ART AND ARTISTS.

Otago Witness, 1 June 1910, Page 85

ART AND ARTISTS.

{ .—. m> DEATH OF SIR W Q. OROHARDSON, : R.A. By the death ot Sir W. Q. Orchardson British art in general and the Royai Academy in particular loses one of its very foremost representatives, one of the few whose genius was "recognised not only in Great Britain, but on the Continent of Europe and in America. Sir William, who had been ill about a fortnight, was 75 years of age, having been born in Edinburgh in 1835. He first exhibited at the Royal. Scottish Academy, and went to London in 1863, and exhibited in the Royal Academy. He was elected an A.R.A. five years later and a Royal Academician in 1877. Sir William was knighted three years ago. One of hi; best-known works, v " Hard Hit," was put up for sale a year or-two ago. and fetched 3300g5. On one occasion a visitor to the artist's house noticed an engraving of the picture. , " Do you see all those cards?" the artist said, noticing ' what the interviewer was looking at. j "Well, you will hardly believe what a number of packs I strewed on the floor of the studio to get that effect. I bought 20 packs at first, thinking that they would be quite enough; but they made no show at all. I had to use 50 to get what I wanted." j To the question " How did you arrive at the title 'Hard Hit'?" the artist made I reply: " Oh, that's rather curious. The j man who sat for the hero —if you call him : a hero—of the picture was rather fond of cards hin self. One daj when he came into the studio I noticed that he looked a little depressed. 'What is the matter?' I asked him. 'I was awfully hard hit last night,' he answered. ' By Jove!' I said, jumping up with delight, ' I've got it at last. " Hard hit," of course.' That is how the picture came to be so called." Pellegrini, the caricaturist, once came up in an excited state to Sir W. Orohardson at a private view of the Academy, and said, regarding this same work: " Mr Orohardson. if I thought that by killing you I could paint a picture like yours, I would stab you to the heart." " It was,'' added the artist, " the greatest compliment I oould have had." A visitor to Sir W. Orchardson's studio : on one occasion was looking at a picture which stood upon an easel. It was the portrait of a bird, set against a delicate background of flowers: —"That picture (said the Academician) has a pathetic interest for me. I had a dear friend, tqi whom beauty was a religion, and who lived, as it were, through his eyes. He* suddenly lost his sight, " yet he frequently cam© to my studio and listened attentively while I explained to him the drawing and colour of any picture I happened : to be painting at the time. One day I he said, ' There is a space on one of the walls of my drawing room; I wish you would paint me something to hang there—something with flowers in it." When it was finished he called, as he said, to see it. His delight at the description of the picture was infinitely touching. I am convinced that, through some inner consciousness of his brain, he experienced the same sensations as if his eyesight had been restored to him." This picture was regarded as one of the most charming of Sir W. Orchardson's works. Sir W. Orohardson. it may be stated, had no speoial favourite among his works. "The moment I have finished a picture," he once said, " it goes away, and I never think of it again. One always finishes a picture in a disappointed state of mind. What is to me so extraordinary about painting is that it is ro- dependent on the fashion of the moment. And fashion only corrupts art, just like a woman who goes for a new hat, and chooses the latest style, wholly indifferent as to whether it suits her or- not." Sir W. Orohardson held that refinement wae the most important thing

in art, " fcr if a thing is not refined it is not fine art; refinement is the personal note of the man himself." THE NOW AND THEN OF PICTURES. The tragedies of genius and the strange way in which posterity values what contemporaries despised have been brought out recently in the case of certain painters. " Frans Hals died a pauper, and his last days were eked out by a pittance from the town of Haarlem. It has just been announced that his painting ox himself and his family has been purchased by a New York banker for £100,000," says the Aberdeen Free Press. " Such whirligigs of time are by no means strange in the world of art, but never has there been such a striking instance of reward deferred as this." In the last few years our own National Gallery has paid £25,000 for Frans Hale's '' Family Groi-p." How Croms Reduced His Pictures. — Another case of th.; same kind is the East Anglian painter Old dome, for whose picture "The Poringland Oak" the National Gallery has just paid thousands of pounds. The conditions ui.der tvhioh this fine painter lived in Norwich are told in a letter to the Telegraph concerning Old Crome's " Mousehold Heath, near Norwich." The writer, Mr C. J. Freeman, says : "My greatgrandfather, Jeremiah Freeman, Art Depository, Norwich, was accustomed to buy paintings of Old Crome, who a.t that time was almost in a state of poverty. One day he took this picture in question and offered it to my relation, who told him it was o good, being too large to be saleable. " Crome took it back to bis wife in a state of great distress, and, like the good woman she was, she showed him a way out of the difficulty—viz., taking a pair of scissors she cut it in two parts, exactly in the centre, and then told him 'to take one of the parts to old Freeman, and ask him if that would suit him.' The latter on seeing: it did not recognise it as part of the original painting, and purchased it for a small sum. Some time aftei Old Crome sold hirr. the other half. "Mr Freeman was accustomed to keep these piotures in folios, and one day a gentlenmn, in turning them over, called his attention to the two pieces being j arts of <ne original painting. My greatgrandfather personally joined these two pieces, and they now form the celebrated " Mousehold Heath" painting. He sold it for what was then considered a good sum to a gentlerran at Yarmouth, and I believe it was acquired by the trustees of the National Gallery for about half the sum they have just paid for the ' Poringland Oak.' " " There is a certain commercialism about the huge prices which are being offered for such paintine-s," says the Free Press, " and one feels that the £103,000 given for this Hals, or the £72,000 given the other day far Holbein's ' Duchess of Milan,' or the £45.000 for Valesquez's 'Venus' have no ielation to their artistic value, but are fanciful prices based upon other standards altogether." Contrasts in Musical Appreciation.— The same tragedies come in the lives of musicians. Mozart and many other great composers died in poverty, but the Labour Leader says that " when ' The Merry Widow ' finished a continuous run of 778 performances at Daly's Theatre it was stated that during that period £242,000 was paid for seats. The composer, Herr Franz Lehar, ex-bandmaster of an Austrian ii.fantry regiment, bas made £150,000 out of the opera. 'And a few years hence,' says an Australian paper, 'it will be dead beyond all hope or fear of resurrection.' "