FAITHFUL ART.

Gisborne Times, Volume LXVIII, Issue 10739, 9 November 1928, Page 6

FAITHFUL ART.

SOME CFAEMTXG WATERCOLORS.

WORK OF MR- CRANLEIGH BARTON.

The walls, of the Hall above the San Toy Tearooms will present an attractive spectacle today and tomorrow, with an exhibition of charming water-colors painted by Mr. Cranleigh Barton, a young New Zealander.. Indeed, there are among the 50 or 60 pictures shown several which would do credit to a more distinguished name; so it wou'd seem that Mr. Barton need only persist to succeed. Very wisely, Mr. Barton has been circumnavigating the globe, which is an excellent thing in an artist. New air. new skies, old architecture, aged streets, and strange peoples help to make one’s perspective of life reasonably correct and an artist’s brush reasonably faithful to his subject. it was Julian Ashton who advised Mr. Barton to try the Slade. School of Art in London, and as the result of hard, earnest work there for thirty months, Mr. Barton was “hung” at the Royal Institute. He also gave two “one-man” shows in London, one at the Graham Gallery, in Bond street, which Her Majesty the Queen attended, and was so impressed with the work of the young artist that, she purchased two impressions and paid full price for them, tooWhat strikes one about Mr. Barton’s work is its clean, wholesome fidelity, his mature architectural sense, his proportion and balance, and reticence m color. When he lake's a picture “St, Martins-in-the-Fi'elds, London,” or “Trafalgar Square,” or “St. Clement’s-Da no, Strand,” there is never a struggle to remember —it is the place itself. Mr. Barton's collection is rich in hits of London. There is nob'e aspiration in the elegant sympathy of hi.s “Westminster Abbey” ; a sense ot hoary age and reverence about his “Winchester Cathedral,” and there are glimpses of’ “the city” with the dome of St. Paul’s dominating the distance: a delicate, misty impression of the Tower Bridge—so typical a Thames-side scene in the autumn. But Mr. Barton has wandered, and his taste i.s catholic. There are quiet hack-waters and quaint bridges; a charming bat of Dinant; Gagnes, on the Riviera, is quaintly intimate in one picture, and the various sketches of Venice, its Gampani'e, St. Mark’s, the quaint bridges, and lively market places—all have a place m this very interesting collection.