ART.
THE EXHIBITION OF THE SOCIETY OF PORTRAIT-PAINTERS.
THERE is a highly cultivated form of human aberration known as " elocution." We are all familiar with its dreary displays,. and those who are less at home in the medium of painting than in that of literature may better understand the relation of the ordinary portrait to the art of portraiture by remem- bering what is the relation of elocution to the art of reading.. There is no question for the moment, be it understood, of physical aptitude. A good voice and a good eye are the gift of God, and no training will produce them ; but those natural gifts may exist in people who have no intelligence in their management. To paint a portrait demands feeling and in- telligence as well as a natural eye for form and colour, as. much as dramatic speech requires these qualities ; the voice of the choir-boy goes up into the heaven of pure voice-quality, while his mind may be occupied with skittles ; but such a per- formance will not satisfy on the stage. So in portraiture the demand of the subject is greater than in freer forms of design.. The centre of attack is not the colour-carpet to be produced, though that is an indispensable condition of the picture ; it is. the reading of a person. And it is in this sphere that the ordinary portrait-reading corresponds to the ordinary elocu- tion. The professor of elocution imparts to his pupils a pain- ful, a systematic, and complete code for the rendering of any "pieces" that may be undertaken. The fact of its being a. code, and a complete one, is an obvious enough defect to start. with. To label so simply all emotions, to raise the voice at , one label, and lower it at another, to signal pathos always by a.
trembling pianissimo, and passion by gasping utterance and clutching hand, is funny enough, and is like the laborious nota- tion of "expression" in some hymn-books,where any reference to death or doom is lettered pp. All this is conventional and tire- some, but the radical defect that nullifies the whole performance is more serious. It is this,—that all these conventional intima- tions are modelled on what the " piece " pretends to express, quite irrespective of the worth of those pretensions. The reader has no critical standard, extends or withholds no agreement or dissent, but accepts in stupid good faith the suggestion "this is sad" or " this is rapturous," in the vulgar rant, equally with the same suggestion in a poem. and renders both with the same repertory of tricks of voice and gesture. It is this that makes us freeze and blush when the drawing-room reciter arises and expends all his available con- viction on hollow sentiment and misplaced emotion. The vulgar emphasis that an artist in reading would pass over lightly with a colourless voice, or render with a point of bur- lesque, he makes the more abominably emphatic by every device he has been taught. The line that among good lines rings a little false, he singles out to dwell upon, and gives himself away in the same condemnation with his author. How different the real reader ! Cheap writing he will refuse by his intonation to connive at. What he reads will be definitely set in relation to his own standard of feeling; and the result will be a triumph of art and expression, however trifling or worthless the stuff read, by the justice dealt out to it in its treatment. It is in this sense only that subject is indifferent and accidental.
Here, then, is the fatal defect that makes a collection of ordinary portraits not only dull but irritating. There is no symptom of comprehension on the part of the painter ; of either a sympathetic or a critical attitude. It is a drawing- room performance like the other, and in the same spirit. The pretension to dignity or prettiness of the subject is accepted, and coldly expressed in the technique of one drawing-school or another. Finished elocutionist, then, is the best one can say for the majority of the painters, members or guests, in the ex- hibition under review ; and when it is added that in many cases the natural painter-gift is wanting, that not only in the sense of relation the intelligence and feeling are at fault, but that the voice is hoarse or shrill, enough has been said about the Society as a whole.
But the Society, if not very rich in painting talent, is shrewd in business management, and the result is that what might otherwise be a mere overflow from the Academy, becomes by the presence of several masterpieces, one of the most in- teresting exhibitions of the season. A gallery dignified by the names of Messrs. Whistler, Orchardson, Millais (of '73), Boldini, and Fantin-Latour, may tempt us to forget the acci- dental occasion that brings them together. Let us ask how far those works bear the tests that must be applied to the portrait art as distinguished from the painting art.
The difficulty of the good painter who would also be a good portrait-painter, is that of the good reader who may be good without being flexible. A man may have at command an intoning chant which suits well with the lectern but does not adapt itself to the daily papers. To set them to a solemn strain is comic. In the same way, portrait-painting, with its imposition of something that must be read, demands a dra- matic adaptive faculty not nearly so common as the lyric. The lyric temper is fixed to a narrow range of mood of character, of face ; it has set up a picture scheme, and is apt to try to force a new sitter into an incompatible setting.
