Strangely little notice, considering the artistic importance of the
subject, has been taken of the death of H. G. Hine, the eminent artist
in water-colours, vice-president of the Royal Institute, who died
a fortnight ago, aged eighty-three years. The explanation, I fear,
of the scanty comment his death has evoked, is to be sought in the
fact that the mass of that public which concerns itself with Art at
all, is occupied chiefly with such art as exhibits an easy piquancy
of treatment or an obvious interest of subject. Hine’s did neither;
yet the best-equipped critics have long done justice to the steady
perfection with which he dealt with those themes of serene weather
upon ‘the billows of the Downs,’ which--superlatively though they
were executed by him--he, with a hankering sometimes after other
compositions and other effects, declined to consider his speciality.
Yet a speciality, of course, they were: those visions of turquoise or
of opal sky, and of grey gold or of embrowned gold turf, with the
long, restful sweeps and subtle curves, the luminous shadows, the
points of light, with the shepherd and his flock on the ascending
hillside, with the ancient thorn-tree bent by the winds of many an
autumn.
Singularly unlike the work of strange refinement and unsurpassed
subtlety which it was his wont to produce, was Hine himself, with his
sturdy and sailorlike personality. Yet the character of the man was,
in truth, not less admirable than the artistic finesse of his work.
He found his true path somewhat late in life. His genius came to him
almost as tardily, but then, perhaps, almost as powerfully, as did
David Cox’s. He was long past fifty when--with a charm of composition
not less certain than Copley Fielding’s, and with the genius of a far
finer and fuller colourist--he began to do justice to the Sussex Downs,
amid whose generally unconsidered scenery it had been his excellent
fortune to be born.
(_Academy_, 30th March 1895.)