The Art Of Today

(via The Outline of Art) Frank Rutter writes:

While Legros was responsible for the renewed attention paid to drawings, other artists gradually made England familiar with the new ideas about color which had originated in France. Conspicuous among the pioneers in this direction is Mr George Clausen, R.A. Born at London in 1852, Mr Clausen was an art student at South Kensington from 1867 to 1873, and then went to Paris, where he was at first chiefly influenced by J.F Millet and his follower, Jules Bastien-Lapage (1848-84). His well-known picture at the Tate Gallery, ‘The Girl at the Gate’, a comparatively early work painted in 1889, shows Mr Clausen still dominated by the art of Bastien-Lepage. Later the artist was profoundly influenced by the color of the Impressionists, especially by Monet and Pissarro, and in his second manner, while frequently adhering to pastoral and peasant subjects which recall Millet, Mr Clausen presented them in prismatic colors in which the illumination of real sunshine is rendered with exquisite truth and delicacy. Mr Clausen has painted both the life and the light of the fields, fusing the humanity of J F Millet with the Nature-worship of Claude Monet. Possessing a wide range, he has painted portraits and allegorical subjects as well as landscapes and pastorals. All his work is distinguished by its beauty of color, radiant illumination, and human tenderness.

Mr P Wilson Steer was born at Birkenhead in 1860. After studying at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris, he returned to England full of enthusiasm for the Impressionists, and among his early works may be found experiments in the style of Manet, Degas, Monet, and Renoir. But while he has always preserved their keen interest in light, Mr Wilson Steer gradually broke away from the close imitation of the Impressionists and developed a style of his own in which the vivacity and broken touch of the French painters were mingled with elements derived from such British painters as Gainsborough, Constable, and Turner. The later art of Mr Steer may be described as a blend of English and French traditions. In the landscapes of his maturity he has used pinks, mauves, and blues very sparingly and concentrated on the varied greens and yellows of Nature, excelling in the rendering of wooded country with trees glittering in the sunshine after rain, and also in depicting the light and atmosphere in great vistas of spacious countrysides. Equally distinguished s a figure painter, Mr Steer is represented by an auto-portrait in the Pitti Gallery, Florence, by ‘The Music Room’ in the Tate Gallery, and by figure subjects as well as landscapes in many other public galleries. Apparently averse to Academical honors, Mr Steer has from the first remained the most loyal member of the New English Art Club, of which he is still the chief ornament. The grace and refinement of his portraiture ar beautifully exemplified in his ‘Portrait of Mrs Hammersley’, in which the background also reveals his powers as landscape painter.

Two other members of the New English Art Club who have helped to introduce Impressionism into England are Lucien Pissarro and Walter Sickert. The former is the eldest son of Camille Pissarro. He was born at Paris in 1863, and grew up among the Impressionist and neo-Impressionists, so that he may be said to have been impregnated with the science of color from his early boyhood. In 1893 he settled in London, where he came into touch with William Morris, and setting up a private press he made a European reputation as a wood engraver and printer of beautiful books. As a painter he made his way more slowly, but his landscapes have always aroused the enthusiasm of his brother artists by their just observation and masterly statement of the actual hues in Nature.

Mr Walter Sickert, born in 1860, was in his youth a pupil of Whistler, but the influence of this master was later superseded by that of the Impressionists, especially that of Degas, after the artist took up his residence in Paris, where he remained for several years. Making a speciality of painting low-life scenes, portraying humble interiors, the galleries of theatres and music halls, costers and flower girls, Mr Sickert does not rarely explore, even in his landscapes, scenes at Dieppe or Venice, the realm of full sunshine which was the happy hunting ground of the earlier Impressionists. In his interiors Mr Sickert is known chiefly as an exquisite interpreter of the subtle beauties of twilight, in his exteriors he usually prefers grey days or at least moments when direct sunshine is masked; but within his self-imposed limits he is a true Impressionist, always giving his first attention to the lighting, and making lights even in darkness sparkle and vibrate with the magic of his deft broken touches.

The Art Of Today (continued)