Studio: international art (85.1923)

THE PAINTINGS OF PHILIP CONNARD, A.R.A.

provide cause of quarrel. An individual
personality. 00000
Mr. Connard is a native of lively Lanca-
shire : the directness of his county is in
his work, and her peculiar strength. He is
an example of what Lancashire could be,
if her vitality were not largely given over
to perusal of the latest football news and
thrilled examination of the pig-faced lady
in the travelling show; if, in fact, she
became cultured—when she might rule
England. Southport, Mr. Connard's town,
is, of all modern Lancastrian towns, the
most beautiful and gayest, and most likely
to produce such a son, and to have the
grace to be proud of him. She possesses
his Suffolk Pastoral and The Rat Catcher—
a masterpiece of art psychology, which, in
the colour and texture of a face, and the

droop of ill-nourished shoulders, tells the
tale of young poverty. Lest this presence
of meaning should shock, we hasten to add
that it is painted with almost uncanny
brilliance. This marvellous facility, this
lordship of the brush, would alone make
an artist conspicuous, if not entirely great.
It is a perfect body : but an intellect also
goes to the making of a great artist, that
the body may be properly directed to ex-
pound something. There is also needed
that other, often inconsidered, thing—a
soul—supplying the thing to be expounded.
It does not seem adulatory to claim for
Philip Connard all three possessions, after
having seen a work of his hung among
other work of a high order, and marvelled
to find how it reduced everything near it
to a dead stillness and silence. Movement

304

"STILL-LIFE.” OIL PAINTING
BY PHILIP CONNARD, A.R.A.