Part 8 (2/2)

In the background a beautiful chocolate balances and enforces the various shades of the shot-silk, and with severity that is fortunate

By aid of two red poppies, worn in the bodice, a final note in the chord is reached--a resonant and closing consonance; a beautiful work, certainly: I should call it a perfect ere it not that the drawing is a little too obvious: in places we can detect theof the very great lish Art Club co is more or less tentative, and I cannot entirely exempt from this criticism either Mr Steer, Mr

Clausen, or Mr Walter Sickert But this criticisreen field growing isthan the Acadelish Art Club than that it is the growing field Say that the crop looks thin, and that the yield will prove below the average, but do not deny that what harvest therehoeneration and look into its future, though we know that the summer months will disprove for better or for worse

Mr Bernard Sickert, the youngest inner, a five- or six-year-old painter, has made, froress, and this year he coly conclusive of a true originality of vision, and there is a certain ease of accomplishment in his hich tempts me to believe that a future is in store for him The differences of style in these two pictures do not affectinto the pictures, the differences are more apparent than real--the palette has been composed differently, but neither picture tells of any desire of a new outlook, or even to radically change his mode of expression The eye which observed and re”, over which a red moon rose like an apparition, observed also the ay with the life of passing sail and flag, and the green eatta”

I hardly knohich picture I prefer I saw first ”A Regatta”, and was struck by the beautiful drawing and painting of the line of boats, their noses thrust right up into the fore water of the picture, a little squadron advancing So well are these boats drawn that the unusual perspective (the picture was probably painted from a ) does not interrupt for a second our enjoyht stretches into the blue sea water, intense with signs of life, and the little white sails glint in the blue bay, and behind the high green hill the colours of a faintly-tinted evening fade slowly The picture is strangely complete, and it would be difficult to divine any reason for disliking it, even a”

is neither so striking nor so immediately attractive; its charentle picture, whose delicacy and si and pathetic shudder of co life which takes the end of a March day before the bud swells or a nest appears The faint chill twilight floats upon the field, and the red rey sky, beautifully graduated and full of the glaht The slope of the field, too--it is there the sheep are folded--is in admirable perspective On the left, beyond the hurdles, is a strip of green, perhaps a little out of tone, though I know such colour persists even in very receding lights; and high up on the right the blue night is beginning to show The sheep are folded in a turnip field, and the root-crop is being eaten down

The ed--there one has dropped on its knees and is digging at the udder of the passive eith that ferocious little gluttony which we knoell; another la with its hind hoof--you know the grotesqueof animal life, the pathos of the unconscious, the pity of transitory light A little u anywhere, and still the wandering forms of sheep and lano picture, spontaneous and si a painter possessed of a natural sentilected lected by Mr Steer, who seems prepared to dispense hat is known as _une atmosphere de tableau_ Any one of his three pictures will serve as an exairl in blue I cannot praise, not because I do not admire it, but because Mr MacColl, the art critic of the _Spectator_, our ablest art critic, himself a painter and a painter of talent, has declared it to be superior to a Romney I will quote his words: ”The word htly used, but e stand before this picture it is difficult to think of any collection in which it would look alish ests itself, because in the bright clear face and brown hair and large siood deal to recall that painter But Ro conventional in observation, however big in style”

To go one better than this, I should have to say the picture was as good as Velasquez, and to simply endorse Mr MacColl's words would be a second-hand sort of criticism to which I am not accusto of ard to this picture So I will say at once that I do not understand the introduction of Roument If comparison there must be, surely Mr Watts would furnish oneand in the execution the portrait seeaiety there is no trace in Mr

Steer's picture

The girl sits in a light wooden arm-chair--her arm stretched in front of her, the hands held between her knees--looking out of the picture soeratedof it in every portrait at all characteristic of our great eighteenth-century artist The portrait exhibited in this year's show of Old Masters in the Academy will do--the lady alks forward, her hands held in front of her boso frolaze I do not think that we find either that gaiety or those glazes in Mr Steer From many a Romney the cleaner has re of those pictures

But if I see very little Romney in Steer's picture, I am thankful that I see at least very rare distinction in the figuration of a beautiful and decorative ideal--a girl in blue sitting with her back to an open , full of the blue night, and on the other side the grey blind, yellowing slightly under the glare of the lamp I appreciate the very re and decoration I see rare distinction (weof Mr Steer) in his choice of what to draw

