Studio: international art (67.1916)

Hugh Bellingham Smith

“THE DOWNS, LEWES” OIL PAINTING BY HUGH BELLINGHAM SMITH

its presence, is something too indefinable to be
captured and expressed, and least of all in a title
which must inevitably smack a little of the com-
monplace. If I seem to labour a trivial detail it is
that, despite its appearance of triviality, it forms
an indication of what one conceives to be a funda-
mental characteristic in such work as this—that it
is woven ab initio of a tissue of poetry and of
restrained romanticism; and even in the delicate
golden water-colour, where beneath the quivering
foliage, through which indeed, as Corot wished,
birds might fly, and between the graceful but
carefully studied stems of the trees we see in the
blue distance a bridge and the tower of a village
church, even here, in a drawing executed in the
neighbourhood of Amberley, a plei?i-air landscape
study, we find fidelity to nature coexisting with a
rare decorative harmony and exquisite lyrical sense
infused naturally, as it were, into the composition
with the artist’s touch.

It is hardly necessary to speak in detail of the
other works which are reproduced in this article.
Some are characteristic of one side of Mr. Belling-
ham Smith’s art, others of a different phase. The
figure subject, a harmony of black and gold, is

reproduced from a large oil painting to which the
enigmatical attractiveness of the girl’s expression
imparts an additional interest beyond that of its
charm as a piece of decoration pure and simple.

Looking at Bellingham Smith’s work one feels
that here, unquestionably, is a man who has kept
before him an unchanging ideal, built up of a love
•of nature and an unwavering search after beauty.
He achieves in his work a harmony of composition
and of colour which for all its sweetness is never
cloying. One would describe him as modern in
that he is never content to accept the dead letter
of art that is past; though he is no iconoclast,
there is always an element of vitality and a very
personal standpoint in his work. He has continued
working quietly in pursuit of his ideal, to please
himself; and art such as his scarcely attains, and
indeed never seeks popularity in the broad sense
of the term. To the amateur and the person of
taste such eclectic work makes its strongest appeal.
But with the volte-face resulting from the war
turning most people from much that is merely
tiresome or trivial in painting to-day, such work as
Bellingham Smith’s, with its quiet charm, its purity
and graceful formality, is more than ever welcome.

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