Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in good condition. Softcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> This with a number of etchings came to the Ashmolean with the Mitchell Gift of 1964. Hereafter the generosity of the artist’s family is associated with the Department’s policy of enriching the Mitchell Collection by purchase and gift. Thirty of Hardie’s drawings which had also provided him with subjects for etchings were bought in 1965 and 1966 and a considerable number of prints by other artists from his collection were similarly acquired. The comprehensive nature of the collection of Hardie’s own prints was ensured by the close interest and practical generosity of the artist’s sons Captain M. L. Hardie R.N. and the present editor. It is a pleasure to pay tribute here to the effective and public-spirited manner in which they have provided a lasting memorial to their father’s work. Of the nature of Hardie’s graphic work the late James Laver has written sympathetically and perceptively: ‘his real preference was for quiet water meadows and calm estuaries the subtle design of which led the eye into the infinite distance. He liked his skies big and transparent and he became a real master of evanescent effects of weather and the fleeting shapes of clouds. He loved to depict the becalmed vessel the moment when water seems to sleep at the turn of the tide. Many of the plates like the sketchbooks also in the Museum show where the artist spent his holidays in Suffolk France Holland or later Spain. His service in the 1914-18 War is reflected in the Italian subjects and his home at Tonbridge in Kent by the casthouses and landscapes of that part of England. He was essentially a landscape artist. (LL)