ART.
OLD MASTERS MASTERS AT BURLINGTON HOUSE.
WE do not propose at this date to enumerate or describe the pic- tures at this winter's Academy Exhibition, but taking a general knowledge of its contents for granted, to dwell on one or two of its chief features, and more particularly on the work of the great Spanish portrait-painter, and- of the great English plastic designer.
The name of Velazquez is a great one always, and for the time happens to be a fashionable one,—so fashionable that, as with that of Botticelli a short time back, the modest admirer who is not a sectary hesitates before he pronounces it, and blushes when he does. It is the war-cry of all the incompatible new schools that have nicknamed themselves Impressionists, to the huge convenience of an undiscriminating public. These schools include, of course, men of the most different aims and methods, and of every degree of ability, from Carolns-Duran and Whistler and Besnard, down to mere lazy ineptitude. But they agree in taking the name of Velazquez—too often they take it in vain—and the general line of their creed is that the side of thought in painting (they usually beg the question by calling it " literature ") is of little account .beside the pure painter's power of rendering what the eye sees. The more devout sectaries would seem to insist further, that what the eye ought to see is only what it happens to see, that it is wrong for it to go out of its way to see some- thing else. And here is a fine source of confusion, because what is by courtesy called the same thing, is seen one way by the dull man who believes this theory, and another way and twenty other ways by the great painter who can make a picture out of anything. And such a painter will often choose quite simply what seems to him a fine and obvious subject in unpromising material, and will be frankly surprised that it should be considered uncommon and unclean by the crowd ; but if he has a touch of bravado and a turn for sporting before the Philistines, he will be apt to arrange for 'accidents, and to seek out the commonplace, and perhaps, in the end, to spoil a fine talent.
The most conscientious and incorrigible Impressionist, how- ever, the man who regards ideas and sentiment as meretricious devices for selling pictures with which the true artist will have nothing to do, is good company when compared with the insufferable creatures by whom the other camp is always in- fested,—the kind who call themselves Idealists, on the strength of possessing the most ordinary ideas, and an extraordinary inability to express them in paint. Between this extreme fanatic who cannot paint, but says he can think, and the other who does not think, but says he can paint, we may complacently allow the battle to rage. But with what right does the latter claim Velazquez as his master?
If we turn to the present collection of paintings by Velazquez, we shall at least see what he means. Among them is one of the rare "subject" pictures of Velazquez, a subject nominally from mythology, the Rokeby "Venus and the Mirror" (135). Is there anything that can be called thought in it ? There is certainly none in the sense of antiquarian learning. But that might only excuse the absence of thought. Is there anything to show that the painter has brooded over his subject, warmed to it as an idea in flesh ? Venus must at least have meant to him Queen of Love, or some such idea. Has that idea in any way touched and governed this study of the nude In the work of the painter from whose hands he took the subject, and whom he challenged in this picture, Titian, we do find some operation of thought ; his Venus at least takes her nudity royally, confronts the spectator like a queen with the splendour of her flesh. But to Velazquez this does not occur as part of the subject. The problem to him is not,—How can I invent a pose that will make her more a Venus ? (this would have been an idea, not a "literary," but a painter's idea). The only problem that occurs to him is the studio question,—How can I get another pose for my nude recumbent figure than that Titian has painted? And the answer is, that she turns her back to us. Or, and this would still better define the technical pivot of his mind, the subject being "Venus and the Mirror," he was attracted by the chance of painting a face as mirrored, and therefore turned the face itself away. And that bit of painting is really the finest thing in the picture. The flesh colour of the body is indeed wonderful; but the whole thing is not exactly a triumph of colour, and the boy who holds the- mirror so that his mistress may see the least magnificent part of herself is, for Velazquez, somewhat messy in execution. But the reflection is a triumph, its colour, and the deft, elusive touch by which the face is painted, so that we catch and lose it again.
