ART EXHIBITION

Evening Star, Issue 21519, 18 September 1933, Page 12

ART EXHIBITION

On exhibition in Park, Reynolds’s gallery showroom, High street, is an excellent collection of original oil paintings, water colours, miniatures, original etchings, Baxter prints, engravings, and old prints by artists of reputation, datipg from the present time back to that of Van Dyck 1598-1641., The collection has been brought here by Mr M. M'Cormick, the well-known art connoisseur of Christchurch, who, in forming it, selected numerous works which were offered for the exhibition from private collections. Mrs V. E. Whiteman, who studied under Lucy Kemp Welch, and whose pictures have been 'much admired and sought after in the dominion, is represented by four works —viz., No. 3, ‘Mowing’; No. 11, ‘Ploughing’; No. 16, ‘The Drover’; and No. 54, ‘After/the Hunt,’ pictures of animal life. A. Fournerie, of Paris, exhibits five landscapes and one flower piece, all impure water colour, showing fine fresh colour with excellent transparent reflections. Daniel Sberrin, a well-known British artist, exhibits four splendidly painted oils, showing his great versatility, from a quiet trout stream in Surrey to cattle in the Highlands of Scotland. Another fine artistic work is No. 56, * The Sunlit Snow, Norway,’ by fl. Goavloff, repicting woodland, hills, and snow, with the sunlight streaming through the trees and resting on the snow. Fred. J. Knowles. R. 1., is represented by several good water colours. No. 4 (‘A Reverie’), No. 15 (‘Grazing, North Wales ’), and two others all show good drawing and the true colouring of England. Blythe Fletcher is well represented, showing a full collection of works both in oils and water colours. This artist has undoubtedly improved of late in a remarkable manner, giving a great variety of subjects from the old solid mills of England to poetic, dreamy sunlit Venice. This artist’s strong feature is colour. The late P. Vander Velden is represented by only one work, an oil, No. 26, ‘At the Otira, 1 a well-painted work, one of the studies made in connection with the painting of the very fine picture of the Otira in the Dunedin Gallery, R. Fleming, an English miniature painter, exhiibts six miniatures in water colour, very beautiful and very delicately painted. There are many other fine works by

good artists m this section, but space will not permit details. Nearly a century ago George Baxtei invented and made popular a new and distinctive method of producing pictures in translucent oil colours. His prints were obtained from a combination of an exceedingly fine hand-engraved steel plate in addition to a series of as many as thirty engraved metal and boxwood blocks for the making of a single picture. It was essential for each of these block to be superimposed with absolute exactness, and for this invention he was granted Royal letters patent by King William IV. in the year 1834. The secret of his process died with him and his productions have long since become collectors’ pieces, a number of them being exceedingly rare and of groat value. There are seven Baxter prints exhibited in this collection. There is also on exhibition a large and good collection of original etchings by members of the Royal Academy, the Royal Etching Society, the French professors and exhibitors in the Paris Salon, including one rare original etching, ‘ Johannes Breguel,’ by Sir Anthony Van Dyck, 1598-1641. Added to this array is a mixed collection ol rare old inn and with old engravings. y