DOI Heft:
No. 349 (April 1922)
DOI Artikel:The Crawhalls of Mr. Liam Burrell's collection
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21395#0194
THE CRAWHALLS OF MR. WIL-
LIAM BURRELL'S COLLECTION.
IF you were to offer Mr. Burrell a Degas,
a Monticelli, or a Matthew Maris, he
would probably ponder long before de-
ciding to purchase. He would have it
sent home for a few days, examined in
different lights, perhaps even hung on his
walls, and seriously discussed and con-
sidered. And then would come the
decision, for or against. But if you offered
him a Crawhall he would succumb at once.
Now there are several reasons for this.
One is that Mr. Burrell, early in his career
as a busy Glasgow shipowner, began to
take an interest in art and to buy pictures,
just about the time when Joseph Crawhall,
an intimate of the young Glasgow painters
of the day, used to come a good deal to the
Clyde city. He brought his work with
him, and from the first Mr. Burrell was
interested and had also some personal
association with the artist. This interest,
through well-nigh forty years, he has never
lost, and though, aesthetically speaking,
he may have repented of much, he has
never repented of Crawhall. 0 0
And thus it has come about that he has
the largest, and, on the whole, the finest
collection of the works of Joseph Crawhall
extant. His only rival in this respect is
Mr. W. A. Coats, who owns some of the
very best of the artist's pictures ; but
while in quality they do not excel Mr.
Burrell's, they fall far short of them in
number—so that to have a just idea of the
scope and range of Crawhall's talent, a
knowledge of the Burrell pictures is in-
dispensable, more especially as they illus-
trate all his methods and cover all periods
of his career. 0 0 0 0
Mr. Burrell has, it is well known, many
fine pictures by other men and of other
schools. He has been greatly attracted by
the French painters, both romantic and
impressionist; by the Dutchman, Matthew
Maris; by the Bavarian, Muhrman. Works
by Hogarth, Reynolds, and Raeburn figure
in his gallery and represent British painting
of the eighteenth century, while of the
nineteenth, Crawhall and Cecil Lawson—
the latter in one example only—are almost
the sole representatives of our native school.
The distinctive clou, however, not only
Vol, LXXXIII.—No. 349. April 1923.
because of numbers, but of artistic achieve-
ment, of the Burrell Collection, is the
Crawhall element. 0 0 0 0
He was a unique artist. There was no
other contemporary with whom he might
be compared, or predecessor from whom
he might be said to have derived. It is
difficult, in speaking of him, to use any
but the language of unmeasured eulogy.
Of his kind he was as near perfection as
our limited human faculties can reach.
He is allied, to some extent, by the deli-
cacy of his perceptions, the sureness of
his touch, and his instinct for “ placing,"
to the greatest names in Japanese art—
not because his art is Eastern in character,
for it is instinct with race, but because he
was temperamentally of the same sort.
He had the same eye for essential incisive
detail, the same nervous faculty of pregnant
touch, the same intense interest in his
subject matter, as the best Japanese
masters. And this, not because he imi-
tated them, but because he was so made
himself. The Japanese painters attracted
him intensely, because he felt his kinship
to them. 00000
On account of his British proclivity for
sport as connected with animals, it was
natural that he should become what we
call an animal painter, though it would be
difficult to associate him with the names
Landseer, Ansdell, etc., which such a
designation recalls to British minds.
Nothing more unlike could be imagined.
The animal world appealed to him more
than the world of humans, and one almost
suspects that he considered, of the two,
the latter the inferior one. At any rate
he lavished on the former all his skill and
powers of observation, making it the
material for his incomparable pictures
in water-colour and gouache. For the oil
medium he seems to have had no personal
use, probably feeling it too heavy for his
purpose, and some known early essays in
that genre do not seem to have survived.
He was both physically and artistically a
light-weight, but never jockey of that sort
rode more surely to victory. The scope
of his knowledge of the animal kingdom
was prodigious. No bird or beast, one
might almost say no insect, was unfamiliar
to him, as the astonishing series of draw-
ings for “ Reynard the Fox " (not yet,
177
LIAM BURRELL'S COLLECTION.
