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CONTEMPORARY ART IN
ENGLAND
ONLY last summer, after going round the Burlington
London galleries, a foreign writer on art whose My******
-MI A J u ty I 9 I 7
name is as well known in America as on the
Continent, remarked gloomily, and in private
of course, that he quite understood why
British art was almost unknown outside Great
Britain. The early work of Englishmen, he
admitted, showed talent and charming sensi-
bility often, but, somehow or other, said he,
their gifts
fail to mature. They will not
become artists, they prefer to remain British
painters. They are hopelessly provincial, he
said and so ;
they are.
Of our elder living artists those,
that is to
say, who had found themselves and developed
a style before the influence of Cezanne became
paramount on the Continent Mr. Sickert is
probably the only one whom a continental
amateur would dream of collecting and ; he,
be it noted, escaped early from British provincialism
and plunged into the main stream of
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