Studio: international art (65.1915)

The Royal Scottish Academy

My love's in Germanie

Send him hame, send him lianie.

The figure is expressively posed, but the main
interest lies in the management of the lighting
from the candles on the piano and the contrast
between this and the beautiful view of an East
Coast estuary under a soft blue light. Mr. Ogilvy
Reid’s three [figure-subjects are each thought out
down to the minutest detail, and remarkably
successful is his painting of the tapestry back-
ground to The New Song, an Orchardsonian subject.
The other two are epics of the Jacobite Rebellion,
one representing the preparations for the struggle
by the sharpening of swords in a smithy, and the
other a dejected fugitive chief in the cottage of a
humble sympathiser. In The Pool Mr. W. S.
MacGeorge has surrounded his group of children
at play by the margin of the pool with a beautiful
landscape setting; particularly successful is the
realisation of happy childhood in two of the figures
admiring their reflections. Within
limits Mr. F. C. B. Cadell’s Afternoon
interior—a tea-party—is arrestingly
clever, even brilliant. At the proper
view-point the formless becomes real
and living, but one feels that it is
dangerously near the dividing line which
separates incompleteness from accom-
plishment. Mr. Robert MacGregor’s
Fugitives, delicately phrased, is sugges-
tive of the war ; Mr. F. H. Newbery’s
Sea Fogs, two old fishermen in con-
verse, shows the chief of the Glasgow
Art School moving sturdily with the
times, and Miss Cecile Walton (Mrs.

Eric Robertson) in Midsummer, intro-
ducing the figures of the artist and her
husband, shows a piece of decorative
landscape genre seriously treated on a
more important scale than she has yet
essayed. It is a credit to the Edin-
burgh College of Art that it has pro-
duced such a skilful painter of the
figure as Miss Dorothy Johnstone, the
daughter of a deceased academician ;
her Lortia and Wang in its delicate
colour-phrasing and accurate modelling
is a work that might do credit to an
artist of much riper experience.

In the domain of the imaginative
nothing in the exhibition can hold place
beside Mr. John Duncan’s Adoration oj
the Magi. Mr. Duncan is a student
of Celtic myth, and here he has repre-

sented the New Testament story as it might have
filtered through tradition to the western isles. The
scene is Highland, the ornamentation on the
garments is Celtic, but the outstanding charm is
the spiritual quality in the chief figures, the en-
shrining of the child-life in an atmosphere of
tenderness and love.

Mr. D. Y. Cameron’s Nether Lochaber is con-
structed on similar lines to his landscape in the
Royal Academy, but more complete in its fore-
ground. Mr. James Paterson’s September, Colvend,
in its pure strong colour of leafy foreground and
mid-distance of blue water grips the eye, and Mr.
Wingate makes one of his rare excursions into
big landscape work, but, though fine in passages,
it does not reach the artistic unity of such small
canvases as his lovely Sunset over the Sound oj
Kilbrannan. Mr. Robert Noble’s Siller Saughs,
Summertime, is another, and one of the best of a
considerable series of studies of grey-green willows

“LORNA AND WANG

IOO

BY DOROTHY JOHNSTONE