ART.
MACLISE AS AN OLD MASTER.
WE are not aware what is the recognised age at which a deceased painter is entitled to be canonised as an Old Master ; but we ob- serve that the French artists Gericault and Decamps, the latter of whom died in 1860, have already undergone that ceremony, as also Scheffer and Delaroche, for paintings by them appear in ex- hibitions of Old Masters at Burlington House. In the British School, however, it is merely necessary to die in order to justify an immediate comparison with the greatest artists of all ages and countries. We hardly know whether it is by way of warn- ing or of encouragement to young painters that a special selection from the works of D. Maclise, R.A., has been inter- spersed among those of Rembrandt and Tintoretto, Reynolds, Hogarth, and Vandyck, not to mention the various ventures of dealers and collectors that connoisseurs are now exercis- ing their taste and judgment in finding names and titles for, in the collection at the Royal Academy. In either case, the display is not calculated to raise the artistic repute of a painter who, whatever his defects, was undoubtedly an artist of merit and originality. It did not need the above juxtaposition to convince the world that Maclise's colour was crude and in- harmonious, nor are the better qualities of his art to be esti- mated by the pictures which he painted for Academy exhibition.
To judge fairly of the genius of Maclise, the works in which he introduced no colour, as his illustrations of books, his outlines of Shakespeare's Seven Ages (designed in 1848 for a porcelain card- tray), and above all, the series of forty-one compositions repre- senting the " Story of the Norman Conquest," exhibited at the Academy in 1857, and afterwards engraved for the Art Union, should be taken into special consideration. By these last designs an impression is confirmed which the attentive study of his paintings can scarcely fail to suggest, that Maclise looked upon nature more with the eye of a sculptor than with that of a painter, and tliat most of the defects of his pictures were due to a misconception of the use of the pencil to express the aspects of nature. One of the most obvious points of inconsistency in the execu- tion of those details which in his picture are often " finished " up to a degree little short of deceptive imitation, is the perfection with which he could paint certain surfaces or textures as contrasted with the absence of almost all attempt to render others. In the " Canton's Printing Office " (44), for example, you may take up each metal type from the compositor's "frame" and read the letter on it, and the bottles of colour used by the illuminators and the very grain of the wood blocks are imitated to perfection ; but the stuffs and fabrics of the various draperies, which range from King to Capuchin, and from prince to printer, are barely suggested. This gives an air of unreality to the whole, which the truthful elaboration of parts only serves to enhance. If Maclise as a designer regarded Nature with a sculptor's eye, when he took the paint - brush in hand, he seems to have treated her as carved in wood or forged in metal and coated with fresh - varnished paint or smooth enamel. There is always a look of irreproachable cleanliness about the places he paints. You might eat your dinner off the floor. There can be no scene where this spotless purity is less in keeping than the interior of a printing-office ; and from the appearance of Caxton's " outward man," Mr. Cox would cer- tainly not have " unhesitatingly set him down as a gentleman connected with the printing interest." The same inability to suggest varieties of surface is apparent in Maclise's employment of outline in some of his book illustrations,—the " Moore's Melodies," for example. It is used as a mere boundary of form, and is thick or thin, without reference to the strength or tenderness which the relief of one part against another would be emphasized or subdued in nature. Thus it of has yuoften true o fouf outline, effect edc tar amounts durnaatsvwntroibtcaliiyn graphy rather than good drawing. Yet without the sculptor's sense of form in its three dimensions this outline never could have been placed as truly as it generally is. It is only necessary to compare the arms, par- gJohn writing-master's rre'snnflieol, i8whithintshose by Maclise, to perceive how much more can be expressed in pure line than was attempted by the latter. Chiefly through a false use of outline, the limbs in some of Maclise's drawings have the appearance of being enveloped in kid drawn tight over wax-work. It is only by the somewhat radical process of elimi-
nating from our estimate of his art all these considerations of its short-comings, as well as of its exaggerations, that one can arrive at a just appreciation of its strength.
