David Boyd Haycock
Life is Movement ‘Pictures vary just as people do,’ Lowes Dalbiac Luard suggested in a lecture on French art delivered in 1932. ‘Indeed, the connection between a picture and the man who painted it is so close,’ he continued, ‘that with a little experience you can often guess the painter’s character from the look of his pictures.’1 Thus he argued that ‘Delacroix’s pictures are just like himself. He was a restless, nervous man – very sensitive.’2 Looking at Luard’s body of work, what can we infer about his character? Clearly, he was fascinated – above all things – by horses. And he clearly enjoyed hard work: or at least he enjoyed the sight of others doing hard work. The straining of horses pulling heavy loads, the men driving them onwards, are recurring motifs in his paintings and drawings. Yet I am reminded of the lines in Jerome K. Jerome’s 1889 classic comic novel, Three Men and a Boat. ‘I like work,’ Jerome recorded: ‘it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.’ Viewing Luard’s extensive output of drawings, paintings and etchings, the image forms in one’s mind of the artist – handsome, smartly dressed – sitting for hours by the banks of the Seine, or [Fig.1] above:
Lowes Dalbiac Luard in c.1900
beneath a shady tree somewhere in the Cotswolds, watching and carefully recording the strenuous exertions of others.
Opposite page:
Riders and Horses [Detail of cat.48] Life is Movement LOWES DALBIAC LUARD
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