Studio: international art (90.1925)

MR. CLARKE'S " FAUST" PICTURES—MACPHERSON COLLECTION

of salvation by proxy, is interpreted by
Mr. Clarke in terms of comedy, the divine
comedy of the human spirit. There is in
Clarke's pictures no trace of the Germanic
idyll, no presentation of youth as inno-
cence and joy unalloyed. Light is faint in
his embryonic humanity, his self-centred
little country-town people, and shines
brightly only from the wise Mephistopheles.
Faust, the meshed old doctor, giving up
his struggle against his own darkness, is
amoeba to Buddha in relationto the smiling,
patiently presiding devil who significantly
first appears to him not rising sulphurous
from lower depths but serenely materialis-
ing above the concentration point of his
desperate reveries. And the rejuvenated
Faust, like maid Marguerite ere she falls
sick of love, is chained, deep in the glooms
of youth. There is from first to last in these
pictures no sunlight, but rather light fil-
tered, coming as through a glass darkly.
And it is this quality of filtered light,
helping to make him so interesting a
commentator on Goethe's tale, that is one
of the distinctive charms of Mr. Clarke's
work. It is not for nothing that he is by
choice a designer of storied windows
richly dight, and in the case of these Faust
pictures the dimmed light is truly religious,
binding together as in a single medium
his wealth of fantastic invention and re-
maining in the mind when the book is
closed, and the illustrations flow together
until the detail is lost in the whole. a
The enchantment of Mr. Clarke's use of
colour, leading one while under its charm
to wish, perhaps a little rashly, that all
colourists might serve an apprenticeship
as stainers of glass and moving one to
declare that his medium is colour, pure
illumination, is present also in much of his
black and white work. This too shines
as things shine when the sun is veiled,
clear and concise in line, in texture rich
and deep. His sense of what is called de-
sign is, as yet, a little lacking in vigour,
and there is room for improvement in his
combination and distribution of masses.
But the happy qualities that are the in-
communicable essence of his work will be
for many a possessor of the new u Faust"
ample compensation for slight defects in
the handling. Dorothy M. Richardson.
224

" SIR GEORGE BRYDGES ROD-
NEY." MEZZOTINT BY V.
GREEN AFTER HUGH BARON

(Macpherson Collection)

THE MACPHERSON COLLECTION

THE collection assembled by Mr. A.
G. H. Macpherson, son of a well-
known Indian judge, and for many years
a steward of the Royal Calcutta Yacht
Club, represents the only attempt that
has ever been made to form a complete
pictorial record of the sea history of the
Anglo-Saxon race. As such, it is not
only unique, but of immense importance
because it can never be duplicated, owing
to the increasing demand for sea prints, a
It would be interesting and not un-
amusing to speculate as to the mental
processes gone through by a critic of the
more " transcendental " type when con-
fronted by anything like the Macpherson
Collection. Exaggerating and distorting
the truth that in the last analysis it is the
treatment that makes the picture, he goes
so far as to say that the subject does not
matter at all. The portrait at once brings
this aesthetic creed ad absurdum (for if
the subject does not matter, the fashion-
able painter might well present Mrs.
Smythe-Smythe with a painting of her
butler instead of her own haughty