The Art of Ambrose McEvoy

A Consideration of His Position in Painting, His Portraits, and His Much Discussed Exhibition

CHRISTIAN BRINTON

THE arrival in this country of a notable European portrait painter is always an event of interest to cultivated Americans. Many such figures have, in the past, played an important part in the development of portrait painting in the United States—among them Carolus-Duran, Chartran Madrazo, Flameng, Helleu, and a long list of other artists.

And now, there comes to us from Britain, an Irishman, Ambrose McEvoy, a resident of London, and for the moment the artistic rage in England. Mr. McEvoy's exhibition, of over fifty portraits, which opened at the Duveen Galleries in New York in the early part of this month, has attracted no end of attention—all of it well merited and easy to account for.

In considering Mr. McEvoy's position in the world of art to-day, we must turn back a dozen years or so, when there was placed on view in London at the Carfax Gallery in Bury Street, a group of paintings by McEvoy, whose name was unfamiliar to the general public. For a painter still in his twenties the exhibition was a significant revelation. In choice of subject it was obvious that the newcomer had dedicated his talents to an interpretation of the pensive grace and sentiment ot the mid-Victorian period. He seemed, in these subdued interiors and delicate glimpses of misty riverbank or drab by-street, to evoke a mood more suggestive and more sustained than lay within the province of his predecessors. He proved himself the possessor of a distinctive aesthetic personality.

Thoughtful figures standing before the mantelpiece or bending over an open book, a solitary woman pausing in the half-open doorway, rooms imbued with faded, bygone romance, a row of houses each alike, yet each revealing its own special identity—such constituted the themes of paintings notable for their earnest fidelity of vision and their power to hold in persuasive spell the imagination of the spectator.

Mr. McEvoy was born in Wiltshire, England, in 1878. As a boy he came early under the influence of Whistler, who was a personal friend of Captain McEvoy, his Irish-American father, and who was among the first to discover his talent and encourage him to devote himself to the study and practice of art. The bond between the two families was in fact of long standing, for, during the Civil War, Captain McEvoy and Doctor Whistler, the great artist's brother, had served together under the Confederate flag. Upon the close of the war both men settled in England and continued a friendship begun at the Battle of Bull Run.

Captain McEvoy was a romantic figure. He assisted in the capture of John Brown, helped construct t h e Merrimac, was present at the fall of Richmond, and later became one of the world's foremost authorities on submarine warfare. His crowning achievement was the invention of the hydrophone, by means of which undersea craft are detected by sound whilst cruising beneath the surface of the water.

HAVING elected to devote his energies to art, young McEvoy entered the Slade School, in London, in 1893 at the age of fifteen. He remained at the Slade some three years in all, having for a boon companion his colleague, Augustus John. They were together much in their student days, and during the summer would post off for an outing to Wales.

Ambrose McEvoy has always striven to conserve that essentially personal quality which is the chief characteristic of his production. Painting to him was from the outset a matter of feeling as well as observation. He saw with the heart and mind, as well as the eye, and it is for this reason that his art in its initial phases makes frank appeal to one's imaginative sensibilities.

In point of actual date, Mr. McEvoy's first professional success was attained in 1901 when he sent to the spring exhibition of the New English Art Club the canvas entitled "The Engraving," which was greatly admired by Whistler.

While his early paintings are small, almost panel-like in dimension, not infrequently recalling the work of the Dutch or Flemish masters of domestic genre, it is interesting to observe the gradual increase in size, and the growing freedom of handling that witness the artist's progress toward self-expression. "The Ear-ring," seen at the New English Art Club in 1911, and now hanging in the National Gallery of British Art, and "Myrtle" (shown in this article), of which Mr. E. J. Hesslein is the happy possessor, mark the first step in Mr. McEvoy's evolution from a painter of interiors toward the portraitist of to-day. In such canvases the figure assumes more and more importance and the setting plays a correspondingly diminished role. It is as though his then demure ladies had little by little grown conscious of their identity and sought that more explicit consideration which is so manifestly their prerogative. In any event, woman never again appears as a mere incident in the painter's compositions. He henceforth accords her due prominence. It is she who has become the real subject of his pictures.

