Some Art Books
TEE very large number of books we have lately received dealing with the history or the practice of art makes it impossible for us to deal with these subjects adequately in our limited space. Our readers, however, may be glad of even these
all-too-short notices of the many sumptuous volumes recently issued. Pride of place must be given to Sir Charles Holmes's
third and final volume of art criticism, The National Gallery : France and England (Chatto and Windus, 25s.). As Director of -the National Gallery _Wig encouraging to note Sir Charles's
sturdy belief the intrinsic virtues of our own national -school no saner or more comprehensive study of modern
art has ever been written. Would we could devote more than this scanty paragraph to it, but in the -limits of our space we can only-6,11'111*nd -it most heartily both to students and .to the general public. Miss Helen Gardner takes us from paleolithic times to the present (via Princess Nefertiti, Selene's -Horse, watered at the mytitic well of sleep, the Mosque of .St. Sophia, -&c., &c.) in her Art Through the Ages (Bell, 15s.), -and her volume is worthy of careful attention. The " still life spirit " is essentially trans-Alpine rather than Latin, Mr: FurSt tells us in The-Art of =Still Life Painting (Chapman and Hall, 21s.), and he goes into the subject so exhaustively -that we have no criticism to Make, unless it be to question whether the Celestial Mtechi has really " congealed passion into a stupendous calm " in his picture of half a dozen 'persimmons. Anyway, this is the best book on still life, which reveals so much of a painter's psychology, that we have had the fortune to read.
It Was a good idea of Miss Leicester-Warren's to give us in -compact form Stories of the British Artists and Stories of the Italian Artists (two volumes, Medici Society, 8s. each). We find here just that pleasant gossip about great painters which, human nature being what it is, we all like to read. And the Great Masters were men after all, as well as artists. Raphael in particular is charmingly dealt with : Miss Leicester- Warren gives us a reproduction of his " St. George and the Dragon "—we wish she had explained why he is spearing it on the wrong side of the horse. Was it for the sake of the composition, or merely that the exquisite Raphael preferred courts to camps ?
The eighth volume of Hofstede de Groot's Catalogue of Dutch Painters is issued by Messrs. Macmillan (81s. 6d.) Mr. E. G. Hawke, the F.nglish translator and editor, is much to be congratulated on the continuation of this catalogue raisonne, which has been long awaited, and which is destined to maintain the high reputation for accuracy and completeness achieved by the preceding volumes. Mr. Hawke has added an index of all the painters and engravers mentioned, which will prove of very real assistance to those who turn to the catalogue.
Art in Greece, by Professors A. de Ridder and W. Deonna (Kegan Paul, 21s.), traces the Dorian and Ionian methods in architecture and sculpture and shows how Hellenistic ,Greece made its art from a synthesis of East and West.. Written by experts, this is a book to note. Messrs. Batsford issue a fifth edition of The Architecture of the Renaissance in „Italy by Messrs. Anderson and Strattan (21s.). Mr. Anderson's text has been long known to students : we may add that the illustrations are excellent in this very useful volume on the most important of all eras in architecture. A notable contri- bution to Flemish painting is the special autumn number of the Studio (7s. 6d.), prepared by Sir Paul Lambotte, who arranged the exhibition at Burlington House that caused Such tremendous interest early this year. We are never tired of studying the masterpieces of the brothers Van Eyck, the strange " Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek" by Dirk Bouts or the marvellous "Mass of St. Giles." As for Rubens, for whcirn the author has a great and, of course, thoroughly iegitiniate admiration, we confess his appeal for us is slighter. But Sir Paul Lambotte knows far more than we : those of us who love the Dutch masters, both early and late, cannot fail to profit by this study. Another interesting book on a similar subject is Mr. Virgil Barker's Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Allen and Unwin, 10s.). The monumental and important History of Art, issued by Salvat Editores from Barcelona, under the editorship of Mr. Joseph Pijoan, concludes its series with its third volume,
dealing with the Renaissance, Baroque Art, Neo-classicism, And Contemporary Art. " As science unfolds the atom, so
art conquers -another part of the universe ; that which is within man "—on this note these remarkable volumes end. Art students all over the world know of this series : its fame