When we turn to the portraits, the same bent of mind in the painter is evident enough. He does not search for a charac- teristic pose, arrange for story-telling effect. All the invention comes afterwards. He takes over the conventional attitude (compare Mytens in the next gallery) with the table, and hat, and other properties. He is safe to get his effect without regard to the commonplaceness of the point or the person he starts from. And so great are the effects he gets in his kind, that it seems idle to attempt to weigh them against successes in another kind. His supremacy comes out well in this gallery, for all but one of the portrait-painters hung here were more limited on the side of pictorial invention than himself, and may fairly be considered his competitors in his own line of portrait. And the conclusion their works here echo is the confession of one of them,—" What we are all trying to do, he does at once." The others, indeed, are not represented by their first-rate work, nor are the Velazquez portraits of anything like equal merit among themselves. The "Portrait of a Lady" (141), the "Don Balthazar Carlos" (137), and the same Prince twice
over in the hobby-horse pictures (136, 138), may be neglected. The same child, with his beady eyes, in No. 134 is fine, but the great things are "Adrian Pulido Pareja " (133) and "Mariana of Austria" (132), and especially the latter. It is obvious enough that the art of painting, as under- stood by Velazquez and the others here, is very different from the craft of Mytens in the other room, or from the great art of Holbein, on which that was founded. It is no longer a matter of delicate outline first, and then filling in of tint and modelling after. Still less, of course, is the more modern painter tied down to the level of Mytens and his like, where, in the spirit of the conscientious shopman, he seems bound to give the customer the full length of his limbs, and all his elaborate clothes, and a carpet, for his money, and all made out as scrupulously as his features. The new painting is free to take just as many hints and glints of the embroidery and jewels as it needs for its own purpose, and no more. But not only is the artist freer, but his technical preoccupation is a new one. His subject is now analysed, not in the spirit of the draughtsman into lines, but into a set of differently toned and coloured patches. These certainly limit one another in out- lines, but if the outline, say of a nose, does not for the moment tell as such in the face, it is not supplied by the painter from his knowledge against the appearance. Now, it is in his peculiar daring in putting down directly what he sees, and not correcting it by a suspicion of what he does not see, that Velazquez distances his competitors. There is no fumbling between what actually appears and what might be expected to appear. And there follows, as the reward of this sincerity of sight and assurance of touch, a concentration of effect, a power of filling and holding the eye which makes the other portraits look a little abject beside this lady of Velazquez. The others have an air of being intruders in their own frames. Gainsborough gives in first. His two portraits here (156, 164) have more than usual that look of bad china-painting of which even his best work has a suspicion. Reynolds himself looks dull and confused, besides being terribly faded ; and Vandyck turns thin. The jolly silversmiths, indeed, of De Keyser (149), hold their own with their limited admirable technique. But there is only one man who stands up to Velazquez, and that is R,embrandt (especially 145 and 151) ; and between them it is something of a game of cross-purposes. On the one side is the painter who knows exactly how much he means to take and how much to leave ; who feels for his paint, and will not try it beyond what it is able to bear. On the other side, the man who will press out of his paint every additional little fact that it can give about the depth of atmosphere round the head, the tension and texture of the skin on the face. The limit to the one is the picture, to the other the reality, even if the reds get wrong and the browns muddy in the pursuit of it. And if any one contends that there is more of character in Rembrandt's man, it may be replied that we do not know whether Velazquez' lady had more character than he has painted, and that, besides the likeness, he has given us a picture that is a web of wonderful colour, from the rouge on her cheek, through the tarnished silver and faint salmon Bushings of the stuffs, and all the subtle approaches and re- treats of nameless colours hardly to be distinguished from black or grey. Who is to decide between Velazquez' sense for the picture qualities of his sitter and of tie material he works in, and Rembrandt's for the man and the depth of his eye and the infinite wrinkles of his face ? They are incom- mensurable quantities, and it is best to praise them singly.
