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PLATE XLII.

A Bend of the Canal. J. H. Weissenbruch.

tion to the rules of the artist." Turner is H. R. Poore,

reported to have said that nature gave him A. N. A. a great deal of trouble in painting his pictures. "It must of necessity be," says Sir Joshua Reynolds, "that even works of genius, as they must have their cause, must also have their rules. Unsubstantial as these may seem, and difficult as it may be to convey them in writing, they are still seen and felt in the mind of the artist, and he works from them with as much certainty as if they were embodied upon paper." The great artists in the past discovered or adopted instinctively, as the best for the composition of their pictures, certain forms based on the triangle, as an example in Raphael's Dresden "Madonna," the circle, in Corot's Ibid. "Ville d'Avray," the cross, in Guido Reni's "Crucifixion," and the curved line, in Rubens's "Descent from the Cross." In looking over any collection of the great pictures of the world, it is evident that these fundamental forms, with variations, appealed to the artistic sense of the painters, or were found out by them, for they are used in their greatest works, and their use continues to the present day.

Following his illustrious predecessors, we find from an examination of his paintings that Weissenbruch had a very sensitive feeling for beauty in his pictures and gave careful attention to the recognized rules of composition.

Hardly ever does he make a mistake about it. He sees instinctively beauty of line, form, colour, and subject, and this gives the feeling of poetry in his pictures. Yet so natural do his paintings seem, so unconscious of effort do they appear, that the observer remains wondering to the end whether after all the artist has not simply seen and felt it all beautiful and true, just as he shows it to us, without troubling himself about rules of art! Certainly his pictures show that Weissenbruch was a master in concealing in his work the art knowledge he undoubtedly had. And so far did he generalize the facts of experience, and leave out the non-essential elements of the scene, that he became one of the best modern examples of carrying out to an extreme degree the principles of generalization, simplicity, and perfect tone quality mentioned in Chapter V. And

consequently his pictures have a very great freedom from any suggestion of artificiality, which is very restful.

To remove so nearly completely all the appearance of art from painting, which is all art; to leave the effect of nature on the mind in its simplicity, so that we are led to think of what the artist wished us to consider, and to see, as he saw it, the essence of the beauty of the scene before him, and nothing of the labour and skill that were necessary to produce this result until we commence to analyse the picture to find out the means by which the end was reached; to do this is indeed a triumph. And to secure this result it needed "For of the the knowledge and experience of a lifetime. soul the But great as is the ability of Weissenbruch, it is not this alone that compels our admiration, but the fact that his art is all dominated by doth the his own personality, that he lives and speaks make." through his works.

body form

doth take, form, and

For soul is

body

Hymn in Honour of

We have pleasure in being able to give the Beauty.” following fine appreciation of Weissenbruch Spenser. and his work by E. F. B. Johnston, K. C., of Toronto:

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