IN LONDON

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 102, 4 May 1929, Page 17

IN LONDON

♦ CANTERBURY PILGRIM THE GREAT GOLD DUTCH EXHIBITION (Specially written for "The Post" by Ngaio Marsh.) The real difficulty in looking, with a moderate amount of intelligence, at a large and august collection of pictures is one's irritating but absorbing interest in the other, people who arc also looking at the pictures. I went into Burlington House the , other day to see the incredibly valuable collection of Dutch masterpieces, lent to us Dy 'the kind Hollanders. The courtyard was crammed with rich cars, and the rooms were thronged with rich people. The air smelt of black bonnets and beaded mantles, which was odd because none of the ladies there were ■wearing these respectable garments, though many of them looked a little ,as if they ought to. People in the mass—how strangely interesting they are! How weirdly dramatic are the half sentences one hears from what may be extremely commonplace conversations. "Is that Rembrandt!" said a tall and blank-looking gentleman. "Yes—Eembrandt," breathed his wife. "Don't like him," said the gentleman distatefully, "never have, and never will. Come on." Poor lady, I don't think she liked him very much either, but her husband was being difficult. They were staring uneasily at that extraordinary picture of the bridal pair, a work so sombrely thoughtful and so profoundly intense that the painter's mood, dark and mysterious, transcends and nullifies the . quality of the paint. There she stands, that plain and acquiescent young Dutchwoman, submissive and thoughtfully responsive to the caress of her elderly bridegroom. The picture is so plain and unpretentious that one wonders if the enigma it presents is in one's own imagination. It has a sacrificial look. Rembrandt has employed, as the cata-

logue competently points' out, a thick, heavy quality of paint, very rich in " effect, and laid on broadly in many parts with a blade. This unctuous revelry of paint must have come as a tremendous innovation to his contemporaries, accustomed as they were to the scrupulous smoothness of tho other Dutch masters. More and more people came to look at the bridal pair. An elderly lady, who evidently teaches painting, had brought a rather young gentleman, her pupil. I noticed that they both spoke in the voice so many people keep for special uso in conversation about the dead or the Divinity. Yet why say facetious things about them! "There was real pleasure behind their funny little affections, and it is so easy to sneer.

JAN STEEN. I went to look at Jan Steen Vcoarse]y conceived and delicately painted satires on the bourgeoisie of his time. His kinship with our own Hogarth is very striking. Mr. Roger Fry, in his broadcast lecture on the Dutch Exhibition, said that the similarity between the Dutch and English temperament is well illustrated by- these pictures. Jan Stcen is a vivid example in support of this theory. lie chose his subjects from the rather stuffy and unpleasant revelries of the coarser-grained among his contemporaries. Vice as he depicts common, and stupid. There is a kind of boistcrousness that saves some of his subject from meanness, and the- brilliance of his technique and significance of his design aro everywhere remarkable. "The Story"—that bugbear of the moderns—is so vital in Jan Steen's works that it is difficult to get away from it and sco tlio really brilliant composition and arrangement. If the bridal pair had proved a little "difficult" for some 'of the visitors, how much more embarrassing were the Jan' Steen themselves, for there is somo■women, -who after a few minutes'"blank astonishment, and as many more of concentrated scrutiny, caught each other 'n eyes and retired giggling and nonplussed. They wouldn't have made a bad Jan Steen themselves, for there is sometiling rather objectionable about a good deal of his work. Two shrewdly critical Frenchwomen afforded a good contrast. They made a brief voluble resume and walked briskly away, followed by what 1 imagined to be three modern art students. At first I took these youths for ragamuffins and wondered ' how they had beaten up one and six each for their admission and the, same sum for their catalogues. They were very dirtily dressed in raincoats and trousers, and apparently little else. The prevailing fashion among sonic "modern" art students of allowing their beards to grow to the ten-day's lengths and then by a mysterious process, arresting their growth, was well illustrated by these solemn young men. They carried mill-boards, drawing-paper, and canvases, under their arms to render their make-up intelligible, were dirty, paintable, and interesting in a weird sort of way. After glowering silently at .the Jan Steen, they hunched up their shoulders and sloped away. FEAKZ HALS. I followed them into the room where most, of the Franz Hals are hung. Mr. Eoger Fry, pursuing his discourse on the similarity of Dutch and English temperaments as shown in this stupendous show, went on to say that the dissimilarity-in choice of subjects to express this temperament is also very marked. For whereas the English— v.'.pccially the Victorians—are inclined Uj find an outlet to their sentimentuhsm in romantic adventure and strange glamorous unrealities, the Dutch masters sought and found romanco in the commonplace, bo the excellent Hals painted very ordinary uneventful citizens, and their stout sensible wives, and their common, cheerful little children. His pictures were bland and jolly, and executed with a wonderful felicity and joyous mastery of paint. There was nothing profound, certainly nothing spiritual'in tlio Franzl Hals, with the exception of one head, that had perhaps been done when the painter was naively sad about something, for it had a ik-ptU of feeling and sensitiveness that J could find in none of his other pictures. But ho is very dashing and full of verve is Hals, his .technique is astonishingly apt, and his colour—though I found it a little cold in many of his works—is just and enterprising. STJBFEIT OF PLUMS. One could go on for ever at this rate, and many people, far more able than the present writer, would seem to be going to do so. So I, humbler ac ; Heart th:i,-i I sound, will leave the Dutch masters, after a successful attempt to look over the heads of the crowd round the famous girl's head by Vermeer of Delft. It was odd to see it, with its ever-trembling underlip, its marvellously controlled range of delicate tone, and its very great simiplicity —surely the hall-mark of the masterfullest masters. It is a very lovely piece of painting, and it is nerve-rack-ing to see all those fine cracks and to wonder if this so young girl, is after all, not quite immortal. The most depressingly true of all our national platitudes is the one that says

