ART.
THE WATER-COLOUR SOCIETY.
WATER-COLOIIR is perhaps the most characteristic English art we have. Only Holland, whose moist climatic conditions are nearest to those of this island, haa produced a considerable school of water-colourists on the Continent The gentle medium seems to shrivel in hotter countries. It flourishes like green grass where the weather is always changeful and often wet. Yet many English water-colourists—Turner, Bonington, Brabazon, and Steer—have found subjects of some of their finest drawings in the heat and glitter of Italy and France. Through all the changes of modern art our practitioners in water-colour pursue their pleasant way. They pursue it most pleasantly in the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours, whose winter Exhibition is open at their gallery in Pall Mall East. We miss there one modest artist whose veteran hand year after year cheered our NI inter with primroses and birds'-nests. Another artist who has painted the unchanging scenery of the English countryside of river and meadow for two generations drops out this year. The late Sir Ernest Waterlow was a patient student of Nature, somewhat literal in his transcript, but rarely without the interest that comes from a love of his subject and a sound technique. Turner's influence still lingers in Mr. Goodwin's grandiose visions of famous sights. Sir Harry Johnston, that man of many parts, recalls the Pre-Raphaelites, but he uses their realism for his own semi-scientific ends. His Sussex cliffs and English gardens are seen so intensely that the flush of the tropics seems to be lighting them up. Selective modern methods, of which Mr. D. Y. Cameron is the chief exponent, are seen in Mr. Murray .:ntith's linear landscapes and in the works of a new member, Mr. Cecil A. Hunt, who seems to us to be losing his grip as he increases the scale of his drawings. Mr. Clausen stands out by his vitality and refusal to stereotype his successes. Mr. .9argent has one picture, A Larch Forest (No. 117), which bursts like a high explosive among its quiet, complacent neighbours. Mr. Oliver Hall and Mr. Payne, on the other hand, produce a sort of water-colour with a reticence of colour and simplification of tone that suggest a coloured print. Mr. Hall certainly could say all he has to say through aquatint or coloured litho- graphy. When one recalls the height to which Daniels, for lastance, brought the English coloured landscape print, it seems inexplicable that it should now have almost disappeared. The nation would be the gainer if some of our talented water-colour- ists with a bent for broad tones and muscular drawing would devote themselves to revive the coloured print. Modest English households especially would benefit, and pretentious repro- ductions of old masters and photographs would be replaced by original prints which could be produced at a reasonable price within the reach of a modest purse. The artist would (have the happiness to know that instead of one or two people enjoying each of his pictures, scores would be able to do so. J. B.
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