Studio: international art (87.1924)

MANCHESTER—NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE

istic which made it not surprising that, in
her student days at the Liverpool School
of Art under the guidance of Mr. C. J.
Allen, Miss Jessie M. Riding (now Mrs.
Gardner) should have amassed three gold
medals, a travelling scholarship, “ Dis-
tinction in Modelling ” in the first year of
the “ New ” Board Scheme, resulting in
a Royal Exhibition to the Royal College of
Art, South Kensington, for five years, and,
finally, the R.C.A. diploma in modelling—
not to mention other recognitions. 0

The work which she is producing at her
present home (Leicester) grows stronger,
more deeply true and delicately con-
sidered, but shows all the best of the char-
acteristics which brought her early success.

When, upon examination of some senti-
mentally undignified war memorial, some
bulbous or banal statue in our public
places, we begin to think that England
has few fine sculptors, we err. It is not
the absence of sculptors of power, but the
presence of selectors of an artless type,
which brings our agony. We need not
more sculptors to produce so much as
more authorities to sanction the erection
of such monuments as that To Kisses in
the Luxembourg Gardens. Sculptors such
as Jessie M. Riding can show us the way—
if we will take it. J. W. S.

MANCHESTER. — The art master
who is also an art worker is
powerful, not only by precept but by
example. Indeed, art is a subject in which
it is almost a necessity that he who teaches
shall have also wrought. Mr. W. O.
Miller's students at Manchester School of
Art may be expected to profit by any
examination open to them of this able
work done in various kinds under one
imaginative inspiration. In painting Mr.
Miller’s work is delicate and forceful, and
brings with it an interest, perhaps all the
greater from the sense of the “ round ”
which comes from his ability in handling
pottery and kindred subjects. To turn from
a set of varied and vivacious pottery
chessmen, exhibited recently at the Old
Students’ Exhibition at the Royal College
of Art, South Kensington, to Mr. Miller’s
paintings in water-colour or gouache is
to be made aware of a widely seeing
temperament demonstrating itself both

"PORTRAIT OF A CHILD.” WATER-
COLOUR BY W. O. MILLER

in method and in spirit. Mr. Miller’s
architectural paintings of churches in
Italy show him in yet another light, and
promote an understanding of his faculty
for deep and intensive study, and his rich
and satisfying colour sense. As a painter
in gouache he shows the great beauty and
possibility of the medium when treated
with virility. 00000

NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE.—It is
not remarkable that the portraiture
of Mrs. Beryl Fowler is desired by people
in the North of England, for there is
a balance in her work which assures her
sitters that they will appear neither as the
creatures of a higher nor of a lower world,
but as human beings. There is a suggestion
that she realises the fact (sometimes for-
gotten) that force without sweetness is not
strong but weak, and, conversely, that
sweetness without force ceases to be sweet
and becomes mawkish. Mrs. Fowler is
admittedly one of the first portrait painters
of Newcastle, as various distinguished
sitters can testify. Her studies of children
show her strength particularly, for most
painters know the strain and the intense

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