WILLIAM STRANG. “JUSTICE LINDLEY.”
expression, to that which is agreeable and comely, to that which the natural man would voluntarily look upon, is yet more marked—a hundred times more marked—than Mr. Legro. Grace, elegance, personal distinction, the freshness of youth, the winsomeness of girlhood, the acceptability of the English upper classes—these things are far from him: he wots not of them, or but rarely. He likes poor folk, enjoys the well-worn clothes, the story of the poor fol work and poor fol trouble. For that I do not blame him. But, like Ostade and Brouwer, he likes the cottager best when he is stunted, and is most interested in him when he is gnarled.
For all the absence—an absence frequent, not continuous—of local colour, the scenes Mr. Strang depicts arrest you. You remember them because he has himself remembered that which was most important in the making of them. Essentials have not escaped him. The “realism” he has attained has been at least something much deeper than that which prides itself on the correct portrayal of the obvious. In great themes and little themes he has been alike vivid. There may be something that is squalid and something that is ignoble in “The Last Supper” as he can conceive it; but, at all events, a genuine human emotion is not banished from the scene. He is Von Uhde-like in that. And here and there, in brief suggestive studies of contemporary existence, an imaginative light is flashed upon the page, a touch of romance suggested, as where, in the curious little etching of a Bohemian wayfarer—a someone who has lost caste probably, whose pence and whose friends are few—lighting his pipe at a flaring gas-jet over some street bookstall on a Saturday night, you feel that for a moment there has sprung into your vision a fellow-creature with a history, whose mysteriousness you will not solve. Out of the darkness he has emerged for an instant, and into it he returns again.
This very remarkable artist has already executed not less than two hundred and fifty etchings.
CHARLES HOLROYD. “MIDNIGHT MASS.”
CHARLES HOLROYD. “FARM BEHIND SCARBOROUGH.”
