ART.
THE OLD OLD WATER-COLOUR SOCIETY AND ARCHITECTURE AT THE ACADEMY.
I.—THE OLD WATER-COLOUR SOCIETY.
THE ideals and practice of the majority of the exhibitors in this Society have been so often discussed, that it is needless to enumerate again the failings of the art as practised here,—the elaboration of a technique that has no corresponding know- ledge to express ; the little facts noticed where the big facts have never been seized. What is more pleasant and profitable is to call attention to a very remarkable drawing, one which alone will repay a visit to the Exhibition. This is the piece called An Impression : Boulogne-Bur-111er, by Mr. Lionel Smythe, one of the more recent accessions to the Society. Visitors to last year's Academy will remember his pic- ture of gleaners there, and his harvest-field studies of women and children must by this time be familiar to those who have an eye for life in pictures. This time he has gone to the quays instead of the corn-rigs, and has designed a beautiful chain of women and children passing along in the foreground, with a background of fisher- men and boats, masts and town. The title Mr. Smythe has given to his picture may, by a current misunderstanding, lead people to expect something clever and flashy in technique. Mr. Smythe's technique is not in the least clever ; it is simple and straightforward ; but the knowledge and observation it expresses are remarkable. The colour is pleasing in the blues and reds of the fisherwomen's clothes ; and it is true in its relation of flesh-tints to the rest to an extent rare among the practitioners of water-colour. But the chief merit of the work is the tender observation of action in the figures, —the moving and the hanging-back of mothers and children. and the wreathing of the forms across the picture. If other pastorals in the Gallery are compared with this, they will be found to go off into something pretty or something coarse, as the case may be. Mr. Herkomer's Hagar, for example, recalls the rather badly observed, but prettily posed, figures in Frederick Walker; but the pose has now become a cramp. Mr. Arthur Melville's Court of the Lions is brilliant; but there is a suspicion of process about its brilliance, which comes of seeing the same sunshine in so many studies ; jut as Miss Montalba's red and yellow prepossession is applied too freely to everything she paints. Mr. Alfred Hunt has attempted an extremely difficult thing in his portrait of an English house among trees, in elaborate detail and uncompro- mising light. The colour-effect is dulled by so much labour, but there is beautiful delicacy of drawing in the trees to the right. Mr. Clausen's Old White Horse should be looked for on one of the screens.
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