IF you were to offer Mr. Burrell a Degas,
a Monticelli, or a Matthew Maris, he
would probably ponder long before de-
ciding to purchase. He would have it
sent home for a few days, examined in
different lights, perhaps even hung on his
walls, and seriously discussed and con-
sidered. And then would come the
decision, for or against. But if you offered
him a Crawhall he would succumb at once.
Now there are several reasons for this.
One is that Mr. Burrell, early in his career
as a busy Glasgow shipowner, began to
take an interest in art and to buy pictures,
just about the time when Joseph Crawhall,
an intimate of the young Glasgow painters
of the day, used to come a good deal to the
Clyde city. He brought his work with
him, and from the first Mr. Burrell was
interested and had also some personal
association with the artist. This interest,
through well-nigh forty years, he has never
lost, and though, aesthetically speaking,
he may have repented of much, he has
never repented of Crawhall. 0 0
And thus it has come about that he has
the largest, and, on the whole, the finest
collection of the works of Joseph Crawhall
extant. His only rival in this respect is
Mr. W. A. Coats, who owns some of the
very best of the artist's pictures ; but
while in quality they do not excel Mr.
Burrell's, they fall far short of them in
number—so that to have a just idea of the
scope and range of Crawhall's talent, a
knowledge of the Burrell pictures is in-
dispensable, more especially as they illus-
trate all his methods and cover all periods
of his career. 0 0 0 0
Mr. Burrell has, it is well known, many
fine pictures by other men and of other
schools. He has been greatly attracted by
the French painters, both romantic and
impressionist; by the Dutchman, Matthew
Maris; by the Bavarian, Muhrman. Works
by Hogarth, Reynolds, and Raeburn figure
in his gallery and represent British painting
of the eighteenth century, while of the
nineteenth, Crawhall and Cecil Lawson—
the latter in one example only—are almost
the sole representatives of our native school.
The distinctive clou, however, not only
Vol, LXXXIII.—No. 349. April 1923.
because of numbers, but of artistic achieve-
ment, of the Burrell Collection, is the
Crawhall element. 0 0 0 0
He was a unique artist. There was no
other contemporary with whom he might
be compared, or predecessor from whom
he might be said to have derived. It is
difficult, in speaking of him, to use any
but the language of unmeasured eulogy.
Of his kind he was as near perfection as
our limited human faculties can reach.
He is allied, to some extent, by the deli-
cacy of his perceptions, the sureness of
his touch, and his instinct for “ placing,"
to the greatest names in Japanese art—
not because his art is Eastern in character,
for it is instinct with race, but because he
was temperamentally of the same sort.
He had the same eye for essential incisive
detail, the same nervous faculty of pregnant
touch, the same intense interest in his
subject matter, as the best Japanese
masters. And this, not because he imi-
tated them, but because he was so made
himself. The Japanese painters attracted
him intensely, because he felt his kinship
to them. 00000
On account of his British proclivity for
sport as connected with animals, it was
natural that he should become what we
call an animal painter, though it would be
difficult to associate him with the names
Landseer, Ansdell, etc., which such a
designation recalls to British minds.
Nothing more unlike could be imagined.
The animal world appealed to him more
than the world of humans, and one almost
suspects that he considered, of the two,
the latter the inferior one. At any rate
he lavished on the former all his skill and
powers of observation, making it the
material for his incomparable pictures
in water-colour and gouache. For the oil
medium he seems to have had no personal
use, probably feeling it too heavy for his
purpose, and some known early essays in
that genre do not seem to have survived.
He was both physically and artistically a
light-weight, but never jockey of that sort
rode more surely to victory. The scope
of his knowledge of the animal kingdom
was prodigious. No bird or beast, one
might almost say no insect, was unfamiliar
to him, as the astonishing series of draw-
ings for “ Reynard the Fox " (not yet,
177