ENGLISH CATHEDRIALS IN PRINTS AT THE FOGG

An exhibition of twenty-two pencil drawings by Mr. Kenneth John Conant '15 is being held in the Print Room of the Fogg Art Museum and is to run into the first week of November.

The drawings are the very happy result of a summer spent by the artist visiting the English cathedrals. Those who saw last autumn's exhibition at the Fogg Museum and remember the fine accuracy and firm precision of Mr. Conant's rendering of Spanish buildings will be charmed with his version of Lincoln, Durham and Wells as ever they were with Palma or Availa. And that is saying a great deal for not only were Mr. Conant's Spanish drawings almost poignantly beautiful, but the architecture of those sun-flooded towns south of the Pyrenees if of itself more stimulating, more exciting than any that can ever be found in England--a land of artistic compromise, of grey-green, indeterminate tones.

Aesthetic Possibilities Utilized

Every aesthetic possibility of these seeming-fragile structures, these English cathedrals, Mr. Conant has realized and rendered with short, firm staccato pencil strokes. All the training of the professional architect is behind him, and that implies a solidity of handling unknown to the disintegrated impressionist schools. (Nothing could be more different, for instance, than three etchings of Venetian Palazzi by Whistler, which hang on one of the other walls of the room.) One notes too a technical advance over the Spanish drawings, a greater range of values, in particular a greater use of black.

There is a good deal of sun-light after all in those sketches, perhaps at moments one misees; the sense of the pervading wetness of England. And one is trivially disappointed in the far views of Durham and Lincoln that there should be no sheep tranquilly grazing in the foreground. For sheep are an inevitable part of the landscape of the English cathedral close. But perhaps Mr. Conant's pencil rebelled at anything so soft, so woolly and so un-architectural as a sheep.

Most of the drawings are of details, of doors like those strange huge doors of Peterborough, of towers and gables and the like. If one cared to be invicious one might pick out the views of the towers of Durham and Lincoln as revealing the artist in his most expressive mood.