Left: Where is It?. 1882. Oil on canvas. 36 x 28 1/4 inches (91.6 x 71.5 cm.). Collection of Birmingham Museums Trust, accession no. 1890P79. Image kindly released on the Creative Commons Zero licence (CC0). Right: Possible Preliminary Study for Where is It?. 1871. Pen and brown ink and wash. 6 5/8 x 5 1/8 inches (16.8 x 13 cm). Private collection.
Marks exhibited Where Is It? at the Royal Academy in 1883, no. 43. It shows an elderly gentleman dressed in black and white sitting on a chair and searching through the drawers of a bureau for an apparent lost document. Some documents have already been piled on the floor in his search to locate the one he wants. The genesis of this subject appears to be a much earlier drawing, dated 1871, although the compositions differ in significant details. The general outlines are similar, but in the drawing the head of the elderly gentleman has a full beard and he holds a quill pen in his mouth, while in the painting the man has a moustache and wears a cap. Again, their clothes are similar but the positions of their legs differ. The backgrounds, the chairs and the bureaus are also significantly unalike. The drawing might have been the basis for an illustration, but it is not known whether such an illustration was ever published.
When the painting was shown at the Royal Academy The Art Journal merely remarked: "Where is It? by H. S. Marks, R.A. A thoroughly Dutch interior, a man busily hunting through the drawers and recesses of his bureau in search of a missing paper" (201). F. G. Stephens in The Athenaeum found this painting richer in tone and freer in execution than normal for Marks's work: "Where is It? (43) depicts the efforts of an old gentleman in a velvet cap to find something in a drawer he is rummaging eagerly. His very shoulders are expressive. The man was once a beau, and it may be that he seeks some long-neglected keepsake or half-forgotten but once precious document. There is much to enjoy in the soft and full illumination of Mr. Marks's painting, which in this instance is richer in tone and somewhat freer in touch than is usual with him" (577). The reviewer for The Portfolio commented on all three of Marks's contributions to the Royal Academy exhibition which he found to be solidly painted: "Mr. Marks' contributions are a series of single figures, shrewdly characteristic, admirably painted, as usual, in the dry, solid manner of the artist. Here is a lover of the 'gentle craft'; a man searching his desk for a lost paper; a 'professor' lecturing to an invisible audience, among which the spectator finds himself irresistibly amused, and a man solemnly winding up 'the old o'clock'" (105).
Bibliography
"Art Chronicles." The Portfolio XIV (1883): 104-05.
"The Exhibition of the Royal Academy." The Art Journal New Series XXII (1883): 201-02.
Stephens, Frederic George. "Fine Arts. The Royal Academy." The Athenaeum No. 2897 (5 May 1883): 575-77.
Where Is It?. Art UK. Web. 26 October 2023.
Created 26 October 2023