Cotmania. Vol. IX. 1933-4

{Kitson annotation}

Burlington Magazine Feb 7— 1934

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The Walpole Society, 1931 1932. Vol. XX. The Vertue Note Rooks (Vol. 11). xii + 160 pp. + 8 pi. Vol. XXI. 1932-1933. 110 pp. 4- 48 pi. Oxford (Printed for the Walpole Society by John Johnson at the University Press).

There is little need to recommend the publications of the Walpole Society or to comment on the value of its activities, which have so much advanced the exact study of English art. The continued publication of Vertue's notebooks is one of its most useful works, and is of great importance to the student. Although this second installment is not perhaps of so much general interest as the first, it contains much important material, and in particular a large number of brief lives of painters, much more carefully written and revised than the majority of Vertue's untidy collection of disjointed information. There is also the earliest account of Vertue's antiquarian tours and a project for an Academy and Drawing School, with strict rules well calculated to correct the idiosyncrasies of English painting. The printing and editing of these haphazard manuscripts is at once an expensive and difficult task, as may be judged from the photo-graphs of sample pages reproduced in this volume, and the work has been scrupulously performed by Mrs. Arundell Esdaile in conjunction with a committee formed for the purpose. With reasonable complacency the editors are able to say that "for practical purposes of study the text as presented is satisfactory."
It is certainly a matter for congratulation that where Vertue himself was so disorderly, modern scholarship should be so precise. There may still be some antiquarians who suffer from that characteristic disease which prevents them from getting anything tidy enough for publication, but it cannot be said that the disability is common.
No doubt this modern accuracy has its drawbacks, but it is pleasant to find, in the next volume of the Walpole Society, that it has not altogether checked the discursive curiosity of antiquarians. There is still some attention paid to genealogies and heraldry, and it is still considered a matter of ' some importance to discover where anyone is , buried, though Aubrey's preoccupation with deathbeds and diseases does not seem to have survived. Mr. George E. Kendall, in his notes on the life of John Wootton, together with a list of engravings after his pictures, is still able to tell us that the artist's last resting place has recently been converted to a playground for children, and to discover mild facts about his relations. But this combines more reasonably than one would expect with a study of Wootton's career as a painter. Mr. Sydney D. Kitson's account of Dawson Turner, the patron of Cotman and Crome, is in the same vein, but rather more lively. In fact he gives a very amusing description of Turner's absurd zeal in the manufacture of scrap- books, in which he included not only drawings by the artists whom he employed, and copies after them by his wife and daughters, but tickets and hotel bills, memorials of his travels abroad. Mr. Kitson has collected a number of entertaining quotations and his essay shows very clearly the difficulty with which the landscape painters of the time found a place for themselves in the interstices of society. This study is prompted by a collection of portrait drawings now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, a scrapbook in two volumes made by Turner. It includes works by Cotman, Varley, Eastlake and Chant rev, and Mr. Kitson has composed an annotated catalogue of the collection.
In the same volume Mr. J. G. Mann attempts a classification of English Church Monuments between the years 1536 and 1625, a period hitherto not studied in detail. He gives a large number of admirable illustrations. Mr. A. J. B. Wace contributes a catalogue of English embroideries in the collection of Sir John Carew Pole, and a learned discussion of the more interesting specimens.
A. C-B.

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{Kitson annotation}

Observer 11.2 '34

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The untimely death of Christopher Wood makes us reflect that it would be so easy to write an I.O.U. on the future when all possibility of repayment has passed were not such a proceeding unnecessary in the light of what he actually had time to do. Christopher Wood was a phenomenon rather rare in British art. a genuine " painter." This may sound like exaggeration, but the British genius runs naturally to line, and many of our best national works, no matter how large or how important, are actually splendid coloured drawings. We tend to see things as shapes rather than as surfaces. Hence the preeminence of water-colour, so suitable to our temperaments. This also explains the fact that Cotman, almost the only true " painter" among the early water- colourists. is not mentioned by Ruskin. who hardly understood true "painting." for -painting is " flinging a pot of paint in the face of the public," the art depending on how the act Is done.