Studio: international art (87.1924)

E. A. WALTON, P.R.S.W., R.S.A.
MEMORIAL EXHIBITION AT
GLASGOW. BY E. A. TAYLOR. 0

THERE is always a web of sadness as
well as a glow of inspiration about a
memorial exhibition—sad for the many
friends of the artist, who recall him again
to life in familiar places, and in each
picture remember happy as well as strug-
gling and enthusiastic associations,—inspir-
ing to the younger generation of artists,
who see and feel a touch of the spirit
necessary to produce similar vast suc-
cesses of a life's attainment. That these
remarks will be especially true in the
present memorial exhibition of the late
Mr. E. A. Walton's work I have no doubt.
It is interesting, too, that it should be
primarily held in the McLellan Galleries,
Glasgow; in galleries and a city which in
themselves must have many silent memo-
ries of him. For some of these one must go
back some thirty-six years to the enthu-
siastic days of his close association with

"MISS MABEL CUTHBERTSON.” BY
E. A WALTON, P.R.S.W., R.S.A.

(By courtesy of Miss Cuthbertson)

“ The Glasgow School,” the name given
to a young group of artists whose work,
though entirely different, held the same
ideals for progress and for maintaining their
individuality. A common bond of sym-
pathy was the search for the greater things
in art than the mere quest of picture-
making so much in vogue at that time, an
outlook certainly most sympathetic towards
Walton's early evinced distinct individual-
ism. Confining himself at the commence-
ment of his career to landscapes, his first
large oil painting of that genre, entitled No-
vember, representing birch trees and rugged
pastureland, was shown in Glasgow in
1882, and in 1884 he exhibited a distinctly
personal canvas of Berwickshire Uplands.
The accompanying illustration of The
Abbot’s House, New Abbey, is a compara-
tively recent work, reminiscent of his
sojourn in a quaint old village in Dum-
fries-shire. There are probably few other
artists in Scotland who were as fond of
experimenting, or who had as close an
acquaintanceship with all the various
mediums of the artist’s craft. It was not
long before he launched into figure and
portrait painting. In them his subjects do
not stare at you as so many likenesses do ;
there is a something more alluring about
them than that, each one conveying a
charm and sensitiveness to beauty, colour
harmony and arrangement, which give
them a pictorially decorative quality un-
commonly pleasing, quite apart from their
resemblance to the sitters. Nor may one
ignore him as an artist in water-colour and
pastels, his mastery over both mediums
being at once individually arresting.
Amongst them one will find drawings
marvellously expressed in pastels and
water-colours on grey paper, brown paper,
millboard, linen or some other as attrac-
tively granulated surface, with a dexterous
use made of body colour that so far few
have surpassed. But space will not permit
of any further appreciation, others more
fully expressive may be found in The
Studio for August, 1902, under the
authorship of the talented curator of the
National Gallery of Scotland, Mr. James L.
Caw, and by Mr. A. Stodart Walker, in the
May number, 1913, both containing many
other illustrations included in the present
memorable exhibition. 000