ART.
THE BLACK AND WHITE GALLERY AT THE EGYPTIAN HALL.
Tins exhibition is not one which is likely to impress a beholder with a high opinion of the originality and artistic power of our countrymen. It is, on the contrary, filled to overflowing with second-rate and third-rate work, dull and common-place to a very unusual degree. Nowhere are this dullness and poverty of imagination more marked than in the works of the best known men ; it is literally true that, amongst the more noted exhibitors in this gallery, there h not one spark of originality manifest upon these walls. The two or three works by Englishmen which show some effort at striking a newer note than usual, are found exclusively to be by the younger exhibitors. What, for instance, can be duller, heavier, less artistic, in the best sense of that word, than the two pictures (to which places of honour are assigned in the middle of the gallery) by Mr. H. S. W. Marks, RA., Nos. 341 and 358, entitled respectively, " Hearing " and" Feeling ?"
These pictures each represent a big and ungraceful woman, in a landscape in which no single thing is beautiful or attractive. Each woman has on a long dress, with folds poorly and stiffly drawn ; one has pointed shoes on, and listens to a bird ; the other has bare feet, one of which she is stretching down- wards to some very solid-looking water. These works, we are told, form part of a series, and are, we imagine, intended for decorative purposes ; but why any one should put up as decora- tion, figures so frankly ugly and unattractive, we confess our- selves unable to discover. For be it noted that there has not been the slightest attempt on the artist's part to render them beautiful, and the attitudes are so stiffly ungraceful, that they seem almost as if they were intentionally so. We look at the technique of the work, to try and find there some redeeming quality, but we look in vain. The charcoal is heavily and lumpily put on, without any attempt at fine gradation, or hint of colour such as we may often see in good charcoal work ; the drawing is neither bad nor good ; there is literally not a scrap of delicate work in either picture. Look, for instance, at the water, and the bough which the lady in " Feeling " holds, and look especially, as a piece of thoroughly ungraceful decorative design, at the angle made by the right arm, as it bolds the bough, and the awkward line formed by it and the left arm, with the body.
Is it not a curious thing to think what a state decorative art must be in in England, when decoration is supposed to consist of ugly single figures stuck in the middle of the space to be filled, not possessing one grateful line, and not even filling the panel. A more violent and unpleasant display of decorative in- capacity of the same kind may be now seen by all visitors to the Haymarket Theatre, round the galleries and ceiling of which are numberless panels, most of them of long oval form, in the centre of which sprawls a single recumbent figure. We say sprawls, for it is literally the case that most of these figures are wriggling and writhing on the ground, in more or less unpleasant attitudes. Now, the curious thing about this bad decoration at first sight, is that both the artists who execute it, both Mr. Marks and Mr. J. D. Watson, are capable painters in their own lines, though the latter is best known by little pictures in water-colours, of lovers in a wood, or by a Devon- shire trout-stream, or standing on a moor, or by a red-brick wall, or an old gateway,—or something of that kind. Mr. Marks has painted many clever pictures of the humorous kind, most of them concerned with birds and burgesses.
Circumstances, however, have conspired to thrust these artists into decorative work, and the results are really pitiable, for in decoration there is little or no scope for laughing bur- gesses or sentimental lovers. What is wanted in decoration, using the word in the restricted sense of panels in furniture or architecture, is chiefly beauty of line and beauty of colour. It is not decoration of a door, to put ugly pictures (no matter how clever or interesting each may be in itself) in its panels ; what has to be considered, is the door as a whole, and the way in which colours and lines may be used to render it beautiful The object is not to withdraw the eye from the fact of there being a square or an oblong panel to fill, but rather to make your design confess, as it were, at every turn that the panel is square or oblong, and yet show, nevertheless, that square or oblong, or whatever shape it be, it can be rendered beautiful by the ingenuity of the artist. First to confess the limitation, then to surmount it ; this is the ideal of good design, for an arbitrarily enclosed space. But we must not spend our readers' time and our space, on the discussion of elementary facts of decoration. At present, there are not half-a-dozen decorative artists in England who have thoroughly mastered the simple fact we- have above stated.
There are practically in this exhibition only three artists who send work in their respective lines which is quite first-rate,— none of whom are Englishmen, two being French, and the third American. Of these, the first we shall name is probably the least talented. This is Mr. James McNeill Whistler, an artist sufficiently notorious for his prosecution of Mr. Ruskin and his pamphlet upon art criticism. We are glad (having often had occasion to speak severely of his oil-painting) to be able to. render him now his just meed of praise, and to say that his etching of "Old Battersea Bridge" (No. 314) is essentially, as an etching, the best in the Gallery. It seems to us to be almost the ideal of an etching in several ways, and first of all, in the selection and arrangement of the subject. The bridge is beauti- fully drawn, with an amount of freedom and accuracy hard to describe, and harder still to do ; there is abundance of atmo- sphere, and the current of the river is indicated in the most slight and yet the most masterly manner. Above all, the great point in an etching is mastered,—that is, that the effect is reached by the most simple and direct means ; there is, we believe, not a wasted line in the whole work. Lastly, the work is in pure etched line, confessing itself frankly as a rough, yet on the whole faithful, description of the artist's thought, not pretending to be a painting, or an engraving, or a mezzotint,. but content to remain perfect its its imperfection.
