The Artists' Corner

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 299, 9 March 1928, Page 14

The A r tists' Corner

SOUTH ISLANDER WRITES | OF PRECIOUS FINDS IN I AUCKLAND’S ART GALLERY [ AND TREASURES IN REFER- | ENCE LIBRARY

A HAPPY HUNTING GROUND A KT seems to manifest itself in unexpected quarters in Auckland. To begin with, your city boasts antique shops that are a revelation to one coming from the South Island. We had never seen anything like it before, and so, in all the exuberance of our first fresh rapture proceeded in our primrose way from one shop to another. By the way, what an unusually picturesque little antique shop that is up on the hill, just a step away from the city’s busiest turmoil! With its absurdly diminutive height, its bow-windows full of the choicest, quaintest things, it seems to belong more rightly to some part of Dickens’s London. This is not very apropos, but 1 couldn’t help being struck with the amazing number of Beethoven busts, good, bad, and mostly indifferent, that adorned many shops and even filtered into the drapers’! Out of many in the drapers’ there was a magnificent Beethoven bust in bronze, its only fault, being that it wasn’t Beethoven, but a prettification that the true Beethovenite would instantly reject. I managed to secure a splendid life-size death-mask of Beethoven in one of your antique shops and know that I would have had to range all the shops in New Zealand in vain to possess such a treasure! As for your Art Gallery, it is the best I have encountered in the Dominion. You can at least crow over us with your Reynolds, your Cuyp, your Velasquez. It was exciting, too, to see for the first time a real live Hals!—but, to be ca.ndid, it rather disappointed me: it lacked the brio which is in most of that great Fleming’s pictures. And while we’re on Hals, I think the Rembrandt copies very masterly indeed. As for the Saint Sebastien (the catalogue says by an unknown painter: the canvas says Guido), I found it the most striking, broad and forceful picture in the gallery—surprisingly modern in treatment, too. Undoubtedly a work of substance and power which drew me to it again and again. The two Brangwyns are full ol the Brangwyn virility. Impressive

I in its cold majesty, if a trifle academic, | was the large Leighton canvas. So much for a flying glimpse of the Gal- ! lery. I I’d like to mention the little pic- ; ture-framer’s shop up Shortland Street that gave me many a delightful : surprise. The first thing to take my ! eye was a group of about a dozen small Vermeers in colour becomingly framed. Very precious things those! Lying against the wall w T ere many valuable oil-paintings, which, if I’d had more time, wouldn’t have escaped my eagle eye. As it was, I had time to unearth a small Sir Alfred East, an equally small Sir Ernest Waterlow, a Cattermole, unusually pleasing in its quiet dignity and live tone of colour. And reminiscent of Morland was a rich pastoral with cows by Reinhart.

My next and biggest art find was in your Reference Library, where I was astounded to discover such a various, full and complete art section. I sat down to one of the richest feasts I have ever had: but, my time being short, I had to rush from one hook to another. What books! What reprints and copies! Where to begin and where to end? There were two huge tomes of Rubens, and though a fairly close student of that virtuoso, there were many reprints I had never seen before. “The Women Painters of the World” showed the two or three interesting things of Marie Bashkirtseff. It was hard to spend a bare five minutes on “The Intimate Journals of Paul Gauguin,” but there was an enticing big book of Meryon’s etchings —including his Akaroa series—waiting. Piled beside that, tempting books on Spanish Art, Dutch Painting, the Brothers Maris, Gavarni and Daumies, two big volumes of Modern Art, all of the excellent “Art in Australia” publications. And here was something I’ve been looking all my life for. A FantinLatour. Feverishly I turned the pages to feast on his enchanting flower-pieces which are so worldfamous.

There were two glorious volumes of Japanese colour-prints (one edited by Laurence Binyon), reproduced in all their delicate suavity of flowing line and muted colour. Almost wickedly I gloated over hitherto-unseen copies of Hiroshigi, Hokusai, Utamaro. We Europeans see things in the round, instead of flat, as the Orientals do, but with all our perspective and all our geometry, can we ever learn their instinctive feeling for line, space and harmony? We shall never paint better than they the fury of wind and wave, the swoop of a bird or the thin, sloping lines of falling rain. But we Westerners can paint portraits. There were several books of reproductions from the National Gallery, and I chose to look at the one produced in colour. Look at Van Eyck’s “Man With the Red Turban.” What truth is there! One of the most commanding portraits In the whole hook, and one entirely new to me, was the self-portrait of Antonello la Nussina. It is a beautiful, firm piece of characterisation and of the whole vital face, with its forceful modelling, the searching eyes shine out with essential life. This Antonello is something to remember with joy. I loved the incomparable “Mrs Collman” by Eldred Stevens, a too-little-known English painter, who has much of the distinction, much of the clear, classic elegance of the Frenchman Ingres. I spent only two nights at the Reference Library, and they were nights crammed with the bliss of new discoveries. The Antonello alone was worth spending a night over. Thanks to the copyists and the men who make books and reproduce prints, the art of all the world can be ours to revel in. Without stirring a foot we can ransack the most famous galleries of Europe and "pocketless of a dime we can purchase the pick of the earth.” JESS DUFF. POETS’ CORNER. THE THREE TALL TREES. IWritten for The Son. 3 The lonely loveliness of three tall trees, Standing upon a hill at morning time Against the sky-edge, makes me catch my breath, Makes me a pagan; and I long to climb Up to their temple and worship at their feet. O, I have seen them bend and bend again Heavy with silver, crying in the wind, Dasked with the passing fury of the r'ain ; And I have seen them painted on the hill Dark green like giants with fantastic heads, The sun a fever burning golden hot, The sky white splashes, wild barbaric reds. Yet when the moonlight comes, I cannot stand And look on them, I kneel down on my knees And watch them so, they are so beautiful, They are so near to Heaven, the three tall trees! MARNA SERVICE. Anderson’s Bay. BOOKS IN DEMAND AT THE AUCKLAND PUBLIC LIBRARY NON-FICTION (f LIFE IN THE STARS" by Sir Francis Youngliusband. “ALE AT SEA" by Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell. “THE GREY SHRINES OF ENGLAND" by A. Grant. “SALT JUNK" by Admiral B. M. Chambers. “THE WORKS OF ARTHUR M. BINSTEAD.” “ROMANCE AND REALITIES OF MAYFAIR AND PICCADILLY" by P. R. Broevnel. “BEHIND THE SCENES WITH CYRIL MAUDE" by Himself. “THOMAS HARDY" by Lascellcs Abercrombie. FICTION “TYPHOON ” by Joseph Conrad. “BEST SHORT STORIES" 1927. American. “THE GARDEN" by Lunky Lee. “TWO ON A TOWER ” by Thomas Hardy. “THE DUEL” by A. Tchehov. “THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HELEN OF TROY" by J. ErsTcinc. “BENIGHTED " by J. B. Priestley. “SORRELL AND SON" by W. Deeping. “THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVIS" by H. H. Munro. “CARAVAN" by John Galsworthy.