Page 56 - Studio International - November 1966

sort normally confined to a peculiarly peripheral art- to him. The second was rather more 'accomplished', but
activity, the sporting-picture trade: a show of those lost in conventionally attractive picture-painting what
jobbing-journeymen of horse-portraitists, the Sartorius his father had in naive directness of expression. The third
family. I gather that the show has already attracted a appears at Waddington's as a pet-painter (dogs and cats)
rather unusual clientele for this gallery, but that the rather than a horse-painter, and somewhat restores the
purchasers have often been collectors of modern paintings. balance in favour of directness and naivete. It's only too
And this, of course, is the point. Mr Waddington is easy to see their weaknesses: they are all minor practi-
deliberately inviting us to turn on these late eighteenth tioners of a minor genre, even if that genre has an in-
and early nineteenth century pictures the eye that we herent charm of essential Englishness and 'period' (as
normally bring to, say, his exhibitions of modern well as literal) atmosphere so strong that it could survive
sculpture. almost any weakness. They are totally unoriginal, and I
`To discuss the Sartorius tribe and such painters,' says make the point rather emphatically because I want to
Professor Waterhouse roundly, 'is no business of the his- stress that they don't, and can't, qualify as interesting on
torian of art.' One can see why he thinks so. These descen- the grounds of being, in the normal sense, 'primitives'.
dants into three generations of a Bavarian immigrant In other words, magic incantations like Douanier
amateur were merely suppliers of commissioned merchan- Rousseau shouldn't be murmured in their defence.
dise of a kind which became a recognized and not `Primitives', good, bad or indifferent, are originals in
dishonourable sub-species of English genre-painting with terms of style, even when they copy their imagery from
Wootton and Seymour, something a little more (though other sources; they do not owe anything to art or the
rather later) with Ben Marshall, and was raised just once knowledge of art. The Sartorius painters do, and in this
into high art by Stubbs. The first professional of 'the tribe' respect are neither more nor less interesting than the
- the son of the Bavarian immigrant-was an almost exact hordes of derivative minor Impressionists whom dealers
contemporary of Stubbs and owes everything in his style try to resurrect as the major ones soar astronomically

Metamorphosis

Two works by William Scott, left, Semi-Nude Reclining
No 1, 1956, charcoal, 29 1/2 x 41 in., and, right, Up and
Across, 1962, oil, 66 x 78 in., lent by the HANOVER
GALLERY to a recent HERBERT ART GALLERY, Coventry,
exhibition entitled Metamorphosis: Figure into Abstract. The
exhibition traced 'the metamorphosis from symbolic
figuration into the various forms of allusive abstraction'
of fifteen British artists, among them William Gear,
Barbara Hepworth, Terry Frost, Ceri Richards, and
Michael Fussell.