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Although Mr. McEvoy had already executed a few portrait commissions, it was not until after the appearance of "La Basquaise," of "Madame." which finds appropriate place in the Luxembourg, and the spirited "Odette," of the present exhibition, that he may definitely be said to have gone over to portraiture. They indeed mark the turning point of his career.

McEVOY'S conversion to portraiture has been accompanied by a change in technique as well as a gradual transposition of theme. Having followed woman from the quietude of mid-Victorian days into the stimulating atmosphere of contemporary life and scene, it became necessary to clothe her accordingly, to present her in the prevailing mode of the time, to permit her, in short, to step from the dim drawingrooms of the late seventies into the play of the electric lamp.

Having meanwhile moved into his present quarters in Grosvenor Road, Chelsea, Mr. McEvoy set about painting a new kind of portrait. You will meet in the typical McEvoy canvas none of the conventional expedients so dear to the commonplace vision. Essentially subject pictures, the sitter of course being the one and only subject, these portraits are personal interpretations, not studies in phrenology or slavish inventories of studio properties.

THE means by which Ambrose McEvoy. achieves his successful transition from the material world into the atmosphere of insubstantial suggestion are extremely interesting. Should you be fortunate enough to catch him at his easel you would better appreciate the feather-like delicacy of stroke, and freeflowing play of chromatic effect which are his chief technical assets. He first lays on his ground rapidly in monochrome and then superimposes his colours over this tone much after the method of the old masters from Titian downward. He works lightly, with sparing display of pigment, and does not scruple to obliterate a passage that may not meet his approval and start afresh. A single portrait is not infrequently completed in half a dozen sittings, the entire composition being kept alive until the final touch is added.

Among the artist's notable civilian portraits may be cited the spirited and appropriately prescient water colour sketch of the Right Honourable David Lloyd George, the characteristic version of the Right Honourable Augustine Birrell, and the portraits of Lord d'Abernon and Mr. Claude Johnson, all of which figure in the current exhibition.

It is likewise with his portraits of women that Ambrose McEvoy has achieved Battering successes, and whether the canvas contain a daring plastic presentation of Lady Diana Manners, or a delicate, vibrant vision of the Duchess of Marlborough, the result is usually both novel and felicitous.

In its more typical aspects the art of Ambrose McEvoy possesses a distinctly romantic quality. And by romantic one does not mean that his women are necessarily depicted as more beautiful, and his men as more brave than they actually are. It simply signifies that they arc seen, as it were, emotionally and imaginatively — that they have acquired in their presentation upon canvas something of the individuality, the personal viewpoint, of the artist. He momentarily lifts them out of the plane of ordinary vision, and places them in an atmosphere of ideal aspiration.

Surveying the imposing though by no means final artistic achievement of Mr. McEvoy as seen at his interesting exhibition, you become more and more impressed with the fact that these paintings and drawings reflect the reactions of a highly responsive aesthetic organism. They are not, as one readily sees, academic analyses of personality and character. They are rather studies in sentiment, in the sense that the paintings of Gainsborough in England, and Watteau in France may be termed studies in sentiment. This art is serene and delicately luminous. You are here not disturbed by a too explicit contact with external reality, nor stirred by some unpropitious inner stress. You do not, in any of these canvases, meet the feverish abandon of Toulouse-Lautrec, or the sardonic sneer of Felicien Rops. The neurotic decadence of Gustav Klimt, and the sinister Gothic evocation of Ignacio Zuloaga, find no place In an art that descends directly from the eighteenth century and preserves for us something of that eternal freshness of spirit which seems so typically English, and which one encounters alike in the drawing-rooms of Mayfair or amid the smiling beauty of England's countryside.