ART AND ARTISTS.

Otago Witness, Volume 23, Issue 2684, 23 August 1905, Page 79

ART AND ARTISTS.

THE PAINTER OF "THE DERBY DAY." —Some Gossiping Reminiscences. —

I have just been talking to Mr Frith, the famous painter of "Derby Day" 1 and "Margate Sands." This year is tha Diamond Jubilee of Mr Friths connection with the Academy. He was elected A.R.A. in 1845. Sitting in au arm-chair before the fire in his cosy studiositting room, Mr Frith talked to me of Varnishing Days of long ago. As he gazed into the fire his eyes lighted up with the memories cf his struggles, and triumphs of 60 and 70 years ago, and again and again he forgot his cigar as he talked, and had to strike a match aud relight it.

He has many memories of Turner and other ".oainters of the early Victorian time. "Many years ago," said Mr Frith, "when we were in Trafalgar square" (how many of us remember when the Acadenry was there?)— "when we were in Trafalgar square the cornei s of the rooms were cut off, so that a picture in the angle had a most prominent place. Well, one Varnishing Day I was near one of these corners, working on some figures in a landscape of Creswick's, and close to me were Turner and Da-wd Roberts, the landscape artist. Both were short men, and both stood side by 6ido on stools, touching up their pictures as fast as they could. Turner's was ' Masa-l-K-110 and the Fisherman's Ring.' There was no Masanieilo to he seen ; it was a ■very small roicrure, and you could not make head or tail oi it. Roberfcs's picture was a long;, grey view of Edinburgh. By-and-bye I noticed that Turner was putting a Jot of blue in his sky, and killing the grey of Roberts's pictures. " ' Turrnerr,' said Roberts, with a gruff Scotch accent, ' you are making that very blue.' "Turner made it bluer still. There was silence for a minute, and then Roberts said : "Turrnor-*, you never saw such a sky as that ! You are playing the devil with my picture.' "'You have your business ajjd I have mine,' said Turner. 'Let us both attend to i+.' " But Mr Frith had nicer things than that to tell of Turner. "One Varnishing . Day I had a picture from Moliere's ' Bourgeois Gentilhomme,' " he said. "The servant had just let her mistress into the banquet room, and is listening at the door. Somehow I saw that I had not made her lean properly. There was something wrong about the waist. Turner came up, and with a few touches at the waist made the whole thing right. It was most remarkable in one who was not a figure painter. The picture now belongs to a gentleman in London, and Turner's touches are still on' it- just as he did them that Varnishing "Day." "LandF^er," continued Air Frith,, "would do a good deal of work on the Varnishing Days, and could make remarkable changes in a day or two. "One day. when he was putting the la.st touches to his splendid picture, ' There Is Life In the Old Do? Yet ! ' he said to me, 'If people knew as much about painting as I d^y they would never buy a painting of mine.' And he meant it; he felt it thoroughly. He wa3 conscious of many imperfections that none but himself could see." Landseer's famous "Dignity and -Impudenoe" was sold 10 Mr Jacob Bell, the druggist in Oxford street, who asked Mr Frith to come and look at it. "Wiat cltrl you pay for that, Beli?" asked Mr Fri+h. "Fifty pounds," was the answer. Mr Frith was astonished that Mr Landseer could sell a pfoture like that for £50. "Bell left it to the nation,'' he said; "but now it would easily fetch £3000 or £*000." "Yes," said the veteran artist, "Varnishing Day makes even Royal Academicians " feel cross ! Over and over again you feel that your picture has mysteriously changed You can't tell quite what is the" matter ; but the canvas looks utterly ruined and beastly and bad. But the annoyance soon wears off, and one- gets reconciled again to one's own picture!" — W. R. H., in the Daily News. COLOUR IN SCULPTURE. — An American Writer's View. — Sculpture is taking such a place in the art of to-day that it bids fair "to wrest the first rank from painting, and, while architecture is bound hand and foot to the chariot of commerce, emancipate itself to some degree from the trammels of convention and develop into an indejiendent art. The clanger 'says Mr C. de Kay, writing in the New York Tribune) is the monotony that has befallen sculpture owing to mistaken ideas as to ihe purpose^ of the art, and what the art was in the great epochs of its flowering. When you walk about the Rotunda of the Capitol at Washington, or down the Sieges-Allee in Berlin, you begin to realisp what it is for nations to borrow ideas in art from other ages and other climes without regard to their own people and climate. They always borrow -the wrong thing. If it is in any way possible, they begin at the wrong end and copy the least appropriate thing first, or, as the- hoirely farm phrase Las it, put the cart before the horz-\ All that white marble in the Rotunda, all those groups and busts rnd> benches of white marble ."n t>hs Sieges-Allee are there because 100 years ago or so it wa><9 assumed' that the Greeks left ibeir raavble statues white. The assumption rested 011 marbles made by Romans, so>me of whfl-h, though by no means all, were left unttntecl, jurt as they csme from the polisher's hand. "Wherefore wo had the cold, glittering statues of Canova and Thorvaldsen and the ci.'amal statues and groups of the American.

BrUish. French, and German sculptor.; who made Rome thciv Mocca. As usual, Ihoy began at the wrong end. and even so, did not know how to ?o about it. Instead cf lingering in Italy, they should have picseoil onto Greece, and there, inducing Governments to explore and dig up what statuary remained in the earth, satisfy ihemsckos what that sculpture really i\as which made Greece the most famous land on the globe.

Tho marble from tl.e Pentelicon Hill, rear Athens, has a good deal of iion in it, which sometimes shovsis tho minute grains whan polished, and is said to be the cause of tne yellow tinge on tho weathered sides of the Parthenon and Propylaia.

The east end of the Parthenon seems to have oxidised more than any other part, some stones having turned pale orange, others a rust colour. But in tbeir architecture aud in their statues as well the Greeks did not wait until weathering removed tho dazzling whiteness of the fresMy polished Pentelic marble; they painted or tinted column and architrave, placed sailenfc colours on t!'e background of the metopes and on the triglyphs; brilliant, also, were the decorative mask and leaf forms on the ' corners of the roof ; less bright, perhaps, the reliefs carved 011 the wall under the porches that ran round the Parthenon and similar temples.