A R T
.111h., NEW ENGLISH ART CLUB.
THE exhibition of the New English Art Club " gives furiously to think " in many directions. What, we wonder, must be the condition of the hitherto quiet graves of the defunct members of the old Water-Colour Society in whose gallery the exhibition is held ? Again, what must be the feelings of the surviving original members of the New English Art Club ? The people who held the fort for Impressionism in the eighties, and were then considered revolutionary, are now seen to have been mere exploiters of a then less familiar phase of realism. Now the newest fashions in painting predominate, and attempts at design reigiband revel here. But, really, how little things have changed ! The same wide-spreading dullness is here and the same rare glimpses of the real thing—the thing so difficult to describe, so much less difficult to recognize. Look, for instance, at the end wall of the Gallery ; here are two landscapes of the old style : Mr. Muirhead's Rochester (76) and Mr. F. Brown's The Water Mirror (80) ; these, superficially, appear worlds apart from Mr. Guenara's Signs of the Zodiac (74) hung above them. In reality they are very much alike : a very moderate, artistic talent expressed in different fashions, each of which has been, or is, of the moment. For those who are looking for a new orientation of English painting, for a turning away from repre- sentation as an end, and a quickening of the sense of design, the present exhibition is a saddening one. The bulk of the new painters seem to have heard of the great quickening force which comes from pure design, and are determined at all costs to use it ; but they seem incapable of really understanding what it means.
As usual with this Society, the best things are to be found among the drawings and water-oolours, and we can delight in The Canal, Norwich (55), of Mr. Rich, The Dunglass (25) of Mr. Shepherd, and Mr. Wilson Steer's Fishing-boats (32). Mr. Shepherd has spoilt what would have been a beautiful study of the figure (160) by the weakness of drawing of the arms, but the sense of style and colour are both good. Among the oil landscapes the most interesting is Mr. Walter Bayes' Welsh picture (137), which, by the largeness of its grouping and the coherence of its design in three dimensions, is a most interesting
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