ART.
ALMA-TADEMA AT THE ACADEMY.
THE art of the late Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema is not of the kind that comes well out of the ordeal of exhibition in large quantities. A small number of his best works well placed would have continued his reputation; four large rooms filled with his work produces monotony. Above all things Alma-Tadeina was a painter of still life; his figures are less interesting than the marble of the buildings to which they are accessory, and although they are given sentimental or dramatic poses they are never endowed with the breath of life. A curious fact is forced upon our observation in contemplating so great a number of pictures which represent stately interiors, Roman baths, palaces, amphitheatres, and temples ; it is that the artist has missed that magic of space and light which so strangely plays on our emotions as we enter a great building. The dominating feeling produced by the interior of the Pantheon is due to the sense of the harmonious imprisonment of space, and differs entirely from the effect of external beauties. All buildings of any architectural pretension produce this result more or less ; and it seems strange to find a painter apparently not sensitive to the feeling when so many of his works represent the interiors of the very buildings where we expect to find this quality most apparent. The lighting is that of the studio, academically correct but uninspired. There are two instances in which the feeling for the light of an interior rises to a far higher plane than in most of the other pictures; in Unconscious Rivals (195) the reflected sunlight playing on the vaulted roof is finely felt. Again, the distant crowd and the ball seen under the shadowed arch in After the Audience (202) give us a glimpse of that peculiar and essential feeling of the awe of a great interior which is so markedly absent elsewhere. This absence is not atoned for by the most elaborate perspective, archeological correctness, or realism of details.
It would be an exaggeration to call Alma-Tadema a colourist, but it would also be unfair not to recognize many felicitous colour effects scattered about his works. These effects, however, occur rather from a process of careful putting together of colour than from an all-compelling sense of harmony. The same may be said of the artist's feeling for composition; it is nowhere spontaneous but always correct— so much so that it ceases to give pleasure. Every object in the pictures suggests that it owes its position to the moves of some game of pictorial chess ; of true feeling for design there is little evidence. Presumably some of the elaborate frames of the pictures are of the painter's own planning ; if this be so they show in a curious way how little the classic architec- tural mouldings which he painted so frequently had affected him.
True to national characteristics, Alma-Tadema used oil- paint with extraordinary skill in the way of imitating sur- faces, though never, even to the last, did he make use of the system of shorthand and suggestion which so many of the Dutch painters attained after years of careful practice. In the handling of his material he was a master. Look where we will, not a crack is to be seen, or indeed a sign of deteriora- tion, and it is to be hoped that so lasting a method of painting has been recorded in words, as far as it is possible, for the
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