Studio: international art (83.1922)

“ MR. MINNEY.” OIL PAINTING
BY WALTER W. RUSSELL, A.R.A.

(National Gallery of British Art)

THE ART OF WALTER W. RUSSELL,
A.R.A. BY MALCOLM C. SALAMAN.

FOR many years before popular recogni-
tion came to him, Walter Russell was
painting, with the modesty of a true
student interested always in problems
relating art to nature, pictures of quality,
of distinction. There were portraits in
which the humanity was expressive in
pictorial conditions, gracious and vital;
landscapes there were in which nature
herself suggested to a vision of ready
artistic response the rhythms of form and
tone, whether it was the growth and
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grouping of trees that offered motives
for beautiful design, or whether it was
wide expanses of country, or intimate
stretches of English sea-coast, that caught
the passing influences of light and atmos-
phere, and in the folds of their skirts of
happy chance found painter's poetry.
These were welcomed in the galleries,
but, while the Academic eye was long in
discerning that the painter was worthy of
fellowship with the elect, the artists them-
selves knew it, and held him always in
high esteem. This appreciation of his
fellows, sweeter to him doubtless than
popular acclamation which he never