OLIVER HALL. “ROADSIDE TREES.”
OLIVER HALL. “TREES ON THE HILL-SIDE.”
OLIVER HALL. “THE EDGE OF THE FOREST.”
XVI.
OLIVER HALL.
MR. OLIVER HALL, a young and, until lately, a comparatively little-known but a distinctly interesting and strongly gifted etcher (who paints, he tells me, a good deal in water-colour), has next to be spoken of; and if his work has one characteristic more than another—though grace and freedom are its characteristics too—the one that is most its own is the continual evidence his plates afford of his enjoyment of growth and building up—his pleasure in the traces of the way by which the object before him became the object that it is. Mr. Hal object is more likely to be a tree than a church. Architecture he does not attack, and his rare figures are but the figures of the landscape-painter. He labours amongst sylvan and amongst pastoral scenes that are not strikingly picturesque; and in method, as well as often in theme, he suggests Seymour Haden.
Mr. Hall has not yet wrought very many plates; they number, it may be, two score. He is not, in his work, always faultless, and perhaps he is not thus far very varied. But he is in the right track, and has shown no disposition to leave it. He has done beautiful things—the “Coniston Hall” one of the finest of them. He is a vigorous, frank, free sketcher, often sketching “effects,” as well as forms that vanish less quickly; and, in the realm of effects, the very spirited etching, “A Windy Day,” is perhaps the best of that which he has done. It is a scene on Angerton Moss, a stretch of open country rising to the right; the scattered trees and clustered farm buildings on the horizon line; and they are wind-swept, and wind is in the sky.
