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Here is a theme which Turner in The Fighting Téméraire made truly poetic, and Seymour Haden in his Agamemnon preserved more than a moiety of sentiment, not to mention the technical prowess displayed; but in the hulk of this ugly old vessel of Brangwyn's there is no beauty. However, it is hugely impressive. His landscapes are not too seldom hell-scapes.
Brangwyn's canvases are a veritable riot of color, full of animation and life. They are almost dynamic. There seems to be something going on in all of them, all the time, and one hardly knows whether it is the composition, the color, or the subject, or all three, which gives them this very pronounced feeling of animation.
Brangwyn's heavy-muscled body, and his ease and grace in handling it, marked him as a man of a high-gravity planet. Besides, Hathor had a permanent cloud-envelope, and Tom Brangwyn's skin had turned boiled-lobster red under the dim orange sunlight of Alpha Gartner.
An artist's dream in romantic Orientalism Mullgardt's own title for it His great "Tower of the Ages" Mullgardt interprets his architectural masterpiece Brangwyn's splendid murals, "Earth," "Air," "Fire" and "Water" The "Fountain of Earth," by Robert Aitken, realism set amidst the romantic. The Court of the Universe is not Oriental, the Court of the Ages is.
"In these colonnades Guerin has done some of his finest coloring. The blue and the red are in absolute harmony with Brangwyn's rich tones. They must have been applied to fit the canvases. But the marvel is that the murals should show up so magnificently. Brangwyn painted them in London and he must have had second sight to divine just the right scheme.
Brangwyn's pictures have one great advantage over all of the others, which lies in their accessible location, well controlled by daylight. All the other decorations seem to me to be situated too high above the ground. Brangwyn's have no such disadvantage to contend with. How much more important, for instance, Mathews' lunette would look, placed somewhere nearer the level of the eye.
Tall cypresses on the right enhance the vast space of sky over the orchard, the best sky in all the eight paintings. The colors are those of the rich fruits, the autumn flowers, and the garish costumes of Brangwyn's peasantry. The companion picture represents a vintage, with great purple grapes hanging among the bronzing leaves on a trellis, and yellow pumpkins and flowers underfoot.
Women, children, and men have congregated, taking their turn in filling all sorts of vessels, some carried on their heads, some in their arms. Brangwyn's clever treatment of zoölogical and botanical detail is well shown in flowers in the foreground, such as foxglove and freesia, and the graceful forms of a pair of pinkish flamingoes.
His pictures are not intellectual in the least, and all of the people in his pictures are animals, more or less, and merely interested in having a square meal and being permitted to enjoy life in general, to the fullest extent. The quality of enjoyment that runs through all of Brangwyn's work is extremely useful in the general atmosphere of Mullgardt's court.
The Inn of the Parrot is quaint with its reversed lettering. The Road to Montreuil is warm in colour and finely handled. How many have realised the charm of the rear view of Santa Maria Salute? It is one of the most interesting of Brangwyn's Venetian etchings. His vision of Saint Sophia, Constantinople, has the mystic quality we find in the Dutchman Bauer's plates.
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