Maclise began life as a portrait-painter, and his first success was achieved by a lucky hit which he made in a lithographed drawing of the late Mr. Charles Kean, as he appeared on the night of his debut, October 1. 1827, the artist being then in his teens. One of the best of his subsequent portraits, and indeed one of his best pictures, is that of the greater tragedian, Macready, as Werner, executed twenty-three years afterwards, and numbered 267 in this exhibition. It is now known, though it was not known at the time they were executed, that the series of sketches of literary characters published in Fraser's Magazine between the years 1830 and 1838, and signed "Alfred Croquis," were also by the hand of Maclise. They were neither caricatures, like the clever exaggerations now being issued in Vanity Fair, nor were they serious portraits, the playful element being chiefly con- tained in the accessories or occupation of the sitter, as where Bulwer is depicted in the act of shaving before a cheval-glass, Harriet Martineau's cat is perched on her shoulder, and Sir John Ross makes chimney-ornaments of his feet. There can be no doubt that Maclise had a happy knack of catching a likeness, which did not desert him in his latest years, as the portrait of Dr. Quail', painted in 1866, and now at Burlington House, amply proves. But this power of painting features correctly seems to have been of much less use to him than might have been expected when he came to draw upon his imagination. In works of the latter class, which were those on which his subsequent fame was founded, be displayed a further power, which seems to have arisen from the same extraordinary facility of drawing, combined with a practical knowledge of anatomy, that gave him so facile a command of the figure in all positions. He was not a master of subtle facial expression, but he was an able designer of features contorted by violent emotion. The expressions which he could best invent were those which can be assumed at will by an actor, as distinguished from those which remain impressed upon the countenance in repose, and which are either inherited or the result of individual habit. We rarely see evidence in his works of a power to combine these two kinds of expres- sion, and to engraft the accidental on the permanent. He comes nearest to it in his story of the Norman Conquest, where the conception of William's character is admirably carried through. He is furthest removed from it in his illustrations from Shake- speare, wherein, whatever may be the force of the passing expres- sion he depicts, we can take no more interest in the persons re- presented than we should do in the actors who played them. Nor does he appear to us to enter at all deeply into the spirit of the dramatist. There are four scenes from Shakespeare in this col- lection, painted at different times between the years 1832 and 1868, and they are for the most part essentially stagey. One of these is the finished study (19) of the well-known " play " scene in Hamlet. This is in better preservation than the larger picture in the Vernon Gallery, which is said to be much cracked and under repair. Here the stage audience are, according to theatrical usage, grouped to the right and left of the players' platform, to give the real audience a clearer view, and enable all the faces to be seen, an arrangement which necessarily suggests the theatre ; and the chief characters are by much the least satisfactory in the group. The scowl of Hamlet and the " conscience of the King " are exaggerated in the last degree ; Horatio is a girl in boy's clothes, and Ophelia a well-looking and stout young lady in white, who has the appearance of occupying a seat at church. But the interest of the rest of the audience in the play is well depicted ; only they could not be all looking at the stage, if the space they occupy were properly represented. "The Banquet Scene in 'Macbeth' " (211), painted in 1840, two years before, is a not very successful effort to grapple with the difficulty of the ghost, of which the audience are placed in the shadow of a shade, itself invisible to them, as to the assembled guests. There is some juggling, too, with the unities of the scene. Macbeth's expression is that of intense surprise and horror at his first sight of Banquo in the chair, which the guests are already examining attentively, to try- and see what he sees, while Lady Macbeth at the same time dismisses the assembly. The various expressions are very powerfully rendered. particularly the attentive gaze of the guest on the left, whose organ of vision seems, oddly enough, to be deprived of the iris, thus inverting the peculiarity of the ghost, who had eyes, but no speculation, while here there is speculation, but no eyes to glare with. The other picture, from the same play—one of the artist's last exhibited works—the " Sleep of Duncan" (148), is framed too much as a tableau vivant, and chiefly remarkable for the undue prominence of the grooms and their armour, which, in an artistic sense, does the deed of killing the king without the intervention
