Studio: international art (86.1923)

STUDIO-TALK.

(From our own Correspondents.)

LONDON.—Mrs. Gertrude Massey's
water-colour painting reproduced in the
accompanying plate is a pleasant departure
from the artist's regular practice and shows
a comparatively unfamiliar side of her work.
As a busy miniature painter—Mrs. Massey
has a record of some 800 commissioned
works, of which twenty-five have been for
members of the Royal Family—her oppor-
tunities for landscape painting are neces-
sarily limited, but, like so many artists who
enjoy excursions into new fields, she wel-
comes chances of attacking problems out-
side the range of her customary experience.
Landscape painting gives her freedom
to please herself and to paint what appeals

to her without consciousness of any of
those restrictions which are inevitable
when the wishes of a sitter have to be taken
into account, and it offers scope for the
exercise of faculties of observation and
selection which the portrait painter is
scarcely able to use or, at all events, cannot
apply in the same way. This particular
example of Mrs. Massey's open air work is
notable for its clever adaptation of realities
and for its ingenious system of simplifica-
tion by which the complexities of nature
are reduced to order and made subject to a
judicious convention; and it is excellent in
its balance of pattern and colour design.
The summariness and directness of the tech-
nical method employed help to give an effect
of freshness that is decidedly agreeable, a
The summer exhibition of the New

“REPAVING OXFORD STREET "
ETCHING BY IAN STRANG
(New English Art Club, June 1923)

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