The same style is found in the later work of Frank Brangwyn, who began by painting out-of-door pictures in the spirit of the French Impressionists, and afterwards, thanks to a visit to the East, was brought into touch with Nature saturated in colour and massive in feature.
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| F. CAYLEY ROBINSON. | A WINTER EVENING. |
| (By permission of the Artist.) | |
All his works are imposing through the decisive way in which he builds up his masses, and the wonderful, rhythmical articulation of forms and colours combined. The picture “Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh” which has been given a place in the Luxembourg, and the large mural painting “Commerce and Navigation” in the Royal Exchange in London, are up to now his strongest work.
F. Cayley Robinson, who arrests one’s attention with his austere, almost heraldic arrangement of line, and his gloomy acerbity of colour; Miss Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, who awoke high hopes with her picture “The Deceitfulness of Riches”; and that spirited draughtsman, W. Nicholson, whose drawings lead the eye to and fro, backwards and forwards, along heavy decided lines, noting every expressive turn and movement. Almost all these masters have come to us from the applied arts. It was the idea of attaining to unity of effect in decorative ornament that impelled these artists to work in the spirit of to-day, not that each should bring forward his own work of art and let it stand by itself, but that the scheme of decorative architecture, modelling, and painting should work together hand in hand in a homogeneous scheme of decoration.
With all these artists one cannot help noticing that they owe much in the way of light and leading to one who in England, the land of poems-in-paint, proclaimed more outspokenly than anyone else the principle of “Art for art’s sake,”—to the great American, James M‘Neill Whistler.
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