Cecil King’s delightful Regatta Day at Appledore (p. 98) has to do with the lighter side of sea life, and his H.M.S. “Wolsey” (p. 97) with matters much more serious. The Regatta Day, as its subject befits, is a lively and brightly treated study, full of incident, and attractively irresponsible in composition. It has both power and originality, and it puts beyond question his capabilities as a draughtsman because it presents a difficult problem in perspective which he has solved most happily. But much of its charm comes from the holiday spirit in which it is conceived and carried out. The H.M.S. “Wolsey” is more sober, and conveys well the idea of the grim simplicity of the practical fighting machine built for use, not ornament.
Norman Wilkinson is a versatile artist who does many things well, and who yields to no one at the present time in knowledge of the pictorial chances which the sea provides. He is shown here under more than one aspect—as a painter of interesting realities in his panoramic Plymouth Harbour (p. 100), as a very acute student of wave movement in Up Channel (p. 103) and The Wave (p. 101), and as a maker of rapid and suggestive notes in his sketch Etretat (p. 99). Of these examples the most arresting in many ways is The Wave; it has such an unusual amount of vitality, it is so seriously observed and yet so free and unlaboured, and it is so correct not only in action but also in matters of lighting and reflection and of colour variation as well. This is an instance of the happy alliance of the science and the art of marine painting to bring about a perfectly balanced result.
Windbound (p. 104), by Hely Smith, and The Needles (p. 107), by Charles Pears, are inshore studies, notes of incidents which, though they are undramatic, lend themselves well to the painters’ purposes. The Needles, with its sense of breeziness and of the rough-and-tumble of a tide-race, is a picture that excites a distinctly pleasurable emotion, so much is there in it of the joy of living when the sun shines brightly and the wind blows briskly and the sea is sparkling and full of colour. The other two pictures by Charles Pears, The Examination (p. 106) and The Yacht Race (p. 105), make a contrast of grave and gay—a contrast between the dark moments of war and the happy times of peace.
Neither W. Marshall Brown in The Sea (p. 109), nor Julius Olsson in The Night Wrack (p. 110) and Heavy Weather in the Channel (p. 111), seek to make their pictures more attractive by adding to them any subsidiary incident. They are content to depend for success upon the plain statement of things they have seen in the sea itself and to be painters of the sea, and the sea alone. But both of them have found stirring subjects, impressively strong and calling for a particular decisiveness of method, and both have proved fully equal to the occasion. Of these three canvases perhaps the most largely seen and the finest in its grasp of the motive as a whole is the Heavy Weather in the Channel, which has really monumental breadth and dignity.
Between these powerful paintings and those of the Hon. Duff Tollemache and A. J. W. Burgess, which have a similar æsthetic intention, come in the sequence of the illustrations two very interesting works of Walter Bayes, The Timid Bather (p. 113) and The Red Beach (p. 112). These make an intelligent compromise between realism and abstract decoration; they are designs worked out with a sound idea of pattern-making and in accordance with a pre-conceived scheme of arrangement, but the details of which they are composed have been studied from nature with serious and observant vision. They are fancies with a solid foundation of fact, while The Watch that Never Ends (p. 116) and The Scarborough Fleet (p. 117), by Burgess, and the Storm on the Cornish Coast (p. 115), by Tollemache, are pure fact all through, and fact stated with well-justified confidence.
A decorative purpose is very definitely apparent in John Everett’s Deck of a Tea-Clipper in the Tropics (p. 118) and Breakers (p. 119), but this purpose has been fulfilled with excellent judgment and eminently good taste. There is an obvious formality in both pictures, and yet this formality does not detract from their charm—indeed, in the Breakers it adds strength to a sensitive note of an afterglow effect in which there is a delightful perception of tone subtleties and of varieties of curiously related colour.
Two absolutely opposed points of view are illustrated in The Wave (p. 123), by Nevinson, and Margate (p. 121), by James McBey. The Wave is an exposition of a modern theory of pictorial expression; it is set forth with unhesitating clearness of manner and method, and allows the artist’s attitude to be estimated at its full value. In such a series as this it fittingly has its place because it presents an aspect of marine painting that has to be considered. The Margate sketch, like W. T. M. Hawksworth’s clever Low Water, Penzance (p. 125), and the Wet Rocks, St. Ives, by R. Borlase Smart (p. 126), is frankly naturalistic, professing to be nothing more than a plain record of things as they are, and propounding no new theories about the development and evolution of art. Its spontaneous delicacy of handling is one of its most evident merits.
Motor Launches, by G. S. Allfree (p. 127), is an example of a type of work which seeks to combine actuality and fantasy in carefully studied proportion, and to produce by this combination something that will be more significant than an absolutely imitative transcription of nature. Certain features of the picture are exaggerated and given marked emphasis so that they may point more definitely the meaning of the subject and increase the strength of its dramatic suggestion. When this method is employed with sane understanding—and with the necessary touch of imagination—it has excellent results. In this case the artist has seen correctly how far it would be expedient for him to go and has not spoiled his picture by making it too audacious.
Yet another phase of modern thought in art influences the work of I. W. Brooks, whose desire is not so much to tell a story or to hold the mirror up to nature as to produce an ornamental abstraction. When the methods he employs to attain this end are not too much defined the outcome of them is a picture like In Cymyran Bay (p. 129), which has a most agreeable restfulness and decorative balance and is inspired by a feeling of serious reality. When he is more explicit in his processes he arrives at results like the two coast scenes (pp. 128 and 131), which have the arbitrary expression of a Japanese print and go as far in their elimination of everything save the fundamentals of the design. But such methods are undeniably legitimate because where they are used with due discretion they make possible the working out of decorative schemes which have both distinction and beauty.
A number of notable paintings of marine subjects stand to the credit of Terrick Williams, who has for some years past devoted himself to this branch of art with conspicuous success. Some idea of the grace and delicacy of his work can be obtained from the example shown, Clouds over the Sea, Holland (p. 132); but naturally it does not reveal the character of his colour. As a colourist he is more than ordinarily endowed, he has the real colour emotion, and it is always delightfully in evidence in everything he does, and always it is controlled by an unerring taste. He has, too, an acute perception of refinements of tone by which he is guided surely in his treatment of the luminous atmospheric effects to which he especially inclines. His right to a place among the chief of the British marine painters of the present day is indisputable.