ROYAL ACADEMY EXHIBITION: MR. WRIMITEICS PICTURES.
The two pictures by Mr. Webster capitally illustrate what we have said Is to the necessity of a well-cultivated and good working imagination in
forming a master. Within the limits of his subject he is a master: he knows what he intends to do, conceives the work, and does it. He is no holyday painter, waiting for "inspiration," as Princess Gmciosa waited for Prince Percinet to do all the labour with the stroke of a magic wand. The power in the magic pencil of genius is earned by toil as hard as that of the alchemist, and more definitely directed. Webster has duly earned a magic of the kind. Having shaped his idea, he is master of the means to realize it; the labour of study has endowed him with a power so well de- veloped that the result is an aspect of the most spontaneous ease. We have already described his two pictures. In one, two files of sliders on the ice have sustained a collision, and are mingled in a hopeless chorus of tumbling. In the other, a mischievous fellow riding at one end of a " See- saw " has bumped his own end down and keeps it down, to the terror of a lighter and more timid lad at the other end; while a third boy, nursing a baby, grins with amusement at the frightened face of the betrayed young- ster so painfully exalted. In both pictures the whole design is made out, completely: you recognise the " story " at once. The drawing is excellent; the colouring is equal to the requirement—bright, truthful, and effective. The colour and texture of each ollject is characteristically though not ob- trusively conveyed: you see ruddy cheeks, sober corduroys, the yellow hair, the dull glassy ice, and over all the watery sun: it is not pigments, but the inherent " local " colour of the several objects, which meets your view. What the painter wanted you to see, you. do see. That, we say, is real mastery. He has duly performed the work of imagining his design. Let us take two faces, one from each painting, to illustrate our meaning. The countenance of the crying boy in "The Slide "—a face wrung together by exasperated pain—is of a kind that could not have been " set " in a model You may see such countenances a thousand times: but while you look they change; and for love or money you could not induce any little urchin, not the most mercenary, deliberately to institute any distortion so purely spontaneous. The artist had seen and observed; he had stored his mind with the materials for imagining; and when it came to the point, he set his well trained imagination to bring forth this dismal face. The laughing boy in the " See-saw " is a still happier example. The look of quiet but exuberant amusement is one of all others to be unintentional: no boy could keep his face to that pitch of fun for two seconds: try one, and you will find that the cheeks will lose their crisp projecting fulness, the upper eyelid will grow heavy, the lips will tremble and collapse, the wrinkles will shift and fade away. But if you have a genius for art, you will be able to conjure up the object as it appears in its transitory mood; and of the ob- ject so retained there is no danger that it turn chopfallen and heavy-eyed. " Una certa idea," with all its spontaneous movements, is the true model for the painter, guided and corrected no doubt by thinning model, but not superseded by it. Webster is an example of this hippy industry within the mind; and the consequence is that his pictures are the most complete in the Exhibition—the works of a master.
Previous page
