is pledged to no formula and to no
particular creed. One sees in his work the evidence
of a sincerity which makes him return again and

again to nature, not as slavish imitator, but in order
by patient study to acquire, sub-consciously it may
be, that intimate knowledge which, without unduly
betraying its presence, is the scaffolding upon
which an artist builds his interpretations of nature.
One of the great attractions of Mr. Birch’s art
as one sees it year by year at the Academy, the Old
Water-Colour Society’s shows, the International
Society and elsewhere, is its steady and constant
development, and the feeling it gives one of being
very much alive. Here, however, is not mere
tentative searching after something but dimly com-
prehended by the artist, but rather a sense of
problems tackled and solved, and of an ever alert
and watchful student of nature constantly alive to
all phases of her beauty.

I have spoken of the skill with which the artist
renders moving water—no doubt as a keen fisher-
man he is a very captious critic of his own work
—and such a picture as the oil painting referred
to, The River Course, near Montreuil, and to a still
greater degree Hie River Lune from the A queduct,
Lancaster, show this to a quite wonderful extent.
This beautiful harmony of blues and greens forms
a picture of varied and yet restrained colour ; the
composition is not only interesting and attractive