WOMAN IN ART
In this excerpt the great English critic bows to a Woman Artist! The first in England.
The reader may not have visited Ireland, may not have sailed around the west and northwest coast of that little world within itself, may not have had a near or distant view of its bleak and barren hills, green and gray in sunlight, or of its sharp peaks pricking cloud curtains, wind-whipped from off the surging sea; may not have seen the rudely piled walls, thatched with clods of turf that look like—what they are—tiny abodes for many folk, pushed up from beneath, kept green by perpetual mists and rain. Such is the environment Lady Butler produced on canvas against which the group of men tell the pathetic story of the beginning of war. The picture shows the rain has cleared the air, but the puddles in the road still reflect in patches the figures of the moving men, officers who are "Recruiting for the Connaught Rangers," and the two men conscripted for war service.
The artist spent some weeks among the hills and huts of these home-loving people, making studies from life. Can one say the scene is too realistic? Why should it not be so? She was not painting a flight of imagination but a chapter of history; a condition of human life, of ethics, of sociology, of hungers and duties of mind and soul. All this and more have been studied and painted with remarkable fidelity by a woman with insight and human sympathy.
The officer in charge is in regimentals, erect, apparently looking straight ahead, but the side glance of his eye is on the recruit on his right, his hands in trouser pockets, a nonchalant upward tilt of his head, while a stub of a pipe lends companionship as he steps into a new and compulsory chapter of his life.
They are mounting the hill road. The scattered huts of the hamlet are seen in the valley behind them. The other recruit looks over his shoulder, it may be his last glance at the cot in the valley he loves amid the hills of Kerry. It is the preface of war, yet full of a tenderness and beauty, a blending of the spirit of nature and the spirit of man. Both are subject to storm and disaster, both subject to the influence of strength, truth, beauty. Nature is active under the influence of power: man, because of the spirit relationship, is more active and elevated under influence of the same Power.
Poverty of the land, poverty of intellectual food, are potent factors in the willingness of the young men to leave their native glen; they show the struggle within as they face the struggle without.
"Scotland Forever!" is perhaps the most dramatic of Lady Butler's canvases, although "Halt," and "Gallop," are close seconds.
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