ART.
A STATUETTE AND SOME PICTURES.
IT is wonderful with what pleasure one comes upon Mr. Swan's little figure of Orpheus at the Academy. Almost persuaded here and there that a picture is pretty good, the disappointed eye has worked through the galleries, but here at last there can be no mistake about the sensation. Sense revives ; fancy, proof against so many vulgar and tactless appeals, is liberated, and leaps out into sunshine. Even so must Plutonian eyes, inured to pallid or lurid ghosts, have opened on his brightness when, among that chittering people,
leves populos, simulacraque functa sepulcris," the singer descended. Here is a plastic conception felicitously born into solid silver, the image unblurred and fit, the stuff obedient. It is not the dream of vague sentiment that has no vital hold on things ; it is life caught in its own act and expression, and yet controlled within a sculptor's thought as the seeming-free motions of a dancer within a tune. Orhpeus strides, scattering music, and we read his power in the lithe form and the non- chalant head. We read it too in the great cats that fawn about his feet, the luxurious coil of their bodies echoing the coil, the charm and torment of the measure. But how well these amplifying figures are bound within the block of the pedestal, instead of cutting out in competition with the dominant form. Mr. Swan must be more of a sculptor at bottom than a painter, for in painting, when he has wrought out his group of animals, he gets into difficulties with a back. ground ; his mind does not seem to conceive figures implicated in a background, which is the painter's way. Here, everything is right and happy.
If the visitor to London wishes to get a pleasure from modern painting comparable to this, he will do well not to weary himself in the Academy, but go straightway to Messrs. Lauries' Gallery, No. 15 Old Bond Street. There, in two canvases by Matthew Maris, in two panels by Monticelli, to mention only two painters out of several, he will find the same happy marriage of mood and material that he has enjoyed in the Orpheus. Matthew Maris, greatest of the painters of that name, and one of the greatest of living masters of his art, is little enough known in London. Like his one or two peers among contemporary painters, he has been too severe a critic of his own work to produce a great -quantity, and what he has produced has been seldom exhibited. One or two examples were to be seen recently at Mr. Van Wisselingh's ; others have found their way to Scottish collections as the result of the good taste of men like the date Mr. Cottier and Mr. Hamilton Bruce. The two at Messrs. Laurier? the artist himself is said now to regard as a kind of pot-boiler, so incessantly has he refined upon an exquisite standard. One is a view of Amsterdam, another a view of Montmartre. I never saw a painting to excel the first for its infinite discrimination of tones and colours between the close limits of its grey light. Betvreen two tones that to a coarser eye would be identical, this master can play a whole gamut of delicate variation, and thereby give the mystery and poetry of the town withdrawn behind veil after veil of vaporous and pearly air. All this, too, with so beautiful an execution that you would think it the labour of years to make paint so lovely. The other canvas clothes in the same mystery a desolate -quarter of Paris, the paint obediently expressing, and with 'the same beauty, another kind of scene. Here, if any one cares to see it, is really fine technique at the service of a poetic spirit.
Then I turn to the gorgeous reveries of Monticelli, and I think of the pictures that are daily described as being splendid in colour, and I feel how hopeless it must be to expect that the admirer of those should consider this beautiful colour at all. When the critic of the Times speaks of Sir Frederic's Flaming .Tune as being in that colour "of which his palette
alone possesses the secret," I am reduced to wondering what can be the peculiar effect of that very open secret, cadmium, on his sensations. When the critic of the West- minster Gazette calls that same orange "salmon-pink," then we know exactly where we are. This anxious shot tells us the exact diatanee from accuracy of his colour sense. Unfor- tunately, within the not very close apace that separates grange from pink lies all that tenders -colour possible or im- possible in a painting, and not to know the difference is to be
an absolute outsider to the art. By the way, if you call orange "pink," you must call Degas "clever." It is a simple sum in proportion.
A great joy has been provided for the colour-blind this last week by an ingenious gentleman who has constructed a "colour organ," and all the papers that I have seen have vaunted the invention as the art of the future. I confess that I was too terrified by the prospectus to go to the exhibition, and it is quite possible that some pretty effects were accidentally pro. dnced. But the "translation of music into colour" by this engine rests on the most absurdly fanciful basis. The colour spectrum, in which there is nothing corresponding to our sensation of pitch in the gamut of sound, is parcelled, by a division into seven bands, among the notes of the octave. Then this first octave having been fancifully secured, of course the difficulty arises, Where are the other octaves to come from P There is no scale of " up and down " (as we express it analo- logically for sound) in the colour spectrum, and evidently there is no recurrence at a higher pitch of the octave series. This difficulty is quietly got over by representing the other octaves by a difference of intensity ! Then the engine gets to work on Chopin or Schumann, and there is a hopping of blue and mauve on the screen. It would be just as reasonable to attach a different colour to each of the letters of the alphabet and work at a type-writer's key-board, from a printed page. If the nonsense about music were dropped the thing would be an amusing toy for combining colours, but this misunderstanding of the difference between the colour spectrum and the scale of sound ought not to have misled
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