Studio: international art (69.1916)

The Art of Joseph Craw hall

" MAGPIE AND PEACOCK'S FEATHER "

never sought the interpretative medium of the artist.
Such a man, of course, will miss the subtleties, the
finesse of the achievement. He may see what is
done, with only a vague recognition of the selective
gift and the genius of elimination which has
achieved the end. To appreciate the artist it was
necessary often to understand the method of the
man. Crawhall's personality was quite unique.
Whistler, admiring his art, had no great liking for
the man and spoke of him as "going about with
a straw in his teeth." Crawhall, however, with
this homely accompaniment, was acting as a keen
and shrewd observer of character. Very reserved,
except in the company of intimate friends, he was
possessed of much quaint humour, and had a
passion for odd types and unusual incidents. His
steady, penetrating eyes always gave the impression
that nothing could escape him. In the early
eighties, when James Guthrie, E. A. Walton,
Whitelaw Hamilton and Crawhall were living to-
gether at Cockburnspath, where their names are
revered to-day by the lairds of Dunglass and the
intelligent peasantry, Mr. Whitelaw Hamilton told
me that he had seen Crawhall spend over an hour
leaning on the gate of a sheep-field, observing,
always observing! Then he would return to his
room and quickly produce some charming draw-
ings of sheep amidst the pale-toned Berwickshire
pastures. His method was to absorb thoroughly

WATER-COLOUR BY JOSEPH CRAWHALL

his "subject" and then, away from the model,
to express in art, with rapidity and with absolute
success, the mental picture. He always mastered
and memorised the essentials both of form and
colour before he approached paper and paint. As
examples of his keen power of observation and his
wonderful memory, we need only refer to the
remarkable insight which he shewed in the eyes of
his birds, in the action of their legs and the " flow "
of their plumage. All were deft, certain, unerring,
graphic, masterly, so masterly indeed as to inspire
wonder; the presentment was one of life, and of
life only to be observed to the full by the artist.
He taught us more of biology in the mass than
all the scientists put together. He caught in a
flash the mannerisms and the individualities of his
subjects, such as the ungainly leisure of the duck,
the placidity of sheep, and the distinctive differ-
ences of horses. Two such men as Landseer and
Crawhall are at the antithesis. In the latter case
there was no humanising of things essentially
unhuman. His horse was a horse, not the soul of
a man beaming through the carcase of a horse.
In the face of one of his dogs we see the character
of a dog not of a human being. His horses were
alive, there was nothing of the Troy or the
Rowland Ward about them. With a great love
for animals, over which he exercised an almost
uncanny influence, he came to them with the

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