ART.
MR. CARL HAAG'S PAINTINGS.
THERE are some artists whose names are scarcely known to the general public, who are, nevertheless, greatly esteemed by the inner circle of art patrons, and justly admired by their pro- fessional brethren. And this is especially true of water-colour painters, whose works are rarely of a kind which claim much popular recognition, however great may be their intrinsic merit. It is more than twenty years since the present writer used to look, on the private-view days of the Old Water-Colour Society, at Mr. Carl Haag's chief picture. And for many years before that period the artist had been one of the most skilful manipu- lators of water-colour in England; had, in fact, in his own peculiar way, been a master of his craft. Whatever else one may say of Mr. Haag's painting—and there is much to be said, both in censure and admiration—this at least is certain, that there are few living painters, and possibly not one of purely English extraction, who have so entirely succeeded in accomplishing, from the technical point of view, the aim which they have set before them. It would be scarcely straining a simile to call Mr. Carl Haag the Tadema of the desert ; for he has done for the Arabs, temples, and sands of Egypt and Asia Minor, an almost similar work to that which Tadema has done for the Rome of the decadence. He has made desert life, both in its warlike and peaceful phases, live again for us Cockneys, in just the same way as Alma Tadema has reproduced the life of Rome; and he has strangely failed, just where Tadema himself has failed, in endowing any of his characters or scenes with more than a superficial vitality, and more than a. conventional interest. Curiously enough, the one living painter who may be said to have most wholly beaten Tadema on his own ground, namely, M. GerOme, has also beaten Carl Haag, so to speak, in his own native element. G6r6me's picture of the Arab in the desert with his dying horse, has just that element of more than outside correctness and technioal completeness, which we miss -entirely in Mr. Haag's work ; just as the first-mentioned artist's picture of "The Death of Csesar " is, from an emotional point of view, worth all the Tademas that were ever painted.
But without going into this comparison more f ally, it is necessary to say a few words upon the method of Mr. Carl Haag's painting, which is in many ways a very peculiar one. The first point about it which invariably strikes a stranger, is its strength and richness of colour. "It's as strong as an oil," to use a popular expression. And it is singularly unlike, from an executive point of view, any water-colour painting with which we are acquainted, having, perhaps, more affinity with that of the late Mr. Dobson (also a member of the old Society) than with that of any other artist. It seems hardly fanciful, on looking at this series of pictures, all the best of which are concerned with the desert and Eastern life, to think that some of the sand has got itself mixed up with the painting ; for there is a queer gritty character about the whole work,— an appearance of the surface being scrubbed and scratched, and almost raked about,—which results in giving an impression as if the picture had been painted upon finely granulated stone, rather than on any softer material. And yet the painting is entirely in what is called pure water-colour ; though, if we have heard aright, it is Mr. Haag's habit to use various mediums and var- nishes of his own composition, in order to increase the solidity of effect and richness of his work. We do not intend by this to make any objection to this characteristic of Mr. Haag's paint- ing; the gritty surface is as a rule very suitable to the subjects he depicts, and it especially helps him when he has to paint, as in all his best pictures he does paint, Grecian or Egyptian architecture and scenery.
The artist's work may be divided into two categories, one of which is good artistically, and in the widest sense of the term, and in the other of which there is little which is estimable, save the technical skill of the painter ; save that certainty of hand and persevering precision of touch which are visible in all his endeavours. Before mentioning, how- ever, the paintings which fall into these categories, we must say a word or two upon the sketches, which are, to us at least, -the pleasantest part of Mr. Haag's art. It does not much matter which of the examples in this gallery we select for men- tion, as all show in a greater or less degree the same charac- teristics. But perhaps, as an example of purely artistic success, no better specimen could be selected than that of one
of the tombs of the Caliphs, just outside Cairo. The sub- ject, which is well known to the present writer, is just one of those which most artists would have failed to render interesting, without the addition of some adventitious circum- stance,—a big, gaunt, domed erection of yellow stone, with a large archway in its centre; that is practically all the subject. And it is worth while to examine it carefully, if only to note that the entire beauty of the sketch depends upon the extreme fidelity with which the artist has reproduced, even while his hand seems to have passed over the paper quite carelessly, all the most minute peculiarities of the structure, and all its little tiny incidents of local colour, and light and shade. A pre- Raphaelite (so-called) would have mapped out an elaborate plan of each detail given here, and presented it to us, so to speak, on a plate, with a courteous wave of his hand ; while Muller, who was, perhaps, on the whole, the finest sketcher of Eastern sub- jects of whom English art has ever boasted, would have massed all the details into broad spaces of broken grey and umber, and trusted to the imagination of the spectator for the result. But here is work which is as correct and intricate as the pre-Raphaelite's, and yet as easy and almost as strong as Miiller's ; and it is with a sense of absolute relief that one catches sight of a single detail in the drawing, wherein the speed at which the band has moved, has made the artist run a thousandth part of an inch beyond the rough pencil-line which marks the boundary of his gateway. All the great qualities of Mr. Carl Haag's art, which may be summed up briefly in the following—keenness of sight, certainty and accuracy of hand, and a high, though not the highest, sense of the beauty of colour—are evidenced in these sketches.
