ART.
THE ENGLISH WATER-COLOURISTS.
THERE has been brought together at the Academy this winter a historical collection of English water-colours, ranging from Paul Sandby to Frederick Walker ; and at the same time it happens that a similar collection, including, however, the work of some living artists, is on view at the gallery of Messrs. Vokins, the well-known dealers in Great Portland Street. The moment, then, is favourable for some attempt to estimate the claims and achievements of the school. A good deal has been heard lately of the grievances of English water-colourists. It is the habit of journalism, acquired in its main business of politics, to approach subjects most readily if they are duly qualified with grievances ; and in this case the general reader is easily stirred by the patriotic colouring given to the com- plaints. He is assured that an art, British in origin and character, is scurvily treated by the nation, and, to bring matters to a practical as well as patriotic issue, that the tax- payer's money is being lavished on the foreigner, while the national art is neglected and despised.
The main burden of the complaints is, that water-colour is not duly recognised by the Royal Academy or at the National Gallery. The advantages in any sort of Academical recogni- tion are so more than doubtful, that this particular grievance is not very important ; a commercial disadvantage may be allowed, and, what is the same thing, a disadvantage of opinion among the masses of people who can only judge of pictures by external accidents. Nor can this disadvantage be considered a very serious one, even commercially, since there exist two Societies at whose galleries water-colours are every year conveniently exhibited, and command good prices. The second grievance has even less of substance, since there exists among the national collections at South Kensington a huge historical series of water-colours. It is true that if some artistic despot had the power to pick out of public and private collections the best works of the one or two men who have used the medium to artistic purpose, such works would well deserve a place at Trafalgar Square, especially if a corresponding number of English oil-paintings were retired in their favour. But the collection at Ken- sington, and any other likely to be formed, whatever their merit as history, must be, as art, to an overwhelming extent a weariness to the flesh, To the scientific flesh and spirit, of course, nothing is a weariness ; and since pictures, like beetles or anything else, can be arranged in a kind of evolution, the work of every one who has spoiled paper with paint has what may be called its fossil value. To the German mind employed on art, Michael Angelo Rooker is as interesting and necessary as Michael Angelo Buonarotti, and it is amusing for any one, in a German mood, to distinguish the direction of Copley Fielding's colour insensibility from that of David Cox, But the inordinate growth of collections will make it necessary in time to distinguish : we shall have the choice pictures which are preserved as art by themselves ; and in a neighbouring and vast annexe appropriated to each school, the scientific archwologist will be allowed to gloat over the links and sports and freaks of painting, and the patriot to swell.
The collection at Burlington House has much more of historical than artistic interest : a good deal of it is embryo, a good deal aberration ; and some of the better artists are feebly represented. Pars and Sandby, and others of the ancients, may some day give 'useful evidence of a topographical kind; but the first name that challenges attention as an artist's, is that of Mr. J. R. Cozens. The art, of course, is not painting yet; it is only the simplest light-and-shade tinting of a drawing ; but it is tinting with a view to effect. This simple effect is successfully rendered in the Convent on the Walls of Naples (16), where the composition has not the awkwardnesses of the other drawings. It was perhaps this drawing that Constable had before him when he said that " Cozens was all poetry," a saying which is no doubt merely echoed in a good deal of the admiration expressed for the artist. In Girtin's drawings, the scale of tinting began to widen in the matter of browns, as in the Bridge at York (37) ; but the conventional and unpleasant blue of his predecessors persists—see particularly the Peterborough Cathedral (40)— and the idea was still that of tinting, with heavy, pencil-like markings superposed. For pictorial arrangement and massing, Girtin had considerable feeling, though none of the drawings here are first-rate examples of what he could do. In John Valley's work, the range of tinting is still further widened, but without any agreeable result. The first room ends with him, and the second begins with ten Cotmans. Cotman is the culmination of this early school. He was not merely a draughtsman of architectural antiquities, but an admirable artist in certain characters of architecture. He expresses the construction of a building, the way it is set into the ground, the beauty of the accidents to its surfaces, and always with the emphasis, the elaboration, or the blanks in the right place. What a designer gives Nature, he reduces to a great simplicity, using just so much as he wants for foundation or background relief to his buildings. In colour, so long as he confined himself to the ochres and umbers of his early work, he is charming and conventional ; his blue is the only jarring note. But this blue became worse, and took possession of him, and he launched out, perhaps in emulation of Turner, into bright and abominable colours in his later work. The River Scene (60) is his pleasantest piece here ; the drawings next it, The Broken Bridge (61) and Storm : Yarmouth Beach (62), show him in his crude moments. Cotman is followed, in the order of the walls, by David Cox, an artist who could render with some skill the play of light and mist on objects, but whose impressions included no sensibility to colour. He is pleasant enough in his negative studies, like the Greenwich Hospital (72) and the Darley Churchyard (81); but those who can enjoy pictures like the Changing Pasture (73) and Vale of Clwyd (80), which pass for masterpieces among Cox's admirers, must be as insensible in this respect as the painter. The crudity of the bright blues possible in water- colour must always be a difficulty with the most skilful and sensitive painter; but to a painter like this no difficulty exists; modulation of colour and the subtleties of grey through which brilliant colour gets its value, are simply not perceived.
For Turner's best work in water-colour, one must go to those rapid impressions in transparent colour to be found among his sketches, or, in a different kind, to the foreign studies in body-colour. His water-colour, when, harnessed to steel-engraving, as in most of the examples here, has few of the merits of the medium. The two sea-pieces (82 and 83), engraved in the England and TV-ales, have the extraordinary qualities one expects from Turner in the intricate coil of the waves and play of the clouds ; but these are qualities that tell better in the line-work of the engraver; the effect is elaborated at the sacrifice of water-colour qualities. In other examples, the colour becomes actively disagreeable, as in the St. 111-awes (89) and Folkestone (91), with their foxy reds and crude blues.
De Wint is an artist who once out of a hundred times sur- prises one with a masterly sketch, broad and simple, and delightful in a limited scale of golden-browns. There is nothing of the kind here ; only the familiar work where the first intention of the sketch has been overlaid with dead, stupid paint. William Hunt follows, with his niggling for niggling's sake, his affection for hot browns and reds, in homely circumstances. The would-be realist is followed by the would-be idealist, no less than seven George Barrets, foxy sun in a woolly nature. Bonington's drawing, Paris (123), in its cleanness is a pleasure beside such work; even Front is a relief, for he is frankly only a tinter, and his drawings are accomplished pencil-work, with all their man- nerism. Unfortunately, that magnificent sketcher, W. J. Muller, is poorly represented.
The general crudity of colour reaches its climax in Samuel Palmer. In black-and-white his work would have certain merits in composition and feeling ; as colour, with its bad purples and yellows and scarlets, it threatens the nerves.
We come last to two painters whose manner is completely different from any we have considered. The art of J. F. Lewis is best looked at as a species of intricate mosaic or enamel. Granted the convention, it is sometimes not un- pleasing in colour, after the fashion of Oriental tiles, and the drawing is always remarkable as outline-drawing, not an painter's drawing, which is a different thing. Frederick. Walker, on the other hand, was well on the way to being a painter. He began by tinting drawings made as if for pen- and-ink. But he had colour-sensibility, as may be seen in his skies and roof-tops ; he had originality, as in his introduction of yellow-green grass; he had an eye for pictorial effect, as The Ferry (158) shows. But in this picture, as in others, his. drawing habit clings to him of making out the, figures by outline beyond their due, and his choice of material and method were better suited to work in oil-colour.
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