David Milne and the Modern Tradition of Painting by John O'Brian (review)

method would be used three years later by Wordsworth in his Guide to the Lakes [1810].) Detailed discussions of the prose would have established that, as Heriot had a predecessor among topographical cum picturesque landscape painters in Thomas Davies, so he had predecessors in picturesque prose landscape descriptions of British North America. His contemporaries George Vancouver and Archibald Menzies display, as Maria Tippett and Douglas Cole showed in From Desolation to Splendour (1977), an intimate understanding of late-century, if not specifically Gilpinian, principles of landscape appreciation in their responses to the northwest Pacific coast in 1792, the year Heriot arrived at Quebec. As well, Alexander Mackenzie, though himself no sensitive aesthetic respondent to landscape, recognizing that his own Voyages would have to be cast in the parlance of the Picturesque to satisfy the turn-of-the-century British readership, hired as his ghost writer William Combe, a master of such landscape description. (Both Vancouver's Voyage of Discovery [1798] and Mackenzie's Voyages [1801] are listed by Heriot in Travels [p xxii] as sources for his earlier History ofCanada [1804] .) Notation of the currency of such landscape preferences among these and other Britons in North America might show, for example, that an intimacy specifically with the theories and art of William Gilpin was not so crucial for Heriot as Finley argues, and that the awareness and practice of landscape aesthetics was not so strictly limited to the gentry as he stipulates. (I.s. MACLAREN) John O'Brian. David Milne and the Modern Tradition of Painting Coach House Press. 141, illus. $12.00 O'Brian's central issue is the nature of David Milne's involvement with international modernist principles, which locate the meaning ofa painting in its abstract qualities (line, colour), not in its subject. This is the appropriate question around which to focus the first serious critical study of a rural Canadian who became a mature artist in New York, during the wave of modernism that struck the city before and during the First World War. O'Brian's various approaches to the question divide the book into five essays. The first is a fine discussion of Milne's critics and scholars throughout the century, with emphasis on early perceptions of his modernist tendencies, followed by an outline of Milne's own extensive writings. The next two essays, 'Stylistic Coordinates I, and 'II: present a pattern of sources for Milne's painting in the work of modern European and American artists. While this pattern will be altered and enriched as Milne scholarship advances, any historian studying the artist's early work will find a strong base in O'Brian's clear and graceful summary. The importance of the fourth section, 'Milne's Theories of Art,' to the HUMANITIES 505 development of O'Brian's thesis reflects the author's strong inclination towards the side of art history that focuses on literature. In this essay he brings Milne's verbal ideas up against the well-known writings of Clive Bell and Roger Fry, early formulators of modernist theory, and demonstrates that they provided Milne with a theoretical framework and 'a diction matching his own unsentimental aims' (P29). O'Brian tempers this argument by pointing to the admiration Milne had for both Thoreau and Ruskin, which seems to contradict modernist ideas. However Milne, O'Brian concludes, was above all a painter, whose work had to reflect the complexities and ambiguities of his life; he could not afford the luxury of an unshakable logical aesthetic. O'Brian might have balanced his discussion throughout the book by providing other Similarly valid counterpoints to modernist theory, which offers only a partial understanding of early-twentieth-century North American art in general. The strength of Milne's attraction to his subjects should never be played down. While O'Brian constantly defines Milne's emphasis on formal qualities as an issue full of human complexity, he still finds 'contradictions' to this which might be interpreted more productively in other ways. In particular, there are the fantasy pictures painted in the 1940S and early 1950S, which the artist himself called 'subject pictures: These are a fascinating result of changes in his life, working methods, and ideas...