BOOKS ON ART.*
MR. NAPIER has dividel his work on Thomson of Dudding- stone,' the Scots landscape painter, into two parts, the first and longer of which is a dissertation on art in general and on the painting of his hero in particular. We use the word " hero " because Mr. Napier can see only perfection in the artist, and combats with quite unnecessary detail any adverse opinion. Thomson, although he was a painter by race and his output was large, was a Presbyterian minister, and for this reason has been considered by some as an amateur. Mr. Napier takes this criticism too seriously, and wastes pages on refutation of such critics as Sir Walter Armstrong. Why he should be so troubled by this writer seems strange, for did not Sir Walter write a book and prove that Gainsborough was an original genius and Reynolds only a stylistic adapter, apparently because the former used realistic impressionism and the latter creative design ? Thomson's art was not that of an amateur because it was good. and accomplished, and for no other reason. The proof lies entirely in his works themselves and not in the opinion of this or that critic. Mr. Napier of course, as becomes a Scotsman, seems rather disquieted because in England his hero had a contemporary who was a greater master. There was no rivalry between the two, and Thomson whole-heartedly admired Turner; and that strange being, Turner, who could not be induced by the Scotsman to express an opinion about his pictures to his face, said to some one else while looking at one of Thomson's landscapes : " The man who did that could paint." The book before us contains a number of reproductions of Thomson's pictures, and we would willingly have sacrificed many of Mr. Napier's well-meant but unnecessary pages of aesthetic dissertation for more examples of the painter's works. It would have been of great interest if we had been shown examples of Thomson's sketches, for presumably there must be some in existence. Thomson's honourable life was passed at Duddingstone, near Edinburgh, where he was the minister. Among his friends were Walter Scott and Raeburn, and at the Manse he entertained Turner. Raeburn painted his friend's portrait, which is repro- duced here. It is a disappointing picture, being one of the painter's most competently commonplace works, of which unfortunately so many exist. Thomson used that treacherous destroyer of pictures, bitumen, and the one example of his • (1) John Thomson of Duddingstone. By Robert W. Napler. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd. [51 lls. 6d.]—(2) The Russian School of Painting. By Alexandre Benobs. London: Werner Laurie. [25s.)—(8) Early Bulgarian Art. By Professor Filow. Berne : Paul Haupt.—(4) Art Principles. By Ernest Gorett. London : Putnam. [17s. Od.]—(5) Mintatura ; or, The Art of Limning. By Edward Norgate. Oxford : at the Clarendon Press. [5s.]
work in the National Gallery has had to be withdrawn from view, the picture being swamped in the Styglan flood. Thus the national collection is left without an example of the Scots landscape painter. Could not some fortunate and patriotic owner be persuaded to send a picture to Trafalgar Square, so that Englishmen may not remain ignorant of Scotland's greatest landscape painter ? To judge by the reproductions in this book, Thomson was at his best when not attempting to be too romantic. His " Newark Castle," with its lovely ash-trees and running water, and the exquisite rhythm of the broadly painted trees and lake of " Carron Castle," have far more true poetry in them than the forced effects of " The Castle on a Rock " or the over-composed " Raveneheugh Castle." Some of the pictures of castles are very fine, especially that of " Dunluce " with its massed light and shade. Perhaps the point at which Thomson is furthest off from Turner is in his treatment of the sky. Seldom, except in the very fine stormcloud in the " View of South Edinburgh," does the artist put much character into his cloud forms, being content as a rule with a general expression of either storm or calm. It was in the great world of the air that Turner's mastery was most conspicuous, and here he reigned supreme.
If M. Benois had not illustrated his book,* we should have formed a much higher estimate of Russian painting. The cleverly written text, with its perfectly natural wish to exalt the art of his own country, is in strange contrast to the dismal artistic failure of most of the illustrations. The author is not without suspicion that all is not well, for he seems to be in some way conscious of the tendency towards theatrical, setting, intellectual ideas without pictorial imagination, and the external realism of the photograph, which too often show that the Russian artist, whatever his views on life may be, is not naturally a painter; that is to say, one who expresses himself by the creation of pictorial effects. The work was apparently written before the beginning of the war, and its final sentence addressed to the younger Russian artists has a ring of tragic prophecy when he tells them not to be " forgetful of the fact that freedom without knowledge is the most bitter slavery."
It seems curious now to find a work on Early Bulgarian Art in English published in Berne last year, but such is the ease. Professor Filow, of Sofia, seeks to prove that in the earliest times his country possessed some sort of independent art, but the evidences are not clear. What does appear is that in Bulgaria is to be found a great deal of what we might call a peasant form of Byzantine art. This splendid style, which flowered so abundantly in its home and in Ravenna and Venice, in its Balkan manifestation seems rude and semi-articulate. The book is well illustrated, and some of the photographs of churches built in the early part of the nineteenth century surprise us when we see that the current style of building then was still Byzantine with a slight Turkish flavour.
The search for " art principles " seems to attract American writers, and among the latest of these is a book 4 containing a bewildering amount of disputable theory. We do not propose to enter into this maze, but give one example. The author considers that in fully developed art the ideal feminine face is always practically the same, and so interchangeable. To prove this contention we are shown a photograph of the figure of the " Sistine Madonna " of Raphael with the face changed to that of the central figure of Fragonard's " Pursuit," and are asked to believe that " there is no resulting suggestion of impropriety." We should say that the only effect of this faked photograph is to make Raphael's great composition and the author of the experiment appear alike ridiculous.
Mr. Martin Hardie has fished out of the Bodleian Library a curious treatise on painting by a writer of the time of Charles I. Edward Norgate in his manuscript en Miniature; or, The Art of Limning,5 reproduces many of the features of that long line of books on painting which have come down to us from very early times, and of which perhaps the most notable is that of Cennino Cennini, one of the Giottesquea of Florence. It is interesting to see how very much less the technical knowledge of painters' materials was in the seventeenth than it was in the fourteenth century. Also it is curious to find the survival in debased forms of earlier processes. The interesting parts of this little book
are the recipes for making paints, and some of the general notes on art. Norgate seems to have had a personal acquaint- ance with many Continental painters, but when he gives instruc- tions for mixing the colours to produce " Mayer coloured sattyn " or " For Fver " the results are not much more illuminating
than Miss Cann's prescription in The Newcomes for " foreground colour." An odd sidelight Is thrown on the extreme back- wardness of this country In painting when the author says of landscape that it is " an Art see new in England, and soe lately come a shore, as all the Language within our lower Seas cannot find it a Name, but a borrowed one, and that from a people that are no great Lenders but upon good Seouritio, the Dutch." In this new art clouds were evidently not esteemed, for we are advised to paint sunshine, and told that " cloudy skies and melancholy weather take up as much time as the other, yet are nothing soe pleasant." The painter is told also to be careful, in painting a sky, that the colours do not by mixing make green, " which never was or over will be sky colour." Have our eyes become more sensitive to, or only more observant of, aerial effects ?
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