ART.
M. BUSSY'S PASTELS.
THE strongly decorative qualities of pastel which in English practice of the last fifty years have been largely neglected for the intimate calligraphic method of Whistler or the heavy revival of the large pastel portraiture of the eighteenth century, are delightfully present in M. Simon Bussy's series of little pastels on view at the Carfax Gallery, 24 Bury Street. M. Bussy is well known as a colourist, his painting of a garden with two lemon vases at the Grosvenor Gallery this year being one of the most brilliant and original pieces of colour design that has been seen in recent years. His pastels of Venice, Scotland, Sicily, and the Tyrol show the same keen seizure of a colour-idea suggested by some happy accident of the hour and the place, and the building of it into a design of rich colour and simple shape. His is a very definite exotic Venice, not the whispering city of dream and innuendo of Whistler, or the fusing epic of Turner, or the brawny daylight tourist wonder of Sargent, but certain selected little pieces of Venetian jewellery in the right Adriatic setting. He has found a way to capture the most elusive thing in Venice—the sea-front of the Doges' palace, whose delicate old red and white marble blocks do not look like white brick, although painters have insisted for genera- tions that they do; and his choice of the red San Nicoletto di Lido, with its queer neighbours, shows that he can make his own discoveries. One would like to see more of his Scottish pictures. It is a very hard thing nowadays for an artist to find something new to say about Scotland, which is more thickly populated by artists than any other part of the world ; but M. Bussy has seen her as "Caledonia stern and wild," grim, melancholy, cruel, just as Mary Queen of Scots did when she landed there from M. Bussy's bright land. His alien gaze is hinted in the trees in grey light, to which he has given the darkness and density of the cypress in hot lands. Scots moorland trees, I think, are never quite like that. But it would not surprise me if some Scots painters were to follow the clue that M. Bussy gives and seek Scotland again in the key of classical romance. J. B.
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