The colour scheme is well maintained, somewhat in the manner of Mr

Watts, but neither the blue of the dress nor the blue of the night is intrinsically beautiful, and we have only to think of the blues that Whistler or Manet would have found to understand how deficient they are

The drawing of the face is neither a synthesis, nor is it intimately characteristic of the irlish face with a curled ly shadohich does not express the nose The shoulders are there, that we are told, but the anato, and the body is without its natural thickness Nor is the drawing more explicit in its exterior lines than it is in its inner

There is hardly an arm in that sleeve; the elboould be difficult to find, and the construction of the waist and hips is uncertain; the drawing does not speak like Mr Sargent's Look across the room at his portrait of a lady in white satin and you will see there a shadow, so exact, so precise, so well understood, that the width of the body is placed beyond doubt

But the most radical fault in the portrait I have yet to point out; it is lacking in atirl, hardly any between the girl's head and the wall The laht effect is conveyed by what Mr MacColl would perhaps call a syirl's head We look in vain for transparent darknesses, lights surrounded by shadows, transposition of tones, and the aspect of things; the girl sits in a full diffused light, and were it not for the shadow on the wall and the shadow cast by the nose, sheof another picture by Mr Steer, ”Boulogne Sands”, Mr MacColl says: ”The children playing, the holiday enca thes, the dazzle of sand and sea, and over and through it all the chattering lights of noon” I seize upon the phrase, ”The people flaunting theested it to the writer is the detached colour in the picture; and the colours are detached because there is no atether; there are no attenuations, transpositions of tone--in a word, none of those coht and shade which make _une atmosphere de tableau_

And Mr Steer's picture is eneral tendency which for the last twenty years has widened the gulf between ested _la peinture claire_, and his suggestion has been developed by Roll, Monet, and others, until oil-painting has becohtly tinted Values have been diverted froinal mission, which was to build up _une atmosphere de tableau_, and now every value and colour finely observed seem to have for mission the abolition of chiaroscuro Without at becomes a mosaic, and Mr MacColl seems prepared to defend this return to archaic formulas This is what he says: ”The sky of the sea-beach, for exa forh and chippy, and if the suggestion gets too much in the way the method has overshot its mark

Its mark is to express by a symbol the vivid life in the sky-colour, the sea-colour, and the sand-colour, and it is doubtful if the richness and subtlety of those colours can be conveyed in any other way” Here I fail altogether to understand If the sky's beauty can be expressed by a symbol, why cannot the beauty of men and women be expressed in the same way? How the infinities of aerial perspective can be expressed by a syhtest notion; nor do I think that Mr MacColl has In striving to excuse deficiencies in a painter whose very real and loyal talent we both aderous sophistries ”The ,” he continues, ”is then a moot point--a question of temperament” Is this so?

That so colour as other men are born with a special sense of proportions is undeniable; but Mr MacColl's thought goes further than this barren platitude, and if heis , I should like to point out to hi did not become a merely personal caprice until the present century A collection of ancient pictures does not present such endless experimentation with the material as a collection of h do not contradict each other so violently regarding their use of the hton, Millais, and Orchardson

In the nineteenth century no one has made such beautiful use of the material as Manet and Whistler, and we find these two painters using it respectively exactly like Hals and Velasquez It would therefore seereed as to the handling of it, just as all good dancers are agreed as to the step

But, though all good dancers dance the sas into his practice of it an individuality of movement and sense of rhyth mechanical The ancient painters relied on differences of feeling and seeing for originality rather than on eccentric handling of colour; and all these extraordinary executions which we meet in every exhibition of modern pictures are in truth no more than frantic efforts either to escape frouise ignorance in fantastic formulas That which cannot be referred back to the classics is not right, and I at least know not where to look aed ed brushwork

Mr Walter Sickert, whose temperament is more irresponsible, is nevertheless content within the traditions of oil-painting He exhibits two portraits, both very clever and neither satisfactory, for neither are carried beyond the salient lines of character Nature has gifted Mr Sickert with a keen hatred of the co slow and uncertain, his rendering therefore as spas links with difficulty, and even his most complete work is full of omissions The defect--for it is a defect--is by noas the futile explanations so dearly beloved by the ignorant Manet was to the end the victim of man's natural dislike of ellipses, and Mr

Walter Sickert is suffering the saence should be able to gather soha red frock--a verround! I should be still htly broken with yellow ochre; but then, at heart, I aes of the verlare of the foot-lights; and the face does not suffer froestive as may be The thinness of the hand and wrist is well insisted upon, and the trip of the legs, just before she turns, realises, and in a e