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Nineteenth-Century Water-Colours PYLONS straggle across the fields behind the Council houses in almost every English village. So much has changed in the country in a hundred years that it is always surprising to find that Girtin's or Cotman's remarks about it are still compre- hensible But it was light that they painted, like good painters before and since, and English light does not change. Several collections of nineteenth-century water-colours to be seen in London just now provide a good record of the permanent English landscape.
The outstanding thing at Walker's (New Bond Street) is a large water-colour by Samuel Palmer, painted about 1850, and so standing between the early full-flushed romanticism of his Kentish drawings of elms, corn-stooks and hop-fields and his later worked-up romance of sad firs against full-blown sunsets. This is of a favourite subject of his—a huge, gnarled tree-trunk against a wooded valley, and it is a picture that, for a moment, makes all " broad " painting seem ridiculous, so complicated are its in-fillings, so clearly justified its careful order. Samuel Palmer and Gerard Manley Hopkins had a lot in common, and it happens that the mood of this water-colour is exactly paralleled by Hopkins. "I looked into a lovely comb. . . . Soft maroon or rosy cocoa-dust-coloured handkerchiefs, sometimes delicately combed with rows of green, their hedges bending in flowing outlines and now misted a little by the beginning of twilight, ran down into it upon the shoulders of the hills; in the bottom crooked rows of rich, tall elms, foreshortened by position, wound through it: some cornfields were still being carried."
Agnews have a mall Cotman sunset with rocks, full of poetry, a Joseph Farington of Chelsea Bridge from 1Vlillbank in 1790, full of curious information, and some delicate grey drawings of castles by Francis Towne. A Girtin displays Stoke Pages church clotted with ivy, the stonework clean of mortar and the church- yard grass unscythed. There are contemporary works here, too, that show no lack of charm, or even of poetry. What most of them do lack, seen beside the works of a hundred years ago, is learning.
At Colnaghi's there are some delightful Rowlandsons, de Loutherbcurgs and Varleys, and a View on the Deben by that often charming artist Thomas Churchyard, which shows him at his best finding simple shapes in a misty river scene. The Palser Gallery (King Street, St. James's) have a collection of Cotman drawings from the Bulwer collection. They include a number of romantic figure and " costume " pieces, in which, about 1838, he was playing a kind of charade to try and please a neglectful public. He can hardly have pleased himself. But there is here a view of Snowdon that shows how he could work up a large composition from old sketches and make it lively and sparkling. No .wonder he was no sort of a success with
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