DOI Heft:
No. 301 (April 1918)
DOI Artikel:Wedmore, Frederick: Albert Goodwin, R.W.S.
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21356#0086
Albert Goodwin, R.IV.S.
product is Drawings, you try to get more of
their productions, for you know their work so
well that, just because you are ready to receive
it, each fresh piece reveals a new facet of the
familiar, and now and then the audacious,
though generally the discreet talent.
Let us come to particulars, and let us begin
them with a reference to the opinions of Mr.
Ruskin ; and here it is necessary to crave the
indulgence of the most youthful and the very
rawest of those to whom Mr. Ruskin is known
only by his faults—his merits and his qualities
being in that amusing world now steadily
ignored.
About this matter one explanatory word. Mr.
Ruskin, we know—and this is an excellent
opportunity for saying it—is rarely either almost
right or very nearly wrong. Much, much oftener
he has been very admirably right or very badly
wrong. Is evidence of this required ? Must I
cite cases in point ? What is easier—what need
be more convincing—on the one hand, than to
reflect upon his untired ecstasy when he finds
comfortably before him the long-drawn, faith-
fully imitative labours of that so dexterous
mere copyist of Nature, William Hunt ? Again,
what is to be thought of the writer on Still Life
Painting who could leave Chardin unnoticed ?
And what, on the other hand, may not be con-
ceded to our subtlest and most inspired of the
exponents of Turner—to the Critic who was at
the same time boldly true in his persistently
held and frequently expressed opinion that the
finished Water-Colours of Samuel Prout—those
that were executed for Exhibition purposes, for
Gallery walls—were, whatever may have been
their popular recommendations, entirely inferior
to his pencil drawings ? Prout's pencil draw-
ings, as it were in the twinkling of an eye,
transfer us to the Calais shore or Calais place,
to the quaint bridge of Ulm, or to Sion in the
Valais with its graceful balconies, its sheltering
arcades.
With this short bird's-eye view in our minds
of Ruskin in error and of Ruskin in truth, we
may the more correctly appraise the worth of
what this fashionable Critic of his period—a
writer for all periods, as long as English lasts—
thought of the Water-Colours of Goodwin, as
one by one they were brought before him, to be
*' PARIS AT REST '
So
WATER-COLOUR BY ALBERT GOODWIN, R.W.S.
product is Drawings, you try to get more of
their productions, for you know their work so
well that, just because you are ready to receive
it, each fresh piece reveals a new facet of the
familiar, and now and then the audacious,
though generally the discreet talent.
Let us come to particulars, and let us begin
them with a reference to the opinions of Mr.
Ruskin ; and here it is necessary to crave the
indulgence of the most youthful and the very
rawest of those to whom Mr. Ruskin is known
only by his faults—his merits and his qualities
being in that amusing world now steadily
ignored.
About this matter one explanatory word. Mr.
Ruskin, we know—and this is an excellent
opportunity for saying it—is rarely either almost
right or very nearly wrong. Much, much oftener
he has been very admirably right or very badly
wrong. Is evidence of this required ? Must I
cite cases in point ? What is easier—what need
be more convincing—on the one hand, than to
reflect upon his untired ecstasy when he finds
comfortably before him the long-drawn, faith-
fully imitative labours of that so dexterous
mere copyist of Nature, William Hunt ? Again,
what is to be thought of the writer on Still Life
Painting who could leave Chardin unnoticed ?
And what, on the other hand, may not be con-
ceded to our subtlest and most inspired of the
exponents of Turner—to the Critic who was at
the same time boldly true in his persistently
held and frequently expressed opinion that the
finished Water-Colours of Samuel Prout—those
that were executed for Exhibition purposes, for
Gallery walls—were, whatever may have been
their popular recommendations, entirely inferior
to his pencil drawings ? Prout's pencil draw-
ings, as it were in the twinkling of an eye,
transfer us to the Calais shore or Calais place,
to the quaint bridge of Ulm, or to Sion in the
Valais with its graceful balconies, its sheltering
arcades.
With this short bird's-eye view in our minds
of Ruskin in error and of Ruskin in truth, we
may the more correctly appraise the worth of
what this fashionable Critic of his period—a
writer for all periods, as long as English lasts—
thought of the Water-Colours of Goodwin, as
one by one they were brought before him, to be
*' PARIS AT REST '
So
WATER-COLOUR BY ALBERT GOODWIN, R.W.S.