sive and it is to be regretted that he does not devote more of his energy to small and genuinely decorative drawings.
His part in the late war must not be overlooked—he is the only man that made tolerable posters. The British Government, through some freakish catholicity, commissioned Vorticists along with Academicians to immortalize the shambles, but its street displays were even worse than our own. The French work was commonplace: Sem and Steinlen hacked out the best appeals in the conventional style—the modernists were strangely silent. America entrusted her responsibilities to a bureau of head-hunters, and we had to put up with epicene madonnas begging for money, and with the smooth bloodless dolls that adorn the covers of the sensational magazines. Brangwyn's adventuresome nature and his hatred of cruelty fitted him well for the task. He attacked the subject with restless eagerness and his lithographs are powerful and to the point. As art they leave much to be desired—often his drawing is concentrated on two duelling soldiers in the foreground, and in the distance a swarming legion that would be more effective as an unbroken mass, but as posters to depict the primeval madness of nations and the suffering of non-combatants they are inimitable.
Brangwyn will live not as a great creator but as a picturesque semi-realist and an illustrator of heroic proportions. Though an eclectic, his many borrowings are submerged by a strong personality, by a muscularity of drawing that makes him always individual. Like all men heavily endowed he has paid the penalty for his gifts and has never raised any department of art to the high pitch of original genius. He has accomplished what is impossible to the photographer and beyond the realm of the pure creator—he has given graphic expression to current events and made valuable records of the mechanical activities of the day, the building of ships, the subservience of man to machines, the sanguinary stupidities, and the like. In another way he has been of immeasurable service: he has put his work before the public and made it a living force; he has demonstrated, to the discouragement of the solitary painter, that it is possible for pictures to find a vast audience. Competent men of his stature do more toward the popularization of art than any amount of special pleading—they help to build up a background from which the man of genius may emerge. Brangwyn is the best of living illustrators. Thomas Jewell Craven.
