Studio: international art (83.1922)

THE ART OF WILLIAM SHACKLETON

“ SONG OF HORNING "
OIL PAINTING BY
W. SHACKLETON

man. For thirty-five years William
Shackleton has worked, passing through
one influence after another, never resting
content in other men's ideas. To see
his pictures historically is to remark how
the tone-structure of his mind grows
clearer and clearer, the heat of his purpose
throwing off the darker hues until the
core of it is revealed—an incandescence.
So the great men move, always from dark
to light, from the opaque, the immediate,
to the transparent, the symbolical. This
was the path that Turner trod, and, in
another art, Dante. 0000
What is the history of these meta-
morphoses through which W i 1 1 i a m
Shackleton has passed i To trace it will
not be useless, for he has retained from
each phase certain essential qualities of
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technique and aim that may be discovered
to-day if we analyse the secret of his
power. His selection of those qualities
has always been directed by one principle,
with which he started out as a boy, and
by which to-day he is as surely guided.
This principle is the conviction that the
visible world is the expression of invisible
mind ; that tangible beauty in art is the
harmonious issue of a union between the
seer and the seen. It is a perilous theory
for a painter ; he leaves the firm ground
of his objective art, and plunges into the
troubled waters of poetry. But the way
has been prepared for him by Lessing
and by Goethe. The former will teach
him when, and the latter where, to leap.

Acting upon the immature mind of the
young artist, it tempted him in his early