We have been favored with a private view of the picture exhibition to be opened at the Federal Gallery shortly. The pictures generally are hardly up to the standard of past years.

"Sweet Stuff," a Queensland landscape by W. M. Hughes, lacks the vigorous treatment of this artist's earlier canvases. He attempts a sentimental treatment and a pernickety techinque with which he is quite unfamiliar.

"The Deserted Woolshed," a monotone by Arthur Blakely, is a gloomy atrocity that should never have been hung on the line. The treatment is jejune, and the accented high-lights are staringly crude. Besides, the whole thing is out of drawing.

In "The Axeman," Massy Greene has chosen a rather gruesome subject. The lurid clouds in the background seem to need explaining though the drawing of the axe in the foreground is singularly realistic. This artist has done more pleasant work in the past.

"A Pastoral," by Earle Page, is weak in treatment, and the artist seems to try to make up for what he lacks in artistic sense by a use of bright colors that serve merely to attract the uninitiated.

The other canvases are uninteresting, and the promised large picture in oils, "The Re-gathering of the Clan," by W. A. Watt, is missing from the exhibition.

"C. J. Dennis"
Herald, 7 June 1922, p6