is spreading, and deservedly. Mr. Sacheverel Sitwell's German Baroque Art (Duckworth, 25s.) is a pleasant book which leads us to hope he will carry out his intention of giving us two more on South Italy and Mexico. We want to hear of the cripple, Aleijadinho, who had no hands and carved pulpits, confessionals, and altar screens with tools strapped to his wrists. Mr. Sitwell deals with every monument of importance in Germany, Austria, and Hungary. His pleasant style and real knowledge lend charm to this study of " those two excessive and interflowing shadows of the Classical, Baroque and Rococo,"_ as he aptly describes them. The fifth volume of the Eumorfopoulas Catalogue (Benn, £12 12s.) is as magnificent as its predecessors. Mr. Hobson, Keeper of the Department of Ceramics at the British Museum, deals with the Ch'ing, K'ang Hsi, Yung Cheng, Ch'ien Lung, and later periods. The illustrations as usual are superb, and Mr. Hobson's interesting introduction opens up, for those of us who are the veriest amateurs rather than con- noisseurs of Chinese porcelain, a whole new world of inquiry and aesthetic delight. The book is a collection of treasures. Another notable work by the same author is Chinese Art (Benn, 12 2s.). We agree that the Chinese have been the most artistically gifted nation in the world's history, and although their art seems now to be in full decadence, the glory of the time of its masters is not yet appreciated at its full worth in the West. If we would make a beginning at such an appreciation, we may safely take Mr. Hobson as mentor. The Bagit Cayes (The India Society, £2 2s.), with text by Sir John Marshall, Mr. Garde, Dr. Vogel, Mr. Havel, and Dr. Cousins, has been in preparation for a number of years and the result was worth waiting for. These wonderful Buddhist frescoes from the cave temples of Malwa rival those of Ajanta. They are very modern in line and pose and freedom. As Mr. Haven says, they are as far removed from realism " as they are from stereotype convention. Some of their attraction is due to the darkness in which they are seen, and we cannot do better than quote Dr. Cousins on their fascination :-
" Suddenly the eye perceives dimly an exquisitely postured hand: Another ghostly shape emerges out of nothing—a shadowy head touched with the faint aroma of an antique courtesy ; then—a finely moulded foot—a horse's neck gloriously arched—the monu- mental forehead of a state elephant. One after another, like stars in twilight, they take the eye, these points of dim radiance on the darkening sky of history, moving the heart with a solemn joy, and stirring the imagination to discovery until there stretches before the inner eye the re-created pageant of a vanished life."
Mr. Keble Chatterton's Old Ship Prints (John Lane, £2 2s.) is a delightful gift book. We need not emphasize Mr. Chatterton's qualifications as an author, nor the charm of his subject. Turning the pages of the volume the mind wanders to steep green seas, such as shown in the aquatint of " Man Overboard," and to vertiginous banquets such as that etched by Cruikshank in " At Dinner in an East Indianian," and to perilous and stormy places such as shown in " Reefing the Topsails." The text is as good as the illustrations. The Present State of Old English Furniture is a reprint on a subject of much popular interest which will be worth to collectors at least twenty times the guinea that Messrs. Duckworth charge for it. Mr. Symons is a well-known expert and his book is a thoroughly practical one, which
should be in the hands of everyone who is not too wise to ' soon have a new race and may close a great many of her hospitals.
want advice. But the main part of the book is not at all an account of a Mr. Thorpe of the Victoria and Albert Museum writes nursery school. It is rather an extremely vivid and interesting in an intimate and agreeable style of English and Irish Glass story of the adventurous life led by two " advanced " young (Medici Society, 7s. 6d.). The hardest and pleasantest task- of women in the latter half of the last century and in the earlier our collector is to think himself into history, he says. Goblets, years of this one. There is a quite thrilling chapter, for wine-glasses, candle-sticks, jugs, girandoles, and epergnes, example, on Miss McMillan's adventure with what she calls marshalled in a cabinet or huddled on a dealer's shelves, " a new kind of employer." She was then a, governess, and are not things to be merely classified and desired. We was sent by a rather shocked agency to interview a Lady X, must know the manners and the customs of those who use them, who, she was led to understand, was not Bien vue in society, and old' glass is a peculiarly homely and suitable medium " I could not take my eyes from her lovely face, and she liked through which to pierce the veils of Clio, me to look at her. Her mobile lips showed that. She was used to turning a spit by means of a dog working a treadwheel—. to thleedm. Deep in the subconsciousness,ysomething hard in the Somebody in the eighteenth century conceived the idea of start this cooking by dog-power is only one of the amusing things to not vanity, nor even beauty, was the thing that arrested. 'Yr,' be 'found in Mr. J. Seymour Lindsay's Iron and Brass Imple- ments of the English House (Medici Society, 25s.). It is a very varied and delightful book,- full of curious yet scholarly and well-arranged information.- The line drawings. by the author are particularly good and the whole provides a very agreeable saunter down the bypaths of history. Here, for instance, is a new story, better than the old one which centred round Sir Walter Raleigh about tobacco :— " I remember a pretty jest of tobacco which was this. A certain Welshman coming newly to London and beholding one to take tobacco, never seeing the like -before, and not knowing the manner of it, but perceiving him vent smoke so fast and supposing his inside parts to be on fire, cried out, 0 Jhesu, Jhesu man, for the passion of God hold, for by God's splud ty snout's on fire' ; and having a bowl of bare in his hand, threw it at the other's face to quench his smoking nose."
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