The Cotman Collection | 31

Cotmania. Vol. IX. 1933-4

Archive: SDK Sydney Decimus Kitson Archive
Reference Number: SDK/1/2/1/9
Page: p. 13 recto


  • Description

    Article reviewing Lawrence Binyon's book on English Watercolours

    review clipping / Kitson annotation

    Date: 1933-1934

  • Transcription

    {review clipping}

    ENGLISH WATER-COLOURS

    English Water-colours by Lawrence Binyon. (Black. 7s. 6d. net.)

    This book is in large part an easy and graceful compilation of the knowledge that has of recent years been accumulated about the English watcr-colourists, both those who arc well known and those who are extremely obscure. Such a work is most useful : for hitherto this knowledge has not been easily accessible to the public, but only to be found in the pages of learned magazines and in particular in the admirable publications of the Walpole Society. It is a very well arranged book, with due space given both to facts and to criticism, and with a great deal of information so presented that it will never oppress the reader, no easy task with painters of such obscurity as some of those who are included in the book. The lives of the painters are pleasantly described, there are admirable accounts of the relevant movements of taste, and Mr. Binyon's criticism is, of course, always sensitive and discriminating. He does not confine himself lo those artists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who are usually supposed to form the English school of water-colourists but he begins with John White, who was employed as draughtsman on Sir Walter Raleigh's expedition to Virginia, and he ends with modern water-colourists, though these are not discussed at any length. Blake, who does not usually find a place among the water-colourists, has a chapter to himself, as also Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites. There are twenty-four reproductions and a frontispiece in colour. Mr. Binyon has also added an appendix of advice to collectors.
    It is a great merit of Mr. Binyon's book that he writes equably of English art, a subject which English critics can seldom discuss with any composure and without defending it against imaginary attackers or attacking it against imaginary defenders. Mr. Binyon has no particular case to make. He does not attempt any large generalizations about the nature of English art, and as a consequence he is able lo inspect more closely the characteristics of individual painters. His criticism of Rowlandson, for example, is extremely illuminating. Rowlandson might easily be used as an instance of the English passion for illustrative painting, deplorable or admirable according lo taste. Mr. Binyon is not concerned with such controversies, but instead he makes a much more interesting point.

    ...We are not really interested in any of the myriad figures that people his radiant drawings; not at least for their own sake. It is something quite different that enchants the eye; and this something is not at all superficial, it is one of the rarest of gifts -that of creating a kind of melodious play in the relations between the forms that animate the scenes; so that, with the seeming ease of the swift pen-line, a whole crowd of figures, often in violent agitation . . . are all caught up by a compiling tune into a flowing arabesque, and are magically translated from the world of fact into the artist's world of line and colour.

    Mr. Binyon's criticism of Cotman is equally subtle, and he has an excellent appreciation of Girtin's extraordinary talents. He greatly admires both J. R. Cozens and Francis Towne, two painters who extended the sphere of the watercolour, sometimes, as Mr. Binyon admits, beyond their own capacity or that of the medium as they used it, but more often without any radical inventions in technique. Yet it may well have been their actual limitations that enabled them to find the essential and poetic quality of a romantic landscape. As Mr. Binyon says of Cozens, in a suitably romantic passage: —

    What is it that these drawings reflect ? No pleasure (one would say) in the artist's skill, no concern to render the faithful aspect of a place, and yet no exploitation of the scene before the eyes, to turn it into a fine " effect." Nor is there any effort to seize and set down the structure of the rocks and mountains. What is communicated is feeling, but feeling of a rare kind. It is a passion for solitude: O beat a solitudo O sola beatitudo ! It is an exquisite sense for the marvelous mountain-stillness. The world is removed; the terror and glory of Alp and glacier veil themselves; the infinitely remote, the impalpable, a mingling of cloud and snow, a suspension of motion, attract the surrendered spirit.

    Mr. Binyon gives some account of the social environment of these painters and of the demands that were made of them by the society of the time. And this, indeed, is very necessary if we are to understand how so many artists of great talent and real sensibility practiced so gentle and in many ways limited an art, or when they attempted the sublime and the beautiful were not very successful. No doubt it was excellent for the crowd of minor artists that their work had at least the social uses of a picture postcard and that something definite, in which they could neither sink very low nor attempt to rise above their powers, was expected of them. But it can hardly have been encouraging to such an artist as Girtin. It is desolating to read that he painted a vast panorama of London, a glorified and impossible postcard, 1,944 sq. ft. in area, and still more to learn that the labour involved in this may have contributed to his early death, which is certainly one of the greatest misfortunes in the history of English painting. Less brilliant than Turner, it is not likely that he would have grown so corrupt, and perhaps his sensibility, though less spectacular, was more genuine. The panorama is said to have gone to Russia, where if it is ever found it will perhaps come in handy as propaganda, more effective than the ordinary run of masterpieces which serve this purpose, against the state of England in 1802.

    {Kitson annotation}

    The Times Literary Supplement Nov 30 1933

Article reviewing Lawrence Binyon's book on English Watercolours