We have spoken a little of bad decoration, and will now direct attention to another instance of a good artist doing bad work, in attempting something that he knows nothing about. This is to be found in Mr. Hubert Herkomer's mezzo- tint of "Grandfather's Pet," No. 14.5. Here we see a draw- ing, clever enough in its way, utterly spoilt by bad work- manship, without the slightest occasion for such a result.. Mr. Herkomer can etch well; why on earth should he try the patience of the public and his admirers by producing ama- teur's work in mezzotint ? As a matter-of-fact, as a mezzo- tint, this is a bad production, horrid in quality of light and shade, and full of broken lines (look, for instance, at those on the Grandfather's clothes), half smeared over with printing-ink, like a badly-cleaned etching. There is not a single quality of a good mezzotint to be found in the work ; neither softness, nor colour, nor depth of light and shade.
We are led to speak, perhaps, the more strongly of this work from having had a very flowery advertisement of it sent to us from the Fine-Art Society, in which a history of its production was given by the artist or the publisher, with details of his industry, &c. Surely Mr. Herkomer should have more sense than to thrust his incapacity for engraving into our faces in this manner ! He paints tremendous oil landscapes and figure- subjects ; he has perpetrated a gigantic picture in water-colours, at least five times the size of any other we have ever seen ; he etches prettily and constantly ; surely he may leave to the poor engraver the one humble department which takes so many years to acquire, and which is, perhaps, in proportion to its difficulty and labour, worse paid than any other branch of the artistic profession.
We said there were three artists of whose work we should speak in detail. The second of these is M. Felix Buhot, a dry-point, soft-ground etcher, at the very opposite pole of -etching art to Mr. Whistler. This artist sends several ex- .amples, of which about half are dry-point, and half (appar- • ently) " soft-ground " etchings. In these works, the merit which is specially individual to the etching-needle—i.e., the clear expression of the subject by free and strongly-marked lines —does not occur. The compositions rather resemble very powerful ink-drawings, executed with a brush. Their beauty consists in two qualities,—very great dramatic power, and a certain intensity of dreary feeling, which holds to individuals much the same relation that the compositions of .Charles Tileryon did to architecture. A Parisian of the Parisians, if we may judge from the internal evidence of these works, M. Buhot gives to every subject he treats a certain flavour of the Quartier Breda, and .Arsene Houssaye's romances. Thoroughly metropolitan, artificial, and unhealthy -in feeling, bearing, as it seems to us, indubitable traces of misspent genius and fevered life, these works are, notwithstanding, true, in the sense of being accurate reflections of the artist's mind. It would be worth while for any one interested in watching the develop- ment and the contrasts of modern Art to buy one of these etch- ings, say No. 58, "La Place Breda, Souvenir de l'Hiver 'a Paris," and hang it side by side with a Walker landscape and a Burne- Jones figure composition. Our amateur might then see for him- self three phases of modern Art, all having a common ground, notwithstanding almost total dissimilarity of method and aim, —a ground of common dissatisfaction and weariness with things as they are at present, which leads the painter of "The Haven of Refuge " to give ideal beauties to the simplest figures and scenes of English peasant-life, which leads Mr. Burne Jones to regret- ful aspirations for the old medimval times, which leads M. Buhot into etching a worn-out cab-horse lying dead upon the snow, and a Parisian lorette stepping daintily along the Place BrSda.
Let us turn to the third painter whose work we have to men- tion, and this time our praise can be hearty and unqualified. It is some years since we first insisted upon the special beauties of M. Leon Lhermitte's charcoal drawings, and during those years he has steadily improved. We may now say, without fear of contradiction, that in this medium he stands unrivalled. One cannot look for a moment at any English manipulation of charcoal, after having seen that of M. Lhermitte. Look, for instance, at the large charcoal landscape by M. Aumonier, which hangs in the place of honour on the right-hand wall of this gallery. Now, we by no means wish to discourage or to defame M. Aumonier, who is a thoroughly good, honest painter, doing pleasant and industrious work, with comparatively little popular recognition; and this landscape of his is, moreover, about -the best English charcoal work in the exhibition. But go from it to M. Lhermitte's picture of "The Choir of Notre Dame de Paris," and it is impossible to avoid feeling the supreme difference. We look at M. Aumonier's work, and say to ourselves, " Ah Southwold, that's a good charcoal drawing, full of nice quality, and not a bit heavy ;" but when we look at M. Lhermitte's ' Choir of Notre Dame," our first feeling, after one of admir- ation for the beauty of the picture, is that it is tiot a charcoal -drawing, that no one could get as much delicacy, variety, and appearance of colour out of that somewhat rough-and-ready material. This " Choir " is, we think, the very finest work -which the artist has yet produced; figures and architecture are equally good in it, and the delicacy of the light and shade is,
we repeat, considering the medium, almost marvellous. One more quality of M. Lhermitte's work is to be noticed, which is, that splendid as is his technical execution, it never usurps the chief attention of the beholder. The beauty of his picture and the truth of its feeling are always our first and our most abiding impressions.
The only other pictures we noted as of striking original merit we must confine ourselves to mentioning briefly. These are" The Top of the Pass," by R. J. Godlie, a finely-worked and im- pressive charcoal drawing, very careful and elaborate in execu- tion; "Weary with Watching," by Robert Macbeth, a good -etching in brown ink; "A Bacchic Dance," by Walter Duncan, a spirited but very rough suggestion for a picture, executed in charcoal.
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