ART.
THE Academicians have been hasty in the last addition they have attempted to the roll of the Masters. The late John Pettie was certainly, in painter's impulse and accomplish- meat, well beyond most of his colleagues ; but the exhibition of his works beside those of the Old Masters of the English School proves the more fatally how low the Academic standard has dropped. For here in the first room are the old English giants, Wilson and Turner, Cotmain and Constable ; and Claude Ruysdael and Cuyp do not resent the neighbour- hood. No more do Titian, Veronese, and Vandyck complain, when Reynolds, G-ainsborough, and Romney are hung by them. Even Stothard, who is no great master, and who does rather trivial little things when he is by himself, can be trusted to behave himself in good company. He does not, so to speak, eat with his knife or whistle when he dines with Titian and Rubens, Poussin and Watteau. Manners like these in paint are modern, and by a strange reversal of pro- priety, their sanction, their inculcation, their imposition, has become the work of the Academy. Kept close to good models, curbed and bred among the Masters, Pettie might have learned, like Stothard, to restrain and chasten his own temperament, for he had, in a way, a stronger talent. Like Stothard, who, if one may judge by his original excursions into colour, was not to be trusted alone, Pettie might have learned to take reds and blues by faith from painters who had a feeling for reds and blues ; indeed, there was a time when he might have shared the discreet palette that Mr. Orchardson took from Rembrandt. And just as Stothard's rather ladylike taste in forms was strung up to something more manly when he was near a master, so Pettie's stagey violence might have been subdued and drilled into dignity. It is unlikely that, in any circumstances, he would have been a great painter, but his more than respectable power and facility of hand in drawing might have been used to better purpose at the suggestion of a Master. A Master has a dignity of temper, a fineness of feeling that shine through everything he does ; a second-rate talent can only borrow this or borrow the reverse. Pettie borrowed from the current Academical ideal. Before a Veronese the largest word that expresses our feeling, the word that overrides and in- cludes the particular beauties of form and colour, is Magni- ficence. In a Gainsborougla, whether it is a very good Gains. boroughor one not so good, there is a persistent element of noble grace. But what a Pettie flings at us is swagger. The forms swagger, the colours swagger, the figures stick their arms and legs out of the canvas in their eagerness, and they wear their garments with the conscious jauntiness of the man who has just put on a fancy dress. The visitor to the Gallery instinctively keeps in the middle of it, bends and huddles himself in the threatening and hurtling atmosphere. He faces, with what courage he may, a joke that is discharged at him from one frame, but he is conscious that behind him is an awful blue with a penetrating power beyond the torpedo's. It is like the " artistic " dressing and setting at our expensive theatres. A yellow about which there can be no possible mistake is followed by an equally certain purple or green, so that it may be evident that there was no want of care and thought, that no tint has been chosen that has any- thing to do with those that went before. Colour ceases to be colour, and becomes an assertion.
But it would be cruel to go on. Pettie is merely the last word. The lesson taught in this climax of the Academy's ideal is only the end of a story that begins further back, and that is equally well illustrated in the present exhibition. The splendid crescendo of discordance in the last gallery is pre- luded in the first, where Etty and Phillip and Frederick Walker bang. Etty and Phillip had both a glimmering of the light ; Phillip's copy of Velazquez in the Diploma Gallery shows that be could appreciate a Master, and copy him with extraordinary skill ; Etty lived and studied the nude, as the faithful admirer of Titian and Rubens. But neither could be trusted a foot away. A native taste for gaudiness, a preference for tin over flesh asserted itself, drew their picturesAway from the schools of Spain and Venice, and made them nearer akin to Landseer and Maclise. And what of the temper and feeling of the painter ? It is summed up in the effort to disguise the models, draped or undraped, by tiresome anecdotes with which they have evidently nothing to do. So does the preacher who cannot hold his audience by the force and propriety of his arguments, tell funny stories to keep them awake.
