Studio: international art (88.1924)

MR. BURLEIGH BRUHL AND HIS WORK

"HAVEN UNDER THE HILL (LEIGH)." WATER-
COLOUR BY L. BURLEIGH BRUHL, P.B.W.S.

(Walker Art Gal., Liverpool Autumn Exhn., 1924)

out the British Isles, and he has the rather he has the valuable faculty of approaching

remarkable record of having exhibited his work with serious conviction and of

for thirty years without a break in the dealing with it honestly and faithfully,

galleries of the Royal Institute of Water and he neither evades difficulties, nor tries

Colour Painters—beginning, indeed, some to get out of them by half-hearted com-

while before he started to practise painting promises. There appears also in all he

professionally—and he has shown some does the simplicity of the student, that

twenty pictures altogether at the Royal frankness of belief in the infallibility of

Academy. Among his greater administra- nature which is the best foundation on

tive successes must be reckoned the which an artist can build, and there is,

revitalising of the Old Dudley Art Society, as well, a straightforwardness of statement

which, under his judicious direction, has that is as attractive as it is convincing,

recovered much of its original high Yet, with all his simplicity of outlook and

standing as an association of professional directness of realisation, Mr. Bruhl is not

artists of well proved capacity. a a merely a matter-of-fact painter of obvious

Executive ability alone would not, things; his work in neither literal nor

however, have brought him to the position commonplace. He has, indeed, a very

he occupies if there had not been some- definite dramatic sense, and he responds

thing in his art which had power to with much readiness to the sentiment of

arrest attention. That something can, nature ; and he appreciates fully both what

perhaps, be best summed up as sincerity : are the essentials of a good subject and

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