Viewed from the Marina, the entrance to the court proved to be a vision of loveliness. There was only one intrusive note to jar the harmony, the coarse sea figure by Sherry Fry, presumably Neptune's, Daughter, standing in the center, with a great fish at her feet, plainly out of place here, in spite of the court's celebration of the sea as the source of human life.
XVI
The Brangwyns
We lingered in the colonnade to view the eight mural decorations by Frank Brangwyn, of London. In front of The Bowmen we found a friend, a gifted woman painter, fairly bursting with enthusiasm. "What delights me in Brangwyn," she said, "is his artistic courage. He dares to put down just what he feels. This sturdy figure in the foreground, for example, peering through the trees, how many other painters would have allowed him to turn his back on the spectator? And yet how interesting he is and how alive."
"Some of those heads strike me as curious," I remarked. "That fellow closest to the center, just about to let his arrow fly, seems to have no head to speak of."
"Sometimes he's careless with his drawing. And yet he can draw magnificently, too. He evidently had a purpose in making so many of the heads in these murals almost deformed. He wanted to suggest that these types were in no way mental. They were wholly physical. Notice the care he has lavished on their muscular bodies, their great shoulders and legs."
"It doesn't seem like English work, does it?" said the architect.
"No, there's something almost Oriental about it both in the feeling and the coloring. And there's the Pagan love of the elemental life."
"But what a chance Brangwyn had to do something new with this magnificent subject," the architect went on. "At last, after centuries of effort, men are actually conquering the air. They've learned to fly. They've become birds. Now why didn't Brangwyn give us a pictorial expression of that miracle? Why didn't the artist have as much sense as the man of affairs who pays Art Smith to come out here and fly before the multitude?"
I argued that Brangwyn preferred to deal with antique themes - they were so much more pictorial.