Six Lectures on Painting. By G. Clausen, A.R.A. (Elliot Stock.
5s. net.)—It is long since anything so good as these lectures has appeared. Originally delivered at the Academy, they are now col- lected into a volume, in which form they cannot fail to be of great use to students, artists, and also to the lay lover of painting. Mr. Clausen possesses a wide and catholic taste, and a keen insight into the methods of the great masters. The analysis of the methods of Titian is most interesting, and we are shown how the painter bound his composition together by masses of shadow which seem to be thrown by passing clouds, this effect being in harmony with the piled-up cumulus which Titian was so fond of massing in his skies. It is interesting to find so accomplished a modern landscape artist as Mr. Clausen saying of the primitive Italian painters :— " I do not, indeed, think skies have at any time been painted. which give the feeling of light so beautifully, or a finer, purer sentiment in the landscape itself." It was of these skies that Ruskin said that it seemed as if the angels had painted them. Mr. Clausen has some wise things to say about photography, and points out how differently the human eye and the lens of the camera see Nature. At first painters tried to "rival the camera in minuteness and detachment, forgetting that it is just this human quality of attention and selection that makes a painting &- work of art." Now the process is reversed, and the so-called "pictorial" photographers use "clumsily all the conventions of the masters. But photographs, especially snapshots of Nature, are most interesting to look at. I do not think, though, that photography can in any other way be an Sid to a painter. You cannot make that yours which the camera chooses to give you. You must make your own selection from Nature."
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