you may have too much of a good thing. You may indeed. I fled from Burlington House to Bond street and spent half an hour looking at a show j of Johns, Sickarts, and Matthews, and j the last at any rate suffered nothing by comparison. It was like long draught's of a fairy stream in the heart of a forest, after too much old tawny port by a roaring fire. BROADCASTING. I have twice referred to Mr. Koaer i Pry's lecture on the Dutch pictures. It was one of very many hundreds of excellent talks that are broadcast from the British wireless stations. English radio is very live wireless indeed. You can listen, in one day, to classical music, a play, vaudeville, popular songs, expert lectures, a football match, world's news, a service in Westminster Abbey, and H.R.H. the Prince of Wales. I have hoard G. K. Chesterton, E. M. Foster, J. C. Squire, Compton Mackenzie, Lord Jellicoe, "Jix," Mr. J. H. Thomas, Sir Watford Davies, and very many other notables—all by the means of switching on a little handle and pointing a leather box vaguely in the direction of the said notables. And forever do I exclaim with simple wonder, 'Hpw extraordinary it all is." Sometimes as you are"groping in the air for Paris or Berlin you can hear a busy mysterious tic-tic-tic-a-tie. Some night-flying airman is sending his messages abroad in the dark, or a steamer buffeting its way down the channel, is talking to a sister ship leagues and leagues away out at sea. And above tnis traflie of the air comes the fruity voice of an Italian tenor in Toulose Kf 7* Donna c Mobile" <° the inhabitants of Tooting Beck Personally I enjoy, almost'best of all, the children's hours. They are really excellent and apparently extremely popular, except with our own party of children who prefer p l aying H £_ ™ Families so that I don't often gefl chance to listen to these pleasant en* ertaniments. The British BroTdca - ™g Company publishes two very ex&p7 ei kliCß> giViDg fu" E"glfsh or art"' es on J T°^ammes ™th short The who the t more important items. well «£»„ T tem, is e^rawaiaarily THE GREAT COLD =?£§mm, lake m the garden is solid, thick glass made a T-7 ° c^ deaot and Ms b°^ made a slide, and my host nnri i • chauffeur put on skated, and the bufe appearing suddenly among tho frozen hoary reede performed a g spectacular co Sal e fT ,° 110 end of th« dide to the other looking like a sort of Gil''tiaVTf in his black swallow-tails and patent leather shoes but the biting cold has como down from the north, and is liko the breath of the Snow Queo f vhQm Hans An the told his frightening stories. Tho streets aro as slippery as the floors of New Jerusalem and the praise of plumbers is in all men's mouths. In spite of repeated warnings in the Papers and on tho air, hundreds of these hardy English insist on skating on the Thames, and every village pond is notious with children. Tho hills have oecome Alps-in-little, and I saw a photo of a. climbing party that 'took me back as people say, to tho Franz Jose-ph Olacier, and instead of the half frozen chattering of these little English birds, I heard mok-a-mok, singimj in hot mid-summer above New Zealand ice. At Cambridge, in a quadrangle of ono of the colleges, there is a frozen fountain, so lovely lhat people are making journeys to see- it. London wlulo tho snow lies fresh, looks like a scene from a Victorian melodrama but the countryside chilled out of all sentimentality, is tho ago-old tith and tillage of Hodge, tho British peasant And Hodge himself, blowing on his frozen nail, is abroad in the l-.inos and fields. There is a kind of dogged jauntiness about the working people ;is one sees them in tho great cold, stamping along tho ringing roads; flogging their arms across their chests, and going about their work steadfastly, as though an ancient instinct, tells thorn Hint thoro is some sort of. satisfaction in endurance-. As I write Ini sitting in ;i hyacinths, frezias in pots, and pots of golden daffodils —delicious pampered creatures who pay no attention to tho cold outside. It is tiresome of Mr. A. S. M. Hutchinson, and the writers of popular ballads, to make it impossible i'or any self-respecting journalist, io quote Shelley on this most appropriate occasion.