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THE MANSARD GALLERY 207
saying so. Why, in artists so original as
Giotto, El Greco, and Cezanne, at least 50
like all
per cent, is derivative ! Vanessa Bell,
artists, and especially women artists, is impressionable,
but as the effect on her work of
familiarity with one or two English painters
and the modern French masters is altogether
for the good, I see no harm in that. At the
same time, she has very personal gifts. Besides
a large simplicity of style, there is about her
drawing something oddly sympathetic, and
what I should call, for want of a better word,
while a sense of the peculiar signi-
amusing ;
ficance to her of certain forms and relations of
forms comes through and gives to her work an
air of intimacy that you will get from nothing
else in this exhibition. Any woman who can
make her work count in the art of her age
deserves to be criticized very seriously. In
literature the authoress stands firm on her
own feet ; only quite uneducated people
subaltern-poets and young Latin philosophers
believe that women cannot write ; but it is
a mere truism to say that no woman-painter,
pace Madame Vigee-Lebrun, has yet held her
own with contemporaries even. To-day there
are at least three Marie Laurencin, Goncharova,
and Vanessa Bell whose claim to
take rank amongst the best of their generation
will have to be answered very carefully by