Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/150

122 designer of interiors, a maker of book-plates, a lithographer, a marine painter, and an engraver; he has been everywhere and is known everywhere; he has innumerable medals and honours; and now at the age of fifty-two the list of his collected works would fill a volume. But his productions are not likely to endure: he is distinguished by an athletic virtuosity in surface effects and by an unrivalled versatility; his work is never informed by the profounder human emotions—it is void of great and solid beauty.

Brangwyn has no sense of composition—he has an extraordinary talent for dramatic arrangements. Complete unity of design obtained by the subordination of the integral parts to the whole, by the interdependence of the parts linearly and voluminally, he does not understand and seldom attempts. In his oil paintings, particularly his huge and ambitious works, the eye wanders from mass to mass, from group to group, unable to find a point of repose or a centre of balance. To counteract this grave defect he relies upon subject matter, always choosing a scene definitely illustrative and striking; the spectator is momentarily deceived, but once the extraneous interest is satisfied the entire content of the picture is exhausted, and the canvas fails to induce a second examination. Compare The Departure of Columbus with Inter Artes et Naturam by Puvis de Chavannes. Brangwyn's decoration is crowded with figures; his desire was apparently to get as many people as possible into a given space, and as a result the picture, for all its magnitude, looks small and incomplete. The Frenchman's panel is an example of perfect elimination of unessentials—each figure is absolutely necessary to the design. One of Brangwyn's favorite devices is the collocation of figures in rows, a clever scheme when employed to emphasize an event, and used on many occasions by the artist to bring home to us the significance of cruelty or tragedy. But look at these arrangements carefully—they have a finished technical symmetry, an appeal legitimate and moving like a frieze, but they are not composed. Nine times out of ten the attention of the observer is drawn to the foreground and held there; back of a line of heavy masses there is a waste of vague spotting and scattered shadows—effective, no doubt, but unsatisfying.

One of the greatest benefits conferred on art by modern painting is the use of pure colour. It has rehabilitated the pictorial vision; it has led to violent scientific conclusions and crazy applications, and