Art
SOME PICTURES]
IT is an evil' chance that makes one view on a foggy day pic- tures whose main concern is to convey effects of light : and Mr. Anthony Gross's exhibition at the Abbey Gallery, Vic- toria Street (the Abbey end of the street) was ill seen by me. Subject to that caution, I convey my impression that he is showing a good deal too much and without due selection. It is true, however, that his study of the outside of the building at Ronda which hung next to the window and so got some show of daylight pleased me much, and I admired the skill with which he suggested that huge sunlit curve of white- washed wall. But of the rest (and there are two rooms full) one only seemed to achieve its object. Don Vito's Pub gets solidity for the figures it represents, and depth to the sunlit space in which they are grouped, and there is life in the light splashed about everywhere and life in the attention of the sitting figures. A boy sitting there is not simply sitting : he is watching what passes at the table and you can see him watch. All the paint here has a meaning, and the vivacity and flickering colour which is the charm of this young man's work in oils loses nothing by the addition of these qualities which I did not find elsewhere. The etchings, of course, one could see, but in etching Mr. Gross has already a sure mastery, I liked much the Wineshop in Madrid with the sweep of light drenching the tall- ramshackle building ; but The Old Man from the Attic gets much more. A steep stair in a tenement house makes an angle in the picture : over the upper banister a crowd is leaning and peering, while on the lower flight comes down a coffin, shoulder-high with two men carrying it. Nothing could suggest more perfectly movement under a weight. Above all the implication of the whole scene is con- veyed, an unobtrusive life passing away finally out of that throng and getting more notice in its leaving than ever in its comings and goings. And over the strong structure of the drawing the design proper is superimposed—a design in light.
At the Leicester Galleries is a triple show : first a collection of drawings, mostly pencil studies of nudes, by Fantin Latour, exquisite in grace, and among them the powerful head of Ingres with its griped mouth, showing what a portrait painter Fantin could be at times. Also, one delightful glass filled with asters is here, to show that this is the Fantin whom every- body in England thinks of as a flower painter.
In the next room are some fifty paintings by Baron Rodolphe d'Erlanger, capable renderings of the kind of thing that all the fashionable world goes to see at Versailles, at Trouville, in Cairo, in Tunis—perfect illustrations for Mr. W. J. Locke's novels. But if you kept one of them in your room for a year I think you would see no more in it than at the first minute: Last come Mr. Orlando Greenwood's pictures, some of which —notably his Circe—Seem to me atrocious in colour and strident. Yet in Shardeloes, the picture of a great house and park seen across water, he paints real sunlight ; his Pendle on the same wall has delicacy of tone ; and half-a-dozen pic- tures—notably Alton End, Durham, Harvest, The Little Delft and La Seine a Amfreville show a talent for compbsition which can be novel and striking without eccentricity.
LEMON GREY.
Previous page
