One of the ablest critics of contemporary art has distinguished two groups among the more abstract types of painting today. The one, deriving through cubism from Cézanne and Seurat, is characterised by this critic as intellectual, structural, architectonic, geometric, rectilinear and classical. The other, deriving from Gauguin through fauvisme, and especially Matisse, he defines as instinctive and emotional, organic or biomorphic, curvilinear and romantic.

The opposition of these two groups is the modem equivalent of the old opposition of the classical and the romantic or, to formulate the distinction in still more general terms, it might be said to represent the eternal distinction between the draughtsman painter and the colourist. It is to the former that the art of Mr de Maistre belongs. He is the leading exponent in this country of the later developments of cubism. His conventions are personal to himself, being dictated by his personal experiences, but his point of view is analogous to that shewn in recent work by the continental artists who created cubism.

Like theirs, Mr de Maistre’s pictures retain a relationship to natural appearances absent from the most extreme forms of contemporary abstract art. Mr de Maistre takes for his theme the emotional experience provoked by some event, real or imaginary, which has struck his imagination. The ceremony of the coronation, for example, has inspired a picture which he has named The Procession. Form and colour are his means of expression, so that :he forms and colours of the scene which has inspired him are of necessity intimately associated with the emotions which it has provoked.