Muirhead Bone
Mr. Muirhead Bone is another artist who has many imitators—some with considerable technical success—but fortunately an artist’s vision is his own and no one can borrow his eyes or his soul though they may well nigh take the pencil from his hand. Of Mr. Bone’s vision much might be said. It is unique in the art of the time; and in his hand a pencil becomes a truly magical instrument—like the bow in the hand of a great violinist: when his pencil has touched the paper one takes a keen pleasure in each line for its own sake, and when to this is added a full realization of the interpretation and vision they collectively record, one may well say—here is a real draughtsman! He endows St. James’s Hall with such beauty in his drawing of its Demolition that one is tempted to desire the destruction of several of our buildings.... Imagine what he would draw for us if we took half the roof off the Albert Hall and gashed a great hole in its obese side! What a flood of light he would let into that gloomy interior and what dignity he would impart to the last remains of that bun-like edifice!
And now I find that I have come to the limit of the space allowed to me for these notes, and I look through the list of over a hundred fine names—splendid names because they belong to men who have done splendid things—and I realize that I have not written a word about the larger number of them and also that if I wrote from now until my personal doomsday I could not express the admiration I feel for the sum of their achievement. I have written notes only on a few of those who make an immense appeal to me; it has been a purely personal choice and, as a fact, quite unconscious; and as that, too, very incomplete, for it was my optimistic conviction that I should return and write about the others—scores of them; but now the chance is gone, in a few hours from now these notes will have been flung to the printer’s devil (a person I have always wanted to meet—but now had better not!) I want to rush back and explain my personal beliefs about Botticelli and his influence on the pre-British-Raphaelites, before the chance is gone, probably for ever; I want to air certain convictions about the principles of rhythm in Raphael’s curving lines; I want to write of Pinturicchio and Claude; of Fragonard and Blake; I want to write about a dozen Frenchmen who are not in the book and more about the four or five who are; I want to argue with an imaginary reader as to whether Mr. Dulac is greater as a caricaturist or as a decorator; I want to abuse nearly everybody for not fully understanding that Mr. Vernon Hill is one of our finest draughtsmen; I want to pen a humble appreciation of Mr. Tonks and his salutary influence as a professor and his benign influence as an artist. I want—I have just time for that—to again remind the reader—who has my gratitude for still being with me to the end—that a drawing is a thing to be looked at and not written about.
“A COURIER.” DRAWING IN PEN AND INK BY ALBRECHT DÜRER IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM. SIZE, 7⅞ × 7⅜ IN.