The 1911 Grafton Galleries exhibition on art between 1810 and 1910 - admission 1 shilling - was accompanied by Charles Ricketts's booklet A Century of Art 1810-1910. Here follow notes on Turner and Beardsley. The complete text of Ricketts's notes may be consulted via Internet Archive.
A Century of Art, 1810-1910 [by Charles Ricketts]
If we can say no painter has surpassed Turner in technical skill, we can say also no sculptor has surpassed Rodin in emotional range. Turner's faculties of invention were immense, but as a designer of landscape he is surpassed by Hokusai, his contemporary, who was also a great figure-draughtsman. (p. 5)
Turner in some early
masterpieces detected and compassed a great deal
which Crome seems to have done instinctively,
almost unknowingly, but the development of the greater genius lay in other directions. Constable more than Turner broke away from the traditional use of pigment.
(p. 10)
 |
J.M.W. Turner, 'Morpeth', etching and mezzotint (1809)
[Tate Gallery, London] |
More than once the great name of Turner has
found its way into these pages, each time with the
sense that he is almost absent from a place where he
should have been at his strongest, for one fine picture
only (No. 70), illustrating as it does but a phase of
his life-work, is here to represent him. Fortunately, the set of water-colours in Room IV. will in part
atone for this flaw in the Exhibition. It is probably
but little known how many of the masterpieces by
Turner shown at the Guildhall eleven years ago
have now left the country, proving again that if we
can no longer hope to retain the more famous works
of the old masters, and if modern English painting
often goes abroad, the accumulated inheritance of our great English masters must follow also. The mere
pride of possession, failing other finer reasons, such as
our debt to the future, has gone out of the Englishman's character of to-day. (p. 14-15)
Three phases of Turner's maturity are illustrated in
this gallery. The "Morpeth," executed for the Liber
Studiorum (No. 147), the "Montjen" (No. 148), for
the "Rivers of France," and the exquisite "River
Scene" (No. 149) are separate specimens of his
development. The "Colchester" (No. 150) is famous.
In all these we can note the gradual change in his
workmanship from the explicit statement of facts
to an imaginative revaluation of them, from the "Morpeth" to the "River Scene." (p. 28)
 |
Aubrey Beardsley, 'The Climax' (1893)
[Tate Gallery, London] |
It seems but yesterday that both these men [Beardsley and Conder] were
our contemporaries. They have been dead but a few
years, and yet their work has become a delightful
thing of the past to which we look back with regret.
Beardsley's Salome drawings have counted enormously in the Continental conception of Wilde's
masterpiece; without them it is more than probable
that Strauss' musical translation of the play would somehow have been different.(p. 37)
Quoted from Charles Ricketts, A Century of Art 1810-1910. London, Carfax & Co., 1911, pp. 5, 10, 14-5, 28, and 37. The catalogue does not contain a list of exhibited paintings, drawings and prints, nor does it contain illustrations. A separate list of the pictures was published by the International Society: A Catalogue of the Pictures, Drawings, Prints and Sculpture at the Century of Art Exhibition of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers held at the Grafton Galleries, June and July, 1911. [A copy is in the National Art Library, V&A Museum, London: Historic Catalogues 200.B.208].
