C URRENT LITERATURE.
ART BOOKS.
The Art of Landscape Painting in Oil Colour. By Alfred East, A.R.A. (Cassell and Co. 10s. 6d.)—This work should be of great use to many a student, amateur, and artist. Mr. East writes with distinctness, and has the power of making his reader understand clearly the various processes, mental and technical, which he uses for the construction of a landscape. Nowhere is Mr. East more interesting than when he is discussing trees. This we should expect from his pictures, for this artist is never seen to better advantage than in his painting of trees, and when he is thinking more of their natural beauties than of effects of style. The book before us deals in separate chapters with such subjects as colour, composition, skies, trees, grass, and the materials to be used in painting. The author gives us several pages from his sketoh-books, which illustrate, most aptly his remarks on the building up of the lines of a picture. In one case we have an interesting series showing the developments of the first sketoh - into the finished work. Mr. East's attitude all through is that Nature should be studied, and studied deeply, but not imitated in a servile spirit. The object of study, we are told, is to enable the artist to use Nature for his own purposes. If a painter has really studied trees, he will be able to alter their relative positions in a landscape without making them grow in impossible places and in unnatural ways. We are told that a landscape artist should be able to alter the shapes of trees as a figure-painter can alter the pose of a figure from his knowledge of its structure. If it is kept in mind that painting is.primarily the art of seeing not only truly but interestingly, and that receipts out, of a book will make neither painters nor pictures, then this work should be a great help to many. The teachings are enforced by a large number of reproductions of pictures by the writer.
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