There is little to be found in the finished pictures to recompense one for the loss of the qualities of freshness, simplicity, and ease, which mark nearly every sketch of the series. We have said that the larger pictures—the completed ones, in fact — fall into two categories. The better of these is made up of Eastern or Grecian scenes,—landscapes in which there are no figures, or in which figures play but a subordinate part. In the second category are those pictures in which figures form the principal interest ; and these are, speaking broadly, estimable in inverse ratio to the size of the figures employed. Exactly a similar incapacity to that which seems to affect Tadema, and prevents him giving us a man or woman whose faces are either beautiful in feature or deeply interesting in expression, affects Carl Haag. We look at one of the large faces here—of Arab, or Nubian, or Greek, or English- man for the matter of that—we admire its delicate modelling, its careful scientific drawing, its fineness of texture, its depth of colour ; but we pass by the net result of the whole, just as we pass one of the genteelly-whiskered waxen images in the hairdressers' shops. Look at these large pictures, which belong to the Queen, of Prince Albert waving his Royal hand above the body of a dead stag, while a flaxen- haired Prince of Wales, in a velvet jacket and white waist- coat, smiles blandly up at him. Just the same thing may he said of his Armenian priests, his Nubian camel-boys, and his Anglo-Saxon heroes; they are wonderfully executed— are, indeed, almost marvellous in their infinity of detail and patience of work—but artistically, they are not worth the paper they are painted upon. They have neither sympathy nor insight, nor grace nor interest. They are not alive ; they never could live, any more than the smirking beauties whom our grandmothers used to palm off on our grandfathers, in the days when the miniature trade flourished gaily. But get Mr. Carl Haag far away from his studio, with its Eastern trappings and artistic accessories, and set him down with his face to a ruin and his back to a sand- heap, anywhere you like from Palmyra to the Parthenon, and he will do such a drawing for you, as it is really hard to characterise for beauty, completeness, and strength. The foolish English public, which incessantly exacts from an artist the worst possible work at the highest possible price, if only it can tempt him to do big semi-melodramatic pictures, has tempted Mr. Carl Haag like the serpent, and with the same result. His painting of late years has had more and more of an opulent, well-fed quality. There has been a piteous lack of new material, and an almost total absence of any endeavour save to do the old work over again. The Queen has two pictures, or had some years ago, called "The Arrival at, and the Departure from, Palmyra," pictures which, if they were anything like proportionately
good to the small finished studies of them, must have been far finer than anything in this Exhibition. But the large pictures which she sends here are, speaking crudely, the worst things in the Exhibition. Three of the landscapes, perhaps, should be specially mentioned, of which the smallest is, on the whole, the best, though all are exceptionally fine. This last mentioned is a picture of "The Acropolis at Athens," in strong light, with a vivid blue-and-white sky. We have selected it, not only for its fine drawing and colour, but because it possesses an aspect of brightness and a sense of movement which is rather foreign to Mr. Carl Haag's work. As a rule, this artist likes to paint a calm day, towards sunset. The second picture, which is far the largest of the three, is a general view of Palmyra, with more ruined' temples, fortresses, and mountains in it than one could easily mention. This is a quiet after-glow picture, with a gloomy foreground, and a glow of rich colour flooding the ruins, which lie, very small in scale, hut very clear in detail, against a background of hills. One gives to work of this kind admiration which is in the main due more to the sentiment of wonder than delight in its beauty, for it is, perhaps, hardly a picture which could be very popular, or which any one but an artist could fully appreciate. The third picture is one of "The Ruins of Baalbek," which belongs to Lord Penrhyn, wiose name deserves mention as that of the painter's first patron, and who possesses most of his finest works.
The summing up of such work as Mr. Carl Haag's is a difficult matter. One is tempted to think that, had he been an English- man instead of a Bavarian, his work would have been more sympathetic, even if it had been less accurate ; one is tempted to fancy that the atmosphere of the Highlands was a bad one for his art, if not in other respects; one is tempted to wish that he had not painted so many tufted saddles and heavy robes, and what may be generally called Oriental frippery ; and, in fact, one, as usual, wishes that the artist had been something different to what he is. But all that is wasted time, as it is probably impossible to have such accuracy, and such unfaltering patience, as Mr. Haag's work possesaes, with very intense sympathies and very acute emotions. From an intellectual—and, if we may use such a term, spiritual—point of view, this artist's work has never fulfilled its promise ; but, as far as actual skill goes, there are few English painters to whom Mr. Carl Haag could not give a great many lessons.
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