The Whistler suggests, by the curious stratification of titles under which it appears in the catalogue, the complexity of the task that a portrait-painter sets himself, and the gauntlet of criticism that a portrait must run. It is, to begin with, a Har- nwny in Flesh-Colour and Grey, and under this bead it makes its appeal and receives its verdict with applause almost before we know it to be a portrait or anything else. The canvas has been cleaned since the picture was seen at Christie's during the Leyland sale, and the original colour comes out in extra- ordinary freshness and beauty. To go nearer is to admire still more, for not only does the architecture of the colour grow on one's sense, the largeness of grasp by which so great a variety and play of hue is controlled to harmony, but there is also revealed the clear, fluent beauty of the painting, the expressive management of the touch. But the picture is also La Princesse des Pays de la Porcelain and a Portrait of Miss S—, and in virtue of these titles
comes under a fresh jurisdiction. And the devil's advocate might argue that there was some incompatibility here between the two aims,—that the pursuit of the picture fancy was at the expense of the portrait, for the portrait is too good to allow it to act the lay-figure to a costume. The mournful, poetic head does not seem at home in the Japanese masquerade. " Miss S—" refuses the crown. It is as in those doubtful cases of the riverside pictures, where a sprig of Japanese foliage disturbs the portrait of the River Thames. The claim of the subject is not felt so profoundly as in some others, and the Eastern influence betrays itself in surface borrowings instead of a deeper inspiration.
It is instructive to compare with the Whistler, Sir John Millais' portrait of Mrs. Bischoffsheim which hangs opposite. It is perhaps, of all works in the exhibition, the one that painters will linger over most. Its resolute tackling of diffi- culties, and masterly dealing with many of them, make it a repaying study. If you take the face by itself and consider the wonderful delicacy of some of the colour—the grey, for instance, that floats about the forehead where the hair begins, a colour that has no name and to few eyes an existence—you confess yourself in the presence of rare painting power. The handling and colour of the brocade, again—the way trans- parent gives place to opaque, and green to rose, and touch melts into touch—all bears competition with the Whistler. As presentation of a person, the portrait has simplicity, unaffectedness, the look of life. But when we stand back and try to get a whole from it, an effect of picture-archi- tecture, the result is more doubtful. Taken piecemeal, the dress was lovely ; taken by itself, the head was delicate ; but in relation to the whole, is there the sense of key, of com- plete subordination and harmony of parts that we get from the Whistler P Hardly. The green background fights for its own hand too much.
In the same gallery, there is an example of exquisite balance of qualities in a portrait by M. Fantin-Latour. Everything in it seems to belong absolutely to the person painted,—to come from her, to be her ordinary accompaniment. But the accompaniment is an affectionate music played in the colours of her dress and embroidery work, and the illumination of her head. The whole thing is free from the blackish tints and gritty, unpleasant quality that spoil so often the work of a painter with a real sense for character.
Another painter who gives one the satisfaction of a keen, intelligent rendering of his subject, is M. Boldini. His pastel head of Signor Verdi is a masterly drawing ; head, hat, and scarf are full of character. His full-length of a lady is the portrait of a fashion, and this was probably a just treatment of its subject. The wisp-like figure, the mode, the mood of the body, is arrested there in a typical example. For M. Boldini's figure is not, like most of those here, dressed in fashions made for other people ; she does not sit in uneasy pomp somewhere inside her best armour, put on to be painted ; she might herself have grown those feathers in a dream of a bird, and she is caught almost on the wing. And that is what dress is when it has any life. It expresses the fluctuating aspirations of the body, which refuses to be a frozen thing, like the padded ideal and norm of the studios. It has han- kerings after the serpent, and the chimera, and the bird.
The Glasgow painters rally in force to this exhibition, and their work, as ever, is intelligent and interesting. But Mr. Guthrie's full-length, which hangs as a pendant to the Boldini, loses by comparison, for a back view like this demands the elegance and complete concord of person and fashion that the latter possesses. It is interesting to compare Mr. Guthrie's later manner with the tighter drawing and Bastien-Lepage-like painting of his other portrait. The advance is considerable, but his danger at present is to let his ground overpower his painting. A unity is secured by this method, but at the expense of the flesh-tints, which in this case are somewhat green. Mr. Henry's painting of a boa is clever, but the face of its wearer wants refinement, and the hands are slovenly. Mr. Loudan, besides his portraits of children, sends a full-length of a lady, in which he has dared greatly in the matter of colour. The dress is bright green with gold spots; bouquet and fan are vermilion, the background is blue, the floor purple, and the lady's hair orange. The combination is just short of being very fine; but this obvious colour-battle overwhelms the portrait, for to paint people on this scale, and to be so ambiguous about their features, is an error in proportion. Mr. Greiffenhagen's lady, a pendant to the last, looks pale beside it, and is rather half-hearted in drawing, but has more grace and distinction.
Mr. Orchardson sends his famous composition of a lady playing with a child on a cane sofa. It is more a picture than a portrait ; but let alone the two people, the painting of the sofa is a lesson in portraiture. Who, after seeing that lovely image taken out of an ordinary piece of furniture, does not find himself provided with a charm to apply to every cane- bottomed chair he comes across ?
One other name must be mentioned, that of M. Bontet de Monvel, whose severe drawing and restrained colour are applied very happily in the portrait of a young girl in red holding a pink rose. And this reversion to a somewhat primi- tive style reminds one of a most interesting exhibition now going on at the Burlington Fine Arts Club. It covers the early schools of the Netherlands and France. Let every one go there who wishes to know Nicholas Lucidel or Neuchittel for a great master of portrait, one to be set near Holbein.
D. S. M.
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