(Eator, "North-China Daily News & Merald." 1911-1990)
London, May 1.
Coming away from the private view of the Royal Academy T was struck by the sight of a girl violinist the corner of Burlington House, with that usual hat for coppers. her feet, Girl street musicians are rare. This one, not exactly pretty but somehow arresting, played on, rather well so far as one could hear, Dut with a fixed, far-away look that. made one wonder what her history. was. She might have been one of the pictures from the house alongside come to lite, That is the fun looking at pictures, It tends to make you sce all sorts of things as it were ina treme and fo discover attraction and. pictorial effect in all sorts of ordinary every day sights, And to help us, the exhibitors (or the Hanging Committee) this year seem to have determined to give us ordinary scenes. "Mis", they seem to have said, is an extremely interesting world just as good to paint as when people wore fancy dress and lived in _pieturesque but unsanitary houses, Let us show what it ig when looked at with a ttle imagination,"
So there is a welcome absence of the usual' rather stuffy portraiture—the alderman-ironmaster, the simper-Ing debutante, of the', mechanical allegories and unexciting story pieces; and instead, artists have gone to the towing path for studies of young oarsmen (why they have £0 long neglected that particular subject which the Greeks would have Toast at was always a mystery), "picture of the Year"
The football grounds with their vast crowds, the film studio with its maze of curious lighting, the teashops, theatres and street corners. There is, perhaps, nothing of overwhelming attraction; "the picture of the year" may be a matter of dispute, But it is.a thoroughly human, happy Academy, fresh and vigorous and far above the interest of those of recent years, Possibly Belcher's charwoman_un-cuding the "perks" of her day' work, a half-carved chicken, a bottle of champagne, some chocolates, will be the picture of the year. Belcher fy the Hogarth of the 20th century, but without Hogarth's savage bitterness: he Toves his Cockneys and they are beyond praise. But either Harold Knight's wonderful study of Miss Curigwen Lewis as "Jane Eyre" in severe dove-grey dress (Rochester knew what he was about if Jane was like this); or Frank Salisbury's roup of Lady Congleton and her eight children, all the more attractive because painted families are usually so terribly, stuffed; or the "Three Gyppos" by Dame Laura Knight, gypsy tirls with a dim race-course background, who "seem almost to jump out of the frame at you: or Jngger's beautiful "Mode! Resting." a nude, red-haired girl lying full-length asleep: any of these must ranie- high,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.