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#0094
The Portrait Paintings oj Ambrose McEvoy
The artist may almost be said to have
begun his career as a portrait painter with the
Portrait of a Young Man in the Tate Gallery
(presented, with other modern works, by the
Second National Loan Exhibition—“ Woman
and Child in Art ”) and Madame in the
Luxembourg (a feature of the Edmund Davis
gift). In character the latter work resembles
the subject-pictures of his youth. To see it is
to read a novel. Nominally a portrait, it is a
masterpiece of genre painting in the appeal it
makes to imagination. The subject is that of a
woman with profile reflected in a mirror of
Victorian pattern on the mantelpiece. In later
portraits the painter has risen to a transcen-
dental order of colour. The romance of his
subject-paintings has been exchanged for the
ecstasy of a new vision, resulting in a “ spiri-
tualization of the external appearance ”—to
use a phrase in which the achievement of a
great French Intimist has been described.
Art of the kind we have set forth must often
tremble between suc-
cesses and disasters, but
at least it is further re-
moved than any other
sort of painting from the
factory-work into which
portraiture often de-
generates.
Those who believe that
Mr. McEvoy’s attainment
in portraiture is too im-
portant for him to be
permitted to return to
the more self-indulgent
work of subject-painting
would perhaps point with
greatest confidence to his
portrait of a boy, Lord
Ivor Spencer Churchill.
Here the attainment of
a difficult effect has con-
cerned him less than in
many of his portraits,
but the picture exhibits
a quality of his art that
must be added to those
we have already named.
It reveals the sympathy
that is the life of all great
portrait art, the key to
a profound interpreta-
86
tion of the sitter. Sensibility, in the degree to
which it is exhibited by our painter, is a fine-
spun thing. But it represents the forces of life
in their most highly organized state. It is
always threatened from below, and to-day. from
every side. And when hostilities cease we may
find that modem war by its character has
created in the world a condition of mind
unfavourable to the manifestation of a,ny sen-
sitive thing. Meanwhile the writer likes to
think of a portrait of the type of Mr. McEvoy’s
Duchess of Marlborough, flanked by ancestral
representations gorgeous and materialistic,
standing for the visionary modern mind.
The preoccupation with the sitter in a psy-
chical rather than material aspect that we have
noted will not, I think, be without an effect on
the English school. And this will be so even if it
can be shown that the elusive personal character
of Mr. McEvoy’s achievement prevents it at the
moment from contributing to the tendencies
that are most in evidence in current exhibitions.
THE ARTIST’S MOTHER BY AMBROSE MCEVOY
The artist may almost be said to have
begun his career as a portrait painter with the
Portrait of a Young Man in the Tate Gallery
(presented, with other modern works, by the
Second National Loan Exhibition—“ Woman
and Child in Art ”) and Madame in the
Luxembourg (a feature of the Edmund Davis
gift). In character the latter work resembles
the subject-pictures of his youth. To see it is
to read a novel. Nominally a portrait, it is a
masterpiece of genre painting in the appeal it
makes to imagination. The subject is that of a
woman with profile reflected in a mirror of
Victorian pattern on the mantelpiece. In later
portraits the painter has risen to a transcen-
dental order of colour. The romance of his
subject-paintings has been exchanged for the
ecstasy of a new vision, resulting in a “ spiri-
tualization of the external appearance ”—to
use a phrase in which the achievement of a
great French Intimist has been described.
Art of the kind we have set forth must often
tremble between suc-
cesses and disasters, but
at least it is further re-
moved than any other
sort of painting from the
factory-work into which
portraiture often de-
generates.
Those who believe that
Mr. McEvoy’s attainment
in portraiture is too im-
portant for him to be
permitted to return to
the more self-indulgent
work of subject-painting
would perhaps point with
greatest confidence to his
portrait of a boy, Lord
Ivor Spencer Churchill.
Here the attainment of
a difficult effect has con-
cerned him less than in
many of his portraits,
but the picture exhibits
a quality of his art that
must be added to those
we have already named.
It reveals the sympathy
that is the life of all great
portrait art, the key to
a profound interpreta-
86
tion of the sitter. Sensibility, in the degree to
which it is exhibited by our painter, is a fine-
spun thing. But it represents the forces of life
in their most highly organized state. It is
always threatened from below, and to-day. from
every side. And when hostilities cease we may
find that modem war by its character has
created in the world a condition of mind
unfavourable to the manifestation of a,ny sen-
sitive thing. Meanwhile the writer likes to
think of a portrait of the type of Mr. McEvoy’s
Duchess of Marlborough, flanked by ancestral
representations gorgeous and materialistic,
standing for the visionary modern mind.
The preoccupation with the sitter in a psy-
chical rather than material aspect that we have
noted will not, I think, be without an effect on
the English school. And this will be so even if it
can be shown that the elusive personal character
of Mr. McEvoy’s achievement prevents it at the
moment from contributing to the tendencies
that are most in evidence in current exhibitions.
THE ARTIST’S MOTHER BY AMBROSE MCEVOY