AN ILLUSTRATOR
Prints and Drawings by Frank Brangwyn: With Some Other Phase of His Art. By Walter Shaw Sparrow. Illustrated. 4to. 288 pages. John Lane Company. New York.
PRINTS and Drawings by Frank Brangwyn is Mr. Walter Shaw Sparrow's second tribute to his master. The value of the book lies in its numerous and excellent reproductions; the text is almost unreadable. The author is apparently incapable of close thinking or criticism; his discursive sentences are clogged with allusions that have no bearing on his subject and with tiresome expressions of puerile flattery. One searches in vain for a single penetrating opinion on art: to Mr. Sparrow, Brangwyn is the faultless painter, and in his slow periphrastic style he tells us, with many a quotation from Shakespeare, whom he calls the "world-brain," that the Welsh artist is the "lineal descendant of Titian, Tintoret, Michael Angelo, Rubens, and Velazquez." There are other statements equally astonishing, as, for example, those concerning the modern men—he speaks of "Cezanne, to a certain extent a pupil of Paul Gaugin," of the "embryonic art of Matisse," and of Gaugin as "an original colourist with a pleasant note in decoration." It is a crime to victimize Brangwyn in so expensive and elaborate a fashion—the text should be deleted and the illustrations published separately with simple explanatory notes.
In every art we find men who seem predestined to "success," men who achieve recognition early and hold it during a lifetime; who love the pomp of oratory, the grammar of pigment and the theatrical phrase; who attempt all things in the province of their respective arts and carry them off with gusto and skill; who maintain a high uniformity of excellence, and yet who add but little to creative wealth. In this category we may put Disraeli, Lord Lytton, Henry Irving, Besnard, Zuloaga, and Sargent; and here in all fairness we must place Brangwyn. At fifteen he was praised by William Morris; at seventeen he was hung in the Royal Academy. He has proved equally facile with the brush or the burin. He has appeared by turn as a mural decorator, a book illustrator, a water-colourist, a
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