MODERN FRENCH PAINTING. — Lumierism is Becoming Oldfashioned —

Otago Witness, Issue 2894, 1 September 1909, Page 77

MODERN FRENCH PAINTING. — Lumierism is Becoming Oldfashioned. —

From the Dutchmen, through Constable ■to Turner^ — thus we might in a few word: sum tip the historical development of modern French landscape painting. It was Dutch influence that killed the dreary "historical landscape" o£> French art, with its Greek* tempkss. waterfalls, and mythological episodes,*" and" efitourtfged the -Barbizon men "to paint' the familial scenes^ and episodesof ~: j heh daily life. • Ih' the work of tho" pure landscape pain-rere like Rousseau and DairfJignjr,- the influence of 1 Constable asscr.'s itself in certain insistence on the local colour and the unexpected aspects of things. When the . tradition' of these men was showing signs of exhaustion Claude Monet and some of. 'his comrades had the good fortune to discover Turner's later work in bur National Gallery Before pictures like' the "Rain, Steam, and Speed" it dawned on' one^bat a new method of picture-making might be popularised. -In Turner's- picture there were no dark shadows *o brighten by contrast the lighter parts. The picture as a whole tells as a bright mass of light. By contrast with the frame and its sur roundings the canvas looks aJmost like a window opened on .Jio the outside world.The great -thing, . then, that el rue: Monet was t< banish all I he- browns,- the earthen, colours, from his palette, , and paint only' with the lighter coloure^^he • tilaes, blues, madders, and chrome^/ & *l : This purely technical innovation Monet aa*d • his followers x set . to work during the early seventies to exploit. They brought' abundant ■ energy and enthusiasm *o their task, as well as all the'" remorseless logics of the French 'character. The market' has "been, flooded with a -multitude of canvases, which,- whatever their other merits on defects, were at least lighter in key tham any pictures that had been painted beforo their time." As the head of this school Claude Mone+ must live in history. His name must go down to posterity as the man who taught Bis. contemporaries to ' c< chante en pleinazur," to capture; '.as one .of has admirers tells us, the illusion of the' impalpable atmosphere and make 't palpitable on his canvas. At the present moment Lumierism i« -becoming a . little Old-fashioned. The recipe" has been - worked" to d-sath, and the adventurous are busy prospecting for a rc\, vqin to exploit. People tiro oow going back to -the point from which Monet broke away. — World

— The death of. Mr E. J. Gregory, R.A., cam© as c great shock to many of that artist's friends and admirers. Although he was in -his sixtieth year Air Gregory gave* the impression of being still in the full vigour of middle ags, ■ and <the marvellous elaboration— perhaps over-elaboration — of his recent work showed no signs of failing power 3. He was jne of these men who seem marked oat for tSuccess and distinction from the very first. Working as a boy in the Southampton School of Art h ; i promise soon artraet&d the attention of his fellow-students, especially' of a young AngHBavarian named Hubert Hertkomer, 6ide by side with whom Gregory raced o tamo. Both, when mere youths, became members of the artistic staft x>f the newly-founded-Graphic, and both early gained success as painters, Herkonfer with 'The Last Muster" "and Gregory with "Dawn." Gregory probably "did nothing better throughout his career than . t.his remarkable picture of a Toom at daybreak^ after a suburban dance. "Dawn 1 " — an oil-painting, not. a watercolour, '.as :it was described .ip .? lengthy -ami otherwise accurate' biographical sketch in one of the dailies — was lew miraculous in detail than some of Gregory's later works, but it war, painted with a breadth and fluency -bat he never afterwards surpassed. It is, or was until -ecently, .he property of Mr J. S. Sargent, R.A., vho bought it soon after the great- Galloway sale. The late Mi Galloway, to whom '"Dawn" belonged, was a North Country engineer and picture-collector, who had thr profoundest admiration for the work of Gregory, and bought everything he could 4hat came from his brush. This, of courser was delightful f oi the painter — until tho death of M«- Galloway, when his collection in its entirety came und-e the hammop, and more than a hundred works, great an r l small, by Gregory were sold at Christie's. Naturally the prices fell. It was inevitable that they should, for there would be r slum} in Holbein o; Titian if a hundred' works by cither Df these masters were thrown upor the market at once. Mr Gregory was man oi >jreat ability and 1 ingenuity in other directions than painting. He was a clever mechanician, and so much of a bookman that he has sometimes bf>3n described as the best-read painter in London. A passionate lover of the Thames, he always passed much of tho Eummer and autumn upon its "lpper reaches, and the life and scenery of our beautiful river was pictured in "numbers of his paintings, notably in "Intruders" and 'Marooned," and in the astonishingly abfo study of Boulter's Lock, that gained for him a gold medal at Paris at the Inter* national Exhibition of 1900.

HV4 flad bronchitis several times, His doctors ordered "warmer dimes.'* But then, alas! the man was poor. Or he'd have gone away before. "Do this, <clo that," 'tis easily said, But poor men have to earn their bread 1 . Thanks be, they may become secure 'Gainst coughs and colds by Woods.' Peppermint Cujy