ART
SINCE they form the first proper exhibition of his work, the Samuel Scotts assembled by Messrs. Agnew are of great interest to the student. (Our principal veduta artist was painting his London scenes several years before Canaletto arrived in this country.) These views of Lambeth, the Tower and St. Paul's, of Whitehall and the Horse Guards, of the Abbey seen from across St. James's Park lake and the rest, are of more than historical and topographic interest, how- ever. They are a complete delight in themselves. The proceeds of the exhibition go to the Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, in which city Scott spent his last years.
Messrs. Roland, Browse and Delbanco are to be congratulated on the Fauve exhibition with which they have followed their instructive Marcoussis show. This is not a balanced collection by any means, but two painters—Vlaminck and Derain—are seen to advantage. For those who wish to extend the field slightly, the more academic, baroque talent of Othon Friesz may be studied at the Marlborough Gallery.
Adrian Ryan,- at the Redfern, inhabits a rich and pretty world somewhere between the Fauves and Post-Impressionists. Was ever a sky so blue, an apple so green ? One is conscious at times of a certain lack of balance. Were the yellow wainscot and door put in at the last moment to heighten the impact of a relatively academic portrait, or were they going to set the key and did Ryan lose his nerve when it came to the portrait ? Idle speculation. As painters gq nowadays Ryan is unselfconscious, enjoys painting and communicates his enjoyment. That is rather rare in this country.
The pleasure in his medium shown by William Gear in his new pictures at Gimpel's takes a more limited form. A small number of fiat colours—usually between six and eight—is fragmented, as though by a prism, into a multitude of small patches, vaguely reminiscent of crocuses in a park, or the patchwork of fields seen from the air through a skein of cloud. He achieves in this way results not dissimilar from Manessier and Bazaine. They are the abstraction of a pleasure in the paint-box rather than abstract organisations on classical lines. Some of the strength of Gear's recent work seemed to me dissipated here by a lack of scale (or variety of scale) within the picture.
At the Leicester Galleries Algernon Newton continues indus- triously to seek a Venetian nostalgia along the Regent's Park canal. The rather mean quality of his paint cannot sustain his more melo- dramatic effects, and he is at his best when most reticent, as in the affecting Paris Street, Lambeth. John Skeaping's brilliant (and sometimes slick) drawings of animals are well-known. His paintings at the Leicester Galleries struck me as unprofound, and some of the sculpture seemed to show the same too-ready generalisations. His sculpture, however, has always seemed to me his best work, and at least three pieces—the Dying Cock, the Cockfight and the larger Bull —are excellent, while his experiments with hollow sculpture (recalling some paintings by John Armstrong) may lead him into
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