Studio: international art (86.1923)

TWO LANCASHIRE PAINTERS

SAMPLER IN DRAWN THREAD, EMBROIDERED
WITH BLACK AND GOLD. BY A. WARD
(L.C.C. CENTRAL SCHOOL OF ARTS AND CRAFTS)

TWO LANCASHIRE PAINTERS. BY
ADRIAN BERNARD KLEIN, M.B.E.

COUPE and Lee are almost unaccount-
able in these days. There is significance
in the fact that men of the textile mills
and of the world of calico prints should go
out on a Sunday and paint perfectly
naturally in the classical style of Girtin
and Cotman. Yet neither has yet gazed
upon a Girtin! 0 0 0 0

Surely the classical manner must be a
mode of expression, as innate, as deeply
implanted as national character itself.
Whenever an Englishman of character
takes to painting, untouched by the
destructive sophistication of the schools
and clubs and cliques, this is how he will
paint—like Crome and Cotman and Varley.
These men should be kept, by friends
of foresight exercising every imaginable
will, from contact with artists, with sketch
clubs, with books on art, with galleries :
from all but their beloved Lancashire mills
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and Derbyshire dales and Huddersfield
chimneys. The schools may be destructive
of talent; a good painter may be too
trustful of the knowledge of his seniors
to remain unwarped by their specious
criticisms. a a a 0 a
The early Englishmen quite frankly
avowed themselves pastoral poets. They
were unashamed sentimentalists, and when-
ever English art rises to the heights it is
sentimental and romantic, and never
ironic nor intellectual, as is Irish or
French art, which the English have been
taking like unpleasant medicine for these
last twenty years. It is not the national
genius to be subtle and remorselessly
logical. Thomas Hardy comes of the same
line as Turner and the early Millais. This
deep sentiment is religious and mystical
in Blake and Francis Thompson and
Elgar ; it is pastoral, perhaps pantheistic
in Turner and Hardy. 000
So we have with us now two water-
colourists of the North of England whose