FOREWORD 



ignores the smaller facts. He may omit altogether a 

 horse's harness or headpiece, or all those petty details 

 on which the camera insists. Yet he summarizes so 

 boldly for the eye that I think, in most cases, such 

 omissions pass unnoticed, as they do in nature, where the 

 movement is the real interest. He gives things which 

 the camera picture cannot express, for with the camera 

 there can be no selection, no emphasis, no accentuation 

 of the important or suppression of the unimportant — 

 in a word, none of the emotion that is naturally neces- 

 sary in the exercise of an activity which is an emotional 

 language. And when you come to study and analyse 

 drawings of movement such as those in this volume, 

 you must understand that nearly all are drawn from 

 memory. You will realize, after a moment's thought, 

 that movement can only be drawn from memory. 

 Millet, for instance, painted largely from memory, 

 depending entirely on a highly-trained receptiveness of 

 the eye, which enabled him to select with absolute fear- 

 lessness and to generalize with absolute knowledge. 

 His observation was undisturbed by the kaleidoscopic 

 shifting of the pictorial elements which bewilder the 

 piecemeal painter. Millet, to quote Mr. Sickert, " did 

 not say to the woman at the wash-tub, ' Do as if you were 

 washing, and stay like that for four or five hours, while 



I paint a picture from you,' or to the reaper, ' Stay 

 like that with the scythe drawn back, pretending to reap.' 

 ' La Nature ne pose pas,' to quote his own words. He 

 knew that if figures in movement were to be painted 

 so as to be convincing, it must be by a process of 

 cumulative observation." 



That is how Mr. Luard has worked, and you will find 

 in these pictures that he is interested in the beauty of 

 weight as well as of energy. He realizes that in drawing 

 movement the artist will run into excessive and empty 

 rhythm, as is sometimes the case with Japanese art, 

 unless he expresses the downward thrust, as well as 

 the horizontal lines of motion. In drawing a plunging 

 cart-horse he suggests always its weight as well as its 

 movement. Among the painters whom he admires are 

 those with the plastic sense — Rubens, Millet, Daumier. 



I have written in general terms of the principles of 

 Mr. Luard's work, because I prefer to leave the separate 

 drawings to speak for themselves. But to show how 

 the qualities of Mr. Luard's work strike another observer, 

 I should like to quote from a criticism by Sir Claude 

 Phillips, in the Daily Telegraph, of one of Mr. Luard's 

 exhibitions in London : 



" An all-important quality which Mr. Luard possesses 

 in a high degree is that of expressing at one and the same 