of Macbeth. The earliest in date of Maclise's pictures now at the Academy, that of " Puck disenchanting Bottom " (47), which was exhibited in 1832, is the nearest approach to genuine fairy grotesque that we are acquainted with in his paintings. But the lighting of the picture is eminently suggestive of the floats, and the fairies are really more human in feature than the weaver. The faces they make are indicative of more serious emotion than belongs to such airy beings, and as for bully Bottom, who, with all his vanity, was by far the most practical of all the hempen homespuns, his features, as far as they can be seen under a stupendous yawn, are those of a kind of Puck, grown up and vulgarised. Maclise's fancy was more fairy-like in the clever little cuts which he drew early in life for Croker's " Legends of the South of Ireland." When left to his own choice, his types of face were apt to be very limited, those most frequently used being seemingly modifications of one male and one female head of decidedly Irish cast ; the former a rollicking Celt with curling locks and great sweeping eyebrows and fine teeth, and so much of the general aspect of a faun as to seem incomplete without a tapering ear and a little tail ; the latter, a clear-eyed beauty, with that kind of youthful grace that belongs to robust health, and is not incon- sistent with substantial form. These types are appropriate in the Irish picture of the "Installation of Captain Rock" (202), which approaches more nearly to real life than any other here shown, but at the same time is less characteristic of the artist's individuality. It was painted and exhibited in 1834, at which time, his biographer tells us, he was very much employed in portraiture, and doubtless before he had acquired the con- ventionality which arose in his later years, as it could not fail to do, from the abandonment of the use of models. The incident is taken from the "Tipperary Tales," where one Delaney swears upon the body of a former faction- leader to revenge his death, and is appointed his successor. Here not only are the types more varied and true to nature, but the masses of light and shade are more skilfully disposed and the colour is more broken and harmonious than in the artist's later works. But it exhibits also the quality which constitutes, at the same time, the wealth and the weakness of most of his composi- tions. The figures are crowded into a space the dimensions of which the artist has taken no pains to express, and which, if he had, would have been found insufficient to hold them. Com- bined with Maclise's extraordinary facility of drawing the human figure, his eulogists rightly give him credit for the like facility of invention. But as a designer, it will be found, we think, that this facility amounted to little more than a talent for always finding something to fill up every corner of space with. It is a kind of Irish eloquence in a graphic form, not so much an embarras de richesses as a superfluity of things neither very useful nor very ornamental, and not necessary, though rarely discordant. Give him a definite area to fill with people, and Maclise could probably supply in a shorter time than any one else a fuller mea- sure of able-bodied folks of both sexes, or indeed of objects of any kind. Give him a sweeping line to string figures upon, and he could weave them in as a garland of flowers without check or join. But the string is one thing and beads on it are another, and when theyonly mark so many changes rung on one theme, to tell them be- comes a tiresome task that needs devotion. In the largest picture here, "The Marriage of Strongbow " (78), which shows us Maclise at his highest as a painter and designer, the line of figures at the back, bearing the dead and wounded, is ornamental as a festoon of this kind, but the part they play in the story of the picture would be equally well performed by a single group. And when Maclise takes up the pencil in a work of pure decoration —as, for example, in the engraved borders to every page of his " Moore's Melodies"—the arrangement of foliage has more analogy to an evergreen garnish at Christmas than to any more thoughtful kind of ornamental art. To the effect of his painted pictures, however, the profusion of incident and accessory is generally injurious, by distracting the attention from the principal subject, while the overcrowding of the figures itself often amounts to a manifest absurdity. It comes to a climax in the great water-glass painting of the " Meeting of Blucher and Wel- lington." With the remaining pictures here by Maclise we have no space to deal ; they chiefly display his staginess in three several forms ; in the " Moksnna " (79), who unveils his panto- mimic ugliness in a theatrical pose; in the "Sleeping Beauty" (252), which reminds us of the pretty extravaganzas of the Olympic in the days of _Madame Vestris ; and in the "Author and the Players " (53), from " Gil Blas," in which, though its sentiment has a pleasant smack of Leslie-about it, there is too much of acting the actors. The " Kitely " (255) is a portrait, more delicate and agreeable than usual in colour, of John Forster, Eaq. ; and the " Waterfall" (258) merely shows Maclise's total inappreciation of landscape, even in the low sense of mere imitation in which the word is now used. It is curious to observe in two of his pictures here, the "Eve of St. Agnes" (77) and the " Werner" (267), an apparent pleasure in painting the coloured image of a stained window, an effect which afterwards drove him nearly to despair when he had to spread his colours on a wall so illumined in the Palace of Westminster. Some idea of the fertility of Maclise's fancy may be formed from the fact that in less than half of those pictures there are in the aggregate not less than 430 figures, not including the elves.
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