The reproductions of Mr. Fowler's paintings in this volume will serve to introduce his work to a larger public than that of the habitual haunters of picture galleries. But this does not mean that the artist is either a beginner or an unknown man. It is only as a landscape painter that Mr. Fowler might perhaps be regarded as a new-comer. As a figure painter he has already established a considerable reputation. His works have been bought for several of the great Continental collections, and his fine pictures of "Ariel" and "Eve and the Voices" are among the ornaments of the Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool. Still, as a landscape painter Mr. Fowler is practically a new-comer, and he has so far given the public few opportunities of becoming acquainted with his powers. A few years ago he held an exhibition at the Salon Gurlitt in Berlin of some eighty of his "nature-portraits," as the German critics styled his work, and in 1903 some thirty of his paintings were shown in one of the exhibitions at the Goupil Gallery in London. He has frequently exhibited figure subjects at the Royal Academy, but only once, in 1903, has he exhibited a landscape there. This was a large picture of "Conway Castle." It formed a notable feature of the Central Gallery, and proved that a new landscape painter had arisen sensitive, to an extraordinary degree, to the fugitive and exquisite charms of natural light. Such a picture could only have been painted by one who had devoted many years of study to subjects that lie outside the range of the ordinary figure painter.

It was not therefore surprising to find that the artist had painted something like two thousand studies in the open air before he could "reproduce that inexorable logic and consistence of lighting" which characterises the seventy or eighty pictures which are reproduced in the present volume. For thirty years the figure painter has devoted fragments of each year to what at first seemed the hopeless attempt to capture those subtle and elusive beauties of nature which, through evident lack of swiftness and skill, elude the painters, or, at best, can only be memorised. Each year had found the artist nerving himself to fresh efforts by saying to himself, "Nature can be actually reproduced in paint,—given the ability," and each winter he had returned to his studio from his campaign among the mountains wondering when, if ever, that ability would come to him. But gradually the hand has become quicker and more skilful, the eye more certain. After years of the most exacting discipline something of the very illusion of the sunbeams seemed to get on to the canvas, and the artist's hand learned the cunning of his swift, flying, vivid, suggestive touch—a touch which sometimes seems like an electric shock received from the tense and excited vision.

Perhaps it is one of Mr. Fowler's most conspicuous merits that his works seem to have sprung up spontaneously in response to the artist's passionate interest in nature's aspects. He has not turned for support to the formulas of abstract science. He has simply felt a genuine passion for the truth and beauty of the visible concrete reality, and he has clung with admirable tenacity and faith to what he has himself felt and proved to be of worth. For in art, as in every other walk of life, the enemy of all excellence and of all progress is the tendency to accept ready-made habits of thought, to go with the crowd, to rely upon routine and machinery. So few are ready to "pay in their person," to win their way to a higher standpoint by dint of their own sufferings, exertions, and failures.

It is this readiness to "pay in his person" that seems to form the distinguishing note of Mr. Fowler's work. He has discarded all picture-making formulas, setting himself to put on record as definite a statement as possible of his own feelings and sensations in the presence of nature. If only he could get something of what he himself had seen, he knew it would be beautiful enough. The whole merit of his work thus springs from his initial, his fundamental determination to see true, and to paint things in their actual relationship.

Work like that of Mr. Fowler is particularly liable to be misjudged by an ignorant or hasty glance. It is easy for those who do not consider what art is to call it artless, and for those who do not see deeply into the infinite beauty of nature to sneer at it as "a mere transcript of nature." "As painting is an art," says Reynolds—and he knew what he was talking about—"they" (the ignorant) "think they ought to be pleased in proportion as they see that art ostentatiously displayed; they will from this supposition prefer neatness, high finishing, and gaudy colouring to the truth, simplicity, and unity of nature." But it is not to the undiscriminating that Mr. Fowler's work makes its appeal; his aim is rather to use art than to make a display of it. And such work rewards us for all the interest we can take in it.

THE END

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