Studio: international art (70.1917)

Graphic Arts Exhibition at the Royal Academy

rolling clouds, the wild uplands, and the growth
of trees; Lieut. Malcolm Osborne, with a
growing breadth of vision and mastery of
expression ; Miss Constance Pott, whose etching
skill is too seldom used for her own art; Miss
Anna Airy, who brings a distinguished draughts-
manship to the copper-plate ; Miss Margaret
Kemp-Welch, always at home with her needle
out of doors ; Sergeant W. P. Robins, one of
the most interesting and distinctive of the
younger generation of etchers, equally happy
with needle and dry-point; Mr. Theodore
Roussel, an artistic veteran of always dainty
accomplishment upon the copper ; and Lieut.
Martin Hardie, a talented etcher, with the
traditions of the art at his fingers’ ends : all
these are worthily represented. Then there
are some impressive plates of pathetic interest
by the late Lieut. Percy F. Gethin, a sensitive
draughtsman, who fell in action ; and prints
of quality are here, too, representing such noted
etchers as Miss Minna Bolingbroke, Miss Mary A.
Sloane, Lieut. Alfred Bentley—always advan-
cing, Mr. H. Rushbury, Lieut. George Gascoyne,
Mr. W. L. Wyllie, Mr. Hedley Fitton, Mr. D. I.
Smart, Mr. F. H. Townsend, Miss Dorothy
Woollard, Mr. Arthur J. Turrell, Miss Myra K.
Hughes, Mr. Nathaniel Sparks, Mr. William
Monk, Miss Katherine Kimball, Mr. E. W.
Charlton, Mr. Frank L. Emanuel, Mr. G. Wool-
liscroft Rhead, Mr. William Walker, Mr. Regi-
nald Bush, Mr. John Wright, Miss M. C. Robin-
son, Mr. Cheston, and Miss G. Hayes. The rare
appearance of Mr. George Clausen as an etcher
calls for a word of welcome, as do two gracefully
vivacious and distinguished plates by Mr. Claude
A. Shepperson; a clever and humorous impres-
sion of feminine character by Miss Sylvia Gosse ;
and the series of prints in which Mr. .Gurnell C.
Jennis shows his happy skill in rendering the
actualities of everyday character with penetrat-
ing but unforced humour. The charm of the
book-plate is exemplified in the artistic work
of Major Neville Wilkinson and Mr. J. F.
Badeley, the latter being almost alone in his
devotion to the method of the line-engraver.

In Mr. Alfred Hartley’s beautiful aquatints,
especially in Jar din du Grand Trianon, and
Misty Morning, St. Ives, we see the artistic lure
of the medium perhaps most convincingly;
though Mr. Percival Gaskell’s admirable
plates, particularly The Bait-Diggers, persuade
one of the rich capacity of aquatint for producing,
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in sympathetic hands, the infinite tones of
light and atmosphere playing over landscape.
Other artistic aquatints are here by Mr. C. H.
Baskett, Mr. Robins, Mr. Osborne, Mr. Hubert
Schroder, but I wish the method could have
been exemplified by just one such masterpiece
as Sir Frank Short’s Dawn. But on this same
wall his magic touch in mezzotint shows, in
those two original plates already mentioned,
how he can interpret, through its boundless
range of tone, all the wonderful poetry of
night mysterious upon the river. How in
mezzotint, used to reproductive purpose, the
modern master can hold his own with the great
eighteenth-century masters one may see in the
noble prints after Turner and Watts, but as an
original artist in mezzotint he goes beyond
them all. Lieut. Malcolm Osborne’s William
Morris, after Watts, is a triumph of reproductive
mezzotint; while admirable, if more conven-
tional, work of the kind is exhibited by Mr. Scott
Bridgewater and Mr. Macbeth-Raeburn; and
original mezzotints of interest and accomplish-

“ PORTRAIT STUDY.” DRY-POINT BY GURNELL
C. JENNIS, A.R.E.