ART.
THE ROYAL ACADEMY.—IL USE and wont have made it difficult for an Englishman to see the thing in its full oddity, and only a foreigner could do justice to the fantasy ; still, most of us do have a qualm that there is something a little bizarre when we read each year that deeply interesting page in the Times headed " The Royal Academy Banquet." This year Mr. Churchill spoke eloquently on the need of naval strength, Colonel Seely on the beauty of devotion (not emotion or drawing), Lord Morley on the European crisis and the Copyright Act, and Canon Hannay °u tile literary man's freedom. Lord Halsbury, more original, actually raised the question of art in its relation to caricature (one of the several branches of art which the Academy has left for future consideration), and passed genially and heartily to give the company the toast of " The Royal Academy." One imagines him pausing a second as he did so to refresh his memory as to the precise institution which he proposed to toast. (He may, perhaps, have thought for a moment that it was the reformed House of Lords.) The President, in his reply, however, recalled the company to the real (one might almost say the bidden) idea of the gathering by referring to the existence of the British School in art and the merits of the late Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. After all this one can imagine the artists that were present at that distinguished dinner marching homeward stimulated and inspired anew with the greatness of art and the holiness of her mission, and how the stirring messages and winged words engendered at the banquet went forth to the artists, sentinels and cohorts, all over the kingdom, inspiring them with high and eager thoughts, as scientists and engineers and shipbuilders are inspired after one of the great rallies of their institutions ?
The spirit that makes the Academy Banquet an orgy of irrelevance is a national trait, and it might quite well be argued that, after all, the banquet is no more than a noble reflection of the exhibition itself, which consists, in the main, of interests and notions that might well have been expressed elsewhere, through other activities than that of art. The hope was generally felt nearly a generation ago that photography, with its increasing capacity to represent reality, would soon away with pictures whose aim was " to make things very like," and that just as the mechanical piano- player has ended piano-playing that was only competent, so the photograph would end painting that had no life-spirit within it. Unhappily, photography has turned traitor and become "artistic," instead of holding to its own clear, faithful virtues, but that may be only a phase; colour-photography, to which we look to purge modern art of much of its impurities and dreariness, is every year coming closer and closer, and its perfection is sure in our time. When it does come there will be no used for such portraits as now bang on the line of nearly every room in Burlington House. In these works there are few signs that the artists had any interest in their sitters except as a source of income which they would rather have gained from pictures of a different vision that they bad once produced, but the public no longer cares to buy. The Academy carries every year a heavier load of irrelevant portraiture--portraiture in which the artist takes no delight and the public have no aesthetic concern. The old anecdote picture on a small scale, however feeble its ostensible motive might be, provoked the painter to details that show c d delight in touch and handling, and there were usually signs that he liked doing it. In the great bulk of the portraiture here by members and associates we see little evidence that the artists cared for anything but getting the business done, working it up to effective Academy pitch and having the affair settled. Besides the portraits I have already mentioned, Mr. G. W. Lambert's Miss Olare Cunninghame Graham, with its keen following of the sinuous lines in the arms and figure,. and the idea it conveys that the inspiration in colour and design was dictated by something in the sitter herself and was not the application of a recipe ; Mr. George Henry's portrait of J. N. Hare, Esq. (No. 522), where a physical charac- teristic of the sitter has given the accent to the picture ;. Mr. Spencer Watson's H.12.11. the Duke of Connaught (No. 315) in the furred robes of a City company; and the works by Mr. 0. Birley and Mr. G, F. Kelly, and a few other portraits, stand out as pictures where the artists had really conceptions of their subjects.
