Studio: international art (79.1920)

THE ROYAL ACADEMY EXHIBITION, 1920

“ LEOPARD KILLING A BIRD”
(STATUETTE, BRONZE). BY
FRANK LUTIGER

has turned his powers of draughtsmanship
and his pleasant feeling for colour arrange-
ment to excellent account. Mr. Spencer
Watson and Mr. Moser have displayed an
unusual degree of artistic conscience, and
have achieved pictorial results which are
finely decorative, in the best sense of the
word, and in which there is no evasion of
those subtleties of characterization and of
those adjustments of harmonious colour
v/hich are the fundamentals in all great
decoration. Mr. Anning Bell's And the
Women stood Afar Off has a stately severity
and dignity of style which can be sincerely
praised, and the two compositions by
Mr. C. H. Shannon, The Childhood of
Bacchus and The Wise and Foolish Virgins,
if not free from conventionality, are well
conceived and handled with scholarly re-
finement. There is something of the same
reticence in Mr. Glyn Philpot's grim
composition, The Coast of Britain, a
powerful but unattractive picture; but
the artist's personality is more charac-
teristically expressed in his two portrait
studies, The Student with a Book, and
The Rice Family, in which he has had more
opportunity to show his executive resource.
Skill of brushwork and sumptuousness of
colour distinguish Mr. Moira's Blessing the
Gospelles ; there is a typical robustness of
manner in Mr. Bundy's humorous Scandal;
and The Convalescent by Sir John Lavery,
the gay little Pantaloon by Mr W. E.
Webster, and the masterly study, The*
Burgomaster, by Mr. James Clark are
performances of unquestionable merit.

128

Of much interest, too, is the Oratio
Obliqua, by Mr. Walter Bayes, another
of those workings out of a problem of
illumination which he treats with so much
inventiveness and originality. 0 a
Among the portrait painters Sir William
Orpen claims, as usual, special attention
by the vigorous characterization and mascu-
line certainty of his work, and a place of
importance must also be assigned to Mr.
W. W. Russell, whose delightfully humor-
ous Mr. Minney is one of the chief successes
of the exhibition. Mr. Sims, too, has
done himself the fullest credit with his
portrait group of The Hon. Esmond Harms-
worth, M.P., and Mrs. Harmsworth, and his
exquisitely accomplished A Lady of Ham-
mersmith ; and Mr. J. J. Shannon, Sir
William Llewellyn, and Mr. Glazebrook
contribute notable canvases. Mr. Melton
Fisher has two portraits of young girls
which are singularly happy in their sug-
gestion of the daintiness of youth ; and
Mr. Connard's Miss Mimpriss, Mr. Bundy's
Commander P. T. Dean, V.C., M.P.,
Mr. Patry's Kathleen, Daughter of H. F.
Parshall, Esq., D.Sc., Mr. Jack's Capt.
R. J. Jack, R.T.O., and Mr. Oswald
Birley's Glyn Philpot, Esq. A.R.A. deserve
to be specially mentioned. 0 0

Some of the most memorable pictures
in the Academy are to be found among
the landscapes and records of open-air
subjects. Mr. Arnesby Brown's atmos-
pheric studies—particularly his admirable
Gathering Clouds—Mr. Connard's spark-
ling Spring, Mr. Clausen's The Roadside