The Academy will have to contrive some title for those English masters who were not Academicians, but whom it greets with such hospitality after their death. How would "Salon des Dissocies" do for the room that Alfred Stevens fills this year Bat the academical slight pales beside the real injury that kept his greatest work unfinished. One is faced, on entering, by the sketch-model for the Wellington Monument, completed by the horseman on the top. It is a vigorous sketch that promises something akin to that greatest equestrian statue in the world, Donatello's Gattamelata at Padua. That we have lost, and must put up for the present with Sir J. E. Boehm's futility at Hyde Park Corner, that so poorly takes the place of the good old scarecrow beloved of all true Londoners. But there is much in the gallery that is less familiar than the Wellington Monument, and the visitor will be struck, first of all, with the evidence here, in his work after Titian, of Stevens's feeling for colour. In his own work he is a designer, a draughtsman, a modeller, and when a painter, one of the school of Michael Angelo.. But here we find him revelling in Venetian colour, and repro- ducing something of it in an admirable portrait-sketch (69). Next after this school-work naturally comes the large number of studies from the life in red chalk. To the student these are the most interesting things here, and for this reason,—that they are clearly a sculptor's life-studies ; the models and the draperies are constantly seen and drawn as bronze. They are already half-way to the sculptured figure or sculpture-like painting. Among these studies is a beautiful tinted pencil- sketch of a boy's head, taken after death (13) ; and here again, in the treatment of the hair, the pillow, and the sheet, comes in the same fine monumental sense. Of the other studies,. perhaps the most charming is the child's figure (80), lit as if by firelight from below.
When we turn from these studies to Stevens's complete designs, we find that his strength is always in his treatment of the figure, in his adapting that to an architectural use. He has Petrachio's eye for the possibilities of the human form as furniture. Prophets descend from the ceiling of the Sistine to become andirons, and their dispread limbs find a. motive in the poker and tongs. Or, to take less startling cases of adaptation, how cunning are the two entwined dol- phins that form the finial to No. 26, or the little lions (Nos.. 33 and 34) that have so long been the joy of all British Museum visitors with eyes. Stevens's design, it must be added, is always best when he leaves his figures as much as possible alone, as in the Dorchester House chimney-piece (model at South Kensington). Otherwise he is tempted, in the spirit of his. Italian masters, to fill up with all kinds of frippery, mis- cellaneous collections of objects and old decorative motives.. They need reducing by that intenser effort of the designer that rejects and rejects till there is nothing left that does not belong to the other parts of the composition. Nos. 9 and 19 are instances of complete fusion with resulting simplicity.. Nos. 8 and 16 are cases of the reverse; and the Wellington Monument itself is not free from this objection, as, for instance, the stupid row of cherubs' heads. No. 11 is a charming variation on a traditional theme; the little boys. who hold the festoon of fruit have fallen to quarrelling over it. Stevens's work for the manufacturers is not very happy.. There is the overcrowding of incompatible detail that we have already spoken of, and even his sense of setting out and general form and proportion sometimes leaves him. Whether he introduced or took over the stove with rounded opening a which there are examples here, it is a bad form, and has been the plague of our houses. But the same man could treat the traditional forms of pedestal and pediment in the freest way witness his model for the Exhibition Monument (95). Does. her Majesty know in how stately a shape she would have been made immortal if this had been carried out ?
We have left ourselves no space to speak of the other pie- tures. The Murillos are worse than usual ; none of the Zurbarans so good as the National Gallery example. There is much quiet pleasure to be got from the Dutchmen. Thus, no one should miss the red jacket of the lady in the Metsa (116), nor the tablecloth in the Terburg (72), nor even the
in these and other pictures. There is a really grand Callcott in Gallery III. (161), as pleasant a surprise as the great Ruysdael in the National Gallery. Wilson's green and glow is always a comfort—(Grainsborough has caught it in several sketches in Gallery I.) ; and Turner, besides his shipping piece in the Dutch manner bettered (48), confutes. rash statements about his not being able to paint faces by the "Captain Williams" (24) in the same gallery, whose face is done as if in Lawrence's studio, and his trousers and hat and_ background with Turner's best sunset colours.
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