ART
January Mixture
THe British Museum Print Room has once again mounted an exhibition of prints and drawings to accompany the Winter Exhibition at the Royal Academy. A whole wall is de- voted to Watteau; Ticpolo is well represented; Piranesi prints and theatrical capriccios by the Bibienas shade into a section of 'Pic- turesque Travel' that includes notable water- colours by J. R. Cozens, Francis Towne and 'Warwick' Smith who was with him in Rome; there is a comparison between French line- engraving and English mezzotint, an interest- ing series of drawings by Fragonard after seventeenth - century Italian pictures, and, among the sketch-books, that of Sir James Thornhill and the record of the five days' 'peregrination' made by Hogarth in company with Samuel Scott and three others. The hang- ing, needless to say, is more orderly than in Piccadilly, hut, lost in the immediacy of a drawing by, say, Parrocel or David, it is easy to forget the eighteenth-century link alto- gether and to delight in the Museum's treasures purely for' their own sakes.
English water-colours are to he seen also at the Walker Gallery and at Agnew's (the annual show at the latter is one of the best the firm has presented for some time; prices from LI,100, for a Turner, to as little as nine guineas, for a Varley). This mid-winter season is also the period for mixed shows of more recent work. The Leicester Galleries' New Year bill ranges from a tiny portrait of his god-daughter by Whistler, to Burra and Cam- pigli. Messrs. Roland, Browse and Delbanco sponsor eight relatively little-known names, of whom Hans Tisdall is probably the eldest and certainly the most decorative; Margaret Neave is the most sensitive and unaffected, as she works her way to a quiet poetry of the Mid- land industrial scene; Norman Adams the one to have made the most progress in recent months (there is a new stability in his painting of Gordale Scar); and Philip Sutton the most daring. Sutton's shrill greens and yellows. orange, blue and vertnilion, are something new in this country (where the full violence of German expressionism has never been un- leashed). A painting like Sailing Boats, Lake of Geneva is handled with tremendous éclat.
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