Frederick Walker's is a somewhat different case. He is not so good a painter as either of the last two in accomplish- ment, but his intention and his feeling are much finer. With serious lapses in colour, and scratchiness of detail, he does
suggest a big idea of a picture, depending on a real emotion from Nature. But going straight so far, he shies and goes aside at the last ; leaves the road that runs clear for the actual beauty and poetry of the thing seen, and goes off down the lane of sentiments and graces that have nothing to do with it. He has not the strength or confidence to let go into the plain beauty and mystery of the natural thing for which he has an evident sneaking affection ; at the last moment he stops alarmed, and runs off to the museum. He is about to drain a cup of the wine of the country, and at the first sip reverts to the jujube. So the little boy crooks his leg, and the ploughman crooks his arm, and bits of plastered-on grace like these are stuck in hard outline all over the picture, over. asserted because uncomformable, and the evening and the country and the poetry cease to exist, sold for a mess of sentiment.
With what joy and relief does one turn from this half-and- half painter to those artists who could rest upon beauty, who did not, with a horrid suspicion that they had missed the music of their art, hurry in with programmes and refresh- ments, Look at the Cotman (No. 15). It is built of the material that stirred poetry in Claude, in Wilson, in Turner, the hills and woods, the bridge, the waterfall, the flock, and in which each exercised his noble composing power ; and Cot- man gives these materials a turn of his own, plays them into his beautiful umbery and olive scheme, and adds the golden bough in the foreground,—a lovely and large invention. He is the equal, in this picture, of the other Masters—even of Wilson (No. 46), of Turner in his grand Wilson period (No. 10), or of Constable in his more classic time (No. 13). No picture could better illustrate how composure in art is an effect of composition. The half-painter, called upon to render Peace, accumulates symbols and emblems that speak coldly to the intellect, while they quarrel to the senses. His blue, that is explained to stand for faith, shrilly and desper- ately cries to be delivered from a neighbouring yellow ; his rainbow, that typifies hope, attacks, at a deplorable angle, the river that means something else, and which has a private grudge against the symptomatic vegetables on its banks. Whereas, in paint, peace is an effect of a brown with a little more of blue, a green with a little more of yellow, side by side; dignity, a result of how, in what mass and at what inclination, the grove cuts against the frame ; and exhilara- tion resides in the exuberant burst of the lines here, under- stood and echoed by the lines there, whether on human limbs, sea-water, or clouds. To attempt a definiteness of expression beyond the natural limits of the graphic art leads to the morass in which Blake's great talent foundered, because the line, too eager to illustrate, too anxious to be beautiful, outcries its natural note, gasps and rants at the door of the understanding, when it ought to be singing at quite another entrance of the spirit.
Few Masters are infallible, and the neighbouring rubbish, if it be by Cotman, is rubbish still, and the Noah's Ark Pet- worth pictures are certainly by the Turner who painted the magnificent Wreck of the Minotaur. There are ups and downs, too, in the Reynolds and Gainsboroughs here, but nothing small or mean, and there are two excellent Romueys.
Of the Old Masters, the painter who most takes one's breath away is Melozzo da Forli. Here is one of those painters who were drunk with perspective and the music of spaces. Here is one of the pictures that, by sheer nobility of arrangement, catch at the sight before one knows what is represented. Chief of those who found a poetry close enwrapped with the science of perspective was Mantegna, and the picture here that bears his name has something of his severe joy in definition and design. Then there is Paolo Uccello with his rich cassone-fronts, Sebastiano del Piombo with a finely composed mother and child, a flute-player by Savoldo with exquisite balance and action and fine tone, a Titian, a Veronese, and many more. A beautiful head of a youth bears the name of Masaccio. In the Dutch room are two remarkable followers of Rembrandt, Eeckhout, and Arent de Gelder, two pictures that bear the name of De Hoogh, and a Jan Ver Meer.
Beside these Masters. the Academicians have put their man. Meanwhile, there is hanging at a dealer's in London a picture by the supreme painter of our time, that would seem finer if brought here than most even of the older pictures. Matchless in beauty and invention of colour, exquisite in the
poetry of its feeling, the Little White Girl of Mr. Whistler is on view to be seen and compared with other paintings, and who dare deny that it is a rare masterpiece ? Is there never a rich man, with an eye for a picture, who will emulate the deeds of the buyers of Academy rubbish at high prices, and save this picture for our National Gallery P If not, the poor picture-lovers must see what can be done. The two crying needs of the National Gallery in the English section are a Millais of the type of the St. Agnes' Eve, and a Whistler. Mr. Tait has secured the Ophelia. Cannot we get one of the few available Whistlers, and one of the best, to show that the nineteenth century had a greater master than Mr. Horsley?'
D. S. M.
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