CHARLES HOLROYD. “ROUND TEMPLE.”
XIII.
CHARLES HOLROYD.
A RESIDENCE of two or three years in Italy—where he enjoyed the Slade School Travelling Studentship—has vied with the tuition of Mr. Legros in influencing that more than promising etcher, Mr. Charles Holroyd. A sense of dignity and Style, and, with this, some direct personal inspiration, lift Mr. Holroy work entirely above the level of the commonplace and the ordinary. In sense of line, indeed, he not seldom makes approach to the classic. He has affinity with Claude and with George Barret.
Several of the best of Mr. Holroy not yet very numerous prints—each one of which is well-considered, thorough and serious work—deal worthily, truly that is, and yet imaginatively, with the lives of ecclesiastics, among the cypresses and olive woods and pine-trees of Monte Oliveto, and in the gaunt and spacious chambers of the remote and hillside monastery, in which Mr. Holroyd, with his love of Italy and of its graver life, was sometime minded to abide. Thus, in the Monte Oliveto series, we have the sombre yet pictorial incident of “Midnight Mass,” and, again, the “Ladies’ Guesthouse,” with its Tiepolo-like charm.
The homeliness of subject in his “Farm behind Scarborough” does not forbid the display of certain of Mr. Holroy virtues. Yet perhaps more characteristic is the “Round Temple,” or that “study of line” suggested by the noble and free beauty of the Borghese Gardens. “Round Temple” is the fuller, the more realized. “Borghese Gardens” consciously and inevitably abandons much that is wont to attract, but it retains the thing for which it has existed—dignified and expressive rhythm of line. And this justifies it, and permits it to omit much, and only to exquisitely hint at the thing it does not actually convey.
FRANK SHORT. “SLEEPING TILL THE FLOOD.”