Mr. Charles Sims's The Wood Beyond the World (No. 3), which the Chantrey Trustees have purchased, has been appre- ciated up to its full value—even beyond it—because it fulfils two strong contemporary wants. The reaction against the literal presentation of things, which is so natural in these days of photograph-newspapers, is one which touches all grades of the public, and was largely responsible for the big -attendances at the Post-Impressionist exhibitions. The desire to escape from realism is unconscious as well as con- scious, and there can be no greater mistake than to believe that the crowds which went to the Grafton Gallery were largely made up of people with definite theories about art. Then Mr. Sims touches the public in another way, because the decorative sensuousness of the old masters is now common 'knowledge through the autotypes that are common on suburban walls, where steel engravings of Frith's and Landseer's pictures and Sir Luke Fildes's The Doctor used
to be, and even the most innocent know that a picture is none the less valuable because of the wilful imaginative manner of presentment of the old masters. Mr. Sims gives us, in his charming picture of dark trees against a sunlit sky, gentle hills, garlands of nude boys and babies, and young mothers in Madonna blue—a "world elsewhere," as delightful as 'that of Maeterlinck's Blue Bird, and bearing something of the same relationship to Bellini as Maeterlinck does to Dante. The picture is certainly weak in the dark formal pattern of the trees and the unsubstantial but half-realistic treatment of the linked line of nude boys, which, with similar insistence, would have made the whole a haunting and monumental design. As it is, it is a work full of real painterlike charm, and a marked advance on anything this artist has hitherto produced. It is a question, however, if his picture, The Month of May (No. 726), is not yet better, as the accidental character of his scattered groups of Rovers and children is more fitting and surprising, like the upspringing of primroses on a green field. Mr. Edward Stott, in his two Scriptural scenes in the setting of a Sussex village, interests us by his courage in attempting a subject which is older than oil painting, and his treatment of it has the quality (so unusual in these walls) of reverence. Mr. George Clausen, too, has reverence, and for subjects which we pass every day without a thought. Love has he found, not 4. in huts where poor men lie," but in places that poetry has yet to hallow with associations—in the hard little cramped back-gardens of St. John's Wood. He has seen them as a worshipper, and in Waiting for the Spring (No. 9), and especially in The Houses at the Back : Frosty Morning (No. 248), they are miracles of shy iridescent dolour, bearing secret messages to man of the promise of life that is eternal, let the performance be what it may. Another lover of health and blossom, Mr. H. S. Tuke, this year produces one of his few complete works. The Fountain (No. 147), a vision of a nude youth partly in sun with a green shade -around him and a splashing fountain before, has the exactness and spontaneity of a good sonnet. It shows Mr. Tuke and many other painters how vastly the artist increases his chance of doing a big thing if he keeps his pictures small. This year Mr. Arnesby Brown, too, reaches his finest expression in the small A .Tune Day (No. 228) Ids large In Suffolk (No. 370), despite its thunderous accent and luminous painting, dividing its interest too impartially between the group of cattle in the foreground and the vivacious town in the background. Mr. Sargent's three Spanish pictures this year are pictorial -exclamations. and none seems an idea like his unforgettable Mountains of Moab. Weavers (No. 229) is the most extra- ordinary achievement, with its vivid painting of figures in shadow. Mr. John Lavery, in his Japanese Switzerland (No. 693), brings us back to the old masters, but the old masters of the East. It has the eager seizure of a decorative inspiration approved by great art and the fresh subtle quality of paint that so charmed the Continent when the Glasgow School made its appearance there in the 'nineties.
In the black-and-white room Mr. Lavely's old colleague, Mr. D. Y. Cameron, makes notable a very queer jumble of exhibits by two etchings and two drawings. Mr. William Strang's A Matter of Business (No.1497) has equal distinction, and on the skyline three notable works by little-known men call for attention: Mr. A. G. Horsnell's Santa Lucia, Naples (No. 1576), Mr. H. Rushbury's The Pin Mill, Gloucestershire (No. 1549), and Mr. A. H. Barker's The Lonely Artist of Shepherd's Bush (No. 1582). Mr. N. Sparks in his etching, The Sprites (No. 1558), shows an original conception skilfully expressed, but as a whole the black-and-white room of the Academy at a moment when English art is expressing itself in its most memorable aspect through that medium, can only be called ludicrous. In the crowded water-colour gallery Mr. A. Barnes's Juno in London (No. 1199) impresses one by the rats spectacle of a modern artist making something interesting and fine out of the nude, and Mr. D. Heath, in his Adoration (No. 985), by sheer belief in his subject and gift for wonder, presents Surrey school children with the naïveté and purity of an Italian primitive. In the sculpture rooms Mr. Albert Hodge's very spirited figure of a boy with a turkey (No. 1821), with its combination of zest and scholarship and richness of handling, is one of the few outstanding things.
J. B.
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