Studio: international art (85.1923)

WILLIAM WALCOT'S ETCHINGS

With the artistic seal characteristic of his
eager, enthusiastic temperament he has
pictured these busy rivers, with big
buildings on their shores and live craft
upon their waters, and he has pictured
them with imagination, and with some-
thing, perhaps, of a larger dream in his
vision. This sense of dream I feel almost
inseparable from Walcot's vision of the
modern world. Even at King Charles's
statue at Charing Cross his delicately
vivacious lines seem to charm us away
from a realisation of the “ hub of the
universe; ” while in his graphic con-
ceptions of Westminster or the Strand,
of Edinburgh or Glasgow, Oxford, Cam-
bridge, Paris, I look at the familiar build-
ings and their animate circumstance as
through an atmosphere of pictorial en-
chantment rather than actuality. Yet, when

Walcot projects his imagination into the
far away past, and brings Pagan Rome to
life again, the spell of his constructive
vision is so powerful that all seems indis-
putably real. To look through that
wonderful series of noble plates known
as the u Roman Compositions,” and
surrender one's imagination to the magic
of their actual suggestion, is to realise
that among the ancients Walcot is verily
at home. And though in modern garb
he may walk about the streets of London
and Oxford, and even stop by the way to
take his pictorial joy of St. Mary-le-
Strand or the entrance to Christ Church,
one suspects the ends of a Roman toga
are tucked mysteriously within the ampli-
tude of his British ** Plus Fours,” and he
has really hurried away from an archi-
tectural consultation with the Emperor

“ 42 ND STREET.” DRY-POINT BY
WILLIAM WALCOT, R.E., HON.
F.R.I.B.A. (PUBLISHED BY A. C. AND
H. W. DICKINS, INC., NEW YORK)

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