From, Beautiful Buildings in France & Belgium, Including many which have been destroyed during the war. Reproductions in Colour and Monochrome from rare old Prints and Drawings, by and after Prout, Boys, Coney, W. Callow, David Roberts, C. Wild and others, with descriptive notes by C. Harrison Townsend, F.R.I.B.A.; New York: The Hubbell Publishing Co., 1916; pp. 26-29.
ST. AMAND : ABBEY
(T. S. Boys)
HE drawing by Boys illustrates characteristically one of those subjects that in his time lay ready to the artist’s hand, vivid with the picturesqueness of decay and of time — which mellows, though it may destroy. In our own day, the zeal of the restorer, while it claims to give us back much, too often does so at the cost of all the sentiment with which the old is charged. The completion of the parapet of the apse, and the conjectural treatment of the unfinished tower shown in the Plate, are doubtful gains when
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compared with the old-world quaintness of the building and its surroundings as our artist saw them some sixty or seventy years ago.
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