DOI Heft:
No. 288 (March 1917)
DOI Artikel:Wood, T. Martin: The portrait paintings of Ambrose McEvoy
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.24576#0086
The Portrait Paintings oj Ambrose McEvoy
everything. Trappings on the person fade out
of sight, in the painting. There is reflected a
mood, of which we are sometimes conscious in
life, in which nothing seems to come between us
and the spirit of the person who advances
towards us.
It was in The Studio for November 1907
that I drew attention to Mr. Ambrose McEvoy
as a painter of interior genre, as an artist with
the gift of saturating his subject with an atmo-
sphere that quickened the imagination of the
spectator. He showed that first sign of a
positive artistic mind, the instinctive selection
of a special aspect of life in obedience to mood ;
the instinctive rejection of everything irrelevant
to it. One thing accepted and another let go
from a choice made from “ within ”—made,
that is, by Life itself. For the cast of an
artist’s mind is thrown out of the mould of
nature like the form of his body.
Selections made by temperament
are natural, they are Nature’s
own'; as they make themselves
felt in art they move us with the
power of something elemental.
They speak for Nature in a way
in which the more conscious
choice of the intellect, with its
assertion of its independence,
does not. To the extent to
which in a work of art we are
compelled to bow to this force
of fundamental personal expres-
sion are we in the presence of
that which will defy the revisions
of the judgment of fashion, and
of that which will endure while
the surface on which it is shown
remains intact.
The art of Van Dyck has been
praised by a philosopher because
it placed the painter’s own in-
terpretation of life on Life, and
was not merely negative in the
perfection of its representation.
True to his own vision of life
that painter expressed the most
graceful aspect of the Court.
And he is to be distinguished
from a flatterer, as one who
takes a high view of a man
is to be distinguished from a
flatterer.
78
The soul of a subject-picture—a subject-
picture in any but the most negative academic
sense—resides with a world, personal to the
artist, projected in it. The artist—unless he
becomes the slave of models and studio-pro-
perties—has the privileges of a god in the day
of a creation. The will in its purity is expressed
in this type of art. The word Beauty is but
an abbreviation for the evidence of this pure
expression of artistic will.
The real test of portraiture lies with this, that
be the vision expressed of a high or of a common
order, power is shown of portraying the sitter
as his personality affects the painter—though
that sitter, if we know him, may have come
into our own world in an altogether different
light. Then we have truth to nature, of a
profounder order altogether than a mere reflec-
tion of surface. Then we see life as it is mirrored
THE HON. CECIL BARING BY AMBROSE MCEVOY
everything. Trappings on the person fade out
of sight, in the painting. There is reflected a
mood, of which we are sometimes conscious in
life, in which nothing seems to come between us
and the spirit of the person who advances
towards us.
It was in The Studio for November 1907
that I drew attention to Mr. Ambrose McEvoy
as a painter of interior genre, as an artist with
the gift of saturating his subject with an atmo-
sphere that quickened the imagination of the
spectator. He showed that first sign of a
positive artistic mind, the instinctive selection
of a special aspect of life in obedience to mood ;
the instinctive rejection of everything irrelevant
to it. One thing accepted and another let go
from a choice made from “ within ”—made,
that is, by Life itself. For the cast of an
artist’s mind is thrown out of the mould of
nature like the form of his body.
Selections made by temperament
are natural, they are Nature’s
own'; as they make themselves
felt in art they move us with the
power of something elemental.
They speak for Nature in a way
in which the more conscious
choice of the intellect, with its
assertion of its independence,
does not. To the extent to
which in a work of art we are
compelled to bow to this force
of fundamental personal expres-
sion are we in the presence of
that which will defy the revisions
of the judgment of fashion, and
of that which will endure while
the surface on which it is shown
remains intact.
The art of Van Dyck has been
praised by a philosopher because
it placed the painter’s own in-
terpretation of life on Life, and
was not merely negative in the
perfection of its representation.
True to his own vision of life
that painter expressed the most
graceful aspect of the Court.
And he is to be distinguished
from a flatterer, as one who
takes a high view of a man
is to be distinguished from a
flatterer.
78
The soul of a subject-picture—a subject-
picture in any but the most negative academic
sense—resides with a world, personal to the
artist, projected in it. The artist—unless he
becomes the slave of models and studio-pro-
perties—has the privileges of a god in the day
of a creation. The will in its purity is expressed
in this type of art. The word Beauty is but
an abbreviation for the evidence of this pure
expression of artistic will.
The real test of portraiture lies with this, that
be the vision expressed of a high or of a common
order, power is shown of portraying the sitter
as his personality affects the painter—though
that sitter, if we know him, may have come
into our own world in an altogether different
light. Then we have truth to nature, of a
profounder order altogether than a mere reflec-
tion of surface. Then we see life as it is mirrored
THE HON. CECIL BARING BY AMBROSE MCEVOY