Old Masters
THE interval between the closing of the doors of Burlington House on the recent Exhibition of British Art and their re-opening on the Academy Exhibition now in progress was clearly a good moment for the publication of such a critical assessment of our Old Masters as that made by Mr. Fry in Reflections on British Painting. In a hundred and fifty pages (a printed version of two lectures delivered to members of the National Art Collections Fund) Mr. Fry provides his now habitual valedictory note to an Exhibition that is just over, and does for our own Art what in 1927 he did for the Flemish masters and last year for the French. If all three books have been—in that temporal sense--valedic- tory, they differ in that this present volume is also to some extent a funeral oration : Mr. Fry here steps forward to bury English Art more often than to praise it.
In one so critically sensitive to the actual masterpieces of painting, that is hardly a matter of surprise : yet Mr. Fry in his Preface apologizes most humbly for the severity of the judgements to follow, while he pleads for a critical rather than a patriotic taste in painting. Reluctantly, we believe, he employs the epithet British, rather than English—though not until more than half-way through the book can he bring himself to give his subject that label (patriotically enough, with Waterloo as his starting point). As this would seem to leave the Scottish Raebtwn—" with his essentially commonplace vision and vulgar dramatic emphasis "even further" out of the picture," it is presumably for the sake of Wilkie and Geddes that we put up with the commodity term, reminiscent of exhortations to buy nation- ally. Or is it simply our usual English diffidence in the face of Scots conceit? In any case, Mr. Fry is only following the precedent of the Exhibition itself ; falling into line,
in fact. . .
Mr. Fry, who protests so little, apologizes, we think, too much for the outspokenness of criticism which will come with no shock of rude surprise to anyone acquainted with his belie& or, indeed, familiar with the greater masterpieces. His views are not less interesting on that account. Mr. Fry is well worth reading : as well worth reading now that many of us have learned to agree with him—or that tastes have moved with the times, let us say—as when his views were revolutionary. His opinion of the Pre-Raphaelites, I..awrence and Turner (so essentially a Joseph—of many colours—here unaccountably rechristened John) is surely shared by everyone but " the majority " ; and we are now at any. rate prepared not to flinch at such valuations of Blake, Hogarth—and even Cotrnan—as he has to offer us. Hogarth Mr. Fry reduces in stature most plausibly and pleasantly. It is always, of course, more entertaining to blame than to praise—which is why this book might be said to make better reading than his Flemish essay or Characteristics of French Art. But Mr. Fry has been rightly praised, too, as a singer of praises : the quality of the pleasure he derives from the contemplation of pictures is high, and his communication of that pleasure to the reader effective and stimulating. It is as easy therefore to enjoy his enjoyment of Girtin and Bonington as it is, naturally, to agree with his presentation of Gainsborough and Constable as our two greatest painters, our only candi- dates, in fact, for world second rank.
Perhaps this is all to say that Mr. Fry writes infectiously —he certainly does that. But is it not also to imply that he admirably fulfils the functions of critic, for which nature and his own incessant care have exceptionally well fitted him ? We are grateful for this little postscript to the Exhibition ; the more so as the book itself could not have been better produced, in handier or more agreeable form, at so modest a price, by the publishers. Though lacking an index, it is convenient in size and contains sixty-six mostly small but excellent plates, which, while they exemplify the work of only some twenty of our island painters, have the benefit of Mr. Fry's comment and elucidation.
Jorix MARKS.
Previous page
