The Holy Bible. Illustrated from Original Water-Colour Draw- ings by
Harold Copping. (R.T.S. 7s. 6d. net to 35s. net.)—We have all sympathy with the aims of the Society in bringing out this richly illustrated edition of the Scriptures, and we appreciate the energy and industry with which Mr. Harold Copping has carried out the commission entrusted to him. Some of his work all will agree, we imagine, in praising. His land- scapes and buildings, for instance, constituting something like a fourth part of the hundred illustrations, are attractive and interesting. Here the artist is on safe ground. Apart from the difficulty of identifying sites—this, after all, does not count for much—he is sure to teach something worth knowing. It is when he has to introduce the element of human personality that his difficulty begins. We do not care to criticise his pictures in detail. Ways of conceiving the scenes represented cannot but differ, and it is hardly possible to please all. We may say, how- ever, that minutiae are not always as carefully studied as they might be. In "The Return of the Spies" the cluster of Eshool grapes which two men are carrying between them is surely too small. The record of a cluster is about twenty inches, but the cluster shown here, taking the proportion of the stature of the two men carrying it, can hardly be much more than half. And should it not, being the one thing mentioned in the narrative, have been put in the foreground? The artist seems to have felt bound to avoid the conventional. To this feeling we attribute a conception of the Annunciation representing the Virgin on the hillside at Nazareth. The narrative certainly leads us to believe that she was in the house, where indeed it was most likely that she would be : "the angel came in unto her."
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