ART.
THE Grosvenor Gallery must still be considered one of the foremost picture exhibitions in London, though it has to some extent lost its most original characteristics, and no longer is the home of that purely ideal art which finds its foremost representative in Mr. Bume-Jones.
The present is not a good exhibition, and at the risk of appearing to meddle with matters beyond the province of a reviewer, one word must be said here as to the cruelty, as well as the impolicy, of asking young artists to send their pictures —and, indeed, inducing them to do so by saying that they shall have a good place in the Gallery—and then, when it is too late for the pictures to be sent elsewhere, returning them because there was a lack of space. That this might be unavoidable in one or two instances, any one who knows the difficulties of getting together a collection of pictures can well believe; but it is said on every hand, both publicly and privately, and has not as yet been denied, that in the present case the managers of the Grosvenor have first chosen and then rejected between sixty and seventy pictures. The consequent disappointment, and in many cases the actual monetary injury inflicted upon young artists, is both severe and great. The sale of a work of art by a young man is in all cases a very hazardous matter, and if his great opportunity for exhibiting, and consequently selling, his work is taken away from him, he is injured doubly, both in reputation and pocket.
"Let us to pictures,' Charmian." The newest thing in
this Gallery is the oldest (in fact, though not to English sightseers), Professor Menzel's celebrated work of the "Piazza dell' Erbe, Verona,"—a crowded market-place, full of figures, market-stalls, picturesque awnings, splashing foun- tains, picturesque architecture, &c. There is no sky, or, at all events, none worth speaking of ; and the first impression of the picture is that everything therein is very black. So it is ; but the blackness is cleverly managed, and though this repre- sentation of outdoor Italy looks like a dark patch even on a dull London wall, and would drive a modern Frenchman mad from its lack of /a luntiere, yet there are many fine qualities in the work, which has, above all, a solid, rough-hewn strength and capability which reduces into powder the inanities of most modern work. This painter can paint a bit, too; and has learnt his business in a big school. As for the drawing, imagine one of Michael Angelo's children who had been brought up under Gustave Dore, and you might get this prolific, vigorous, and most powerful character of design,—almost wanton in the exercise of its strength ; chiefly capable of portraying character and action ; at once scientific and rugged, careful and disordered, reticent and extravagant, and above all, teeming with life, with movement, with intellectual as well as physical power. There are many beautiful things, we say again, in this work, though it is on the scientific and intellec- tual, rather than the emotional side of Art ; moreover, its art is genuine as a Tethers, and natural as a Franz Reis. After this picture, the one which should attract most attention is Mr. John Reid's "Smugglers," which exem- plifies fully the change which his art has undergone during the last two or three years. Mr. Reid, artistically speaking, has become a cross between John Phillip and Sir David Wilkie, and has mixed this compound with a good deal of native extravagance and nineteenth-century incomplete- ness. This picture is full of brilliant qualities, muddled, obscured, and thrown away by impatience, affectation, and lack of study. The colour in many portions—indeed, as a whole—is simply splendid ; but there are discordant patches of light and unnecessary blots of shadow, which jar like false notes in music. Look, for instance, at the white hair of the principal figure, standing out against a lurid obscurity of warm colour effectively enough, but "falser than the bank of fancy," as Lord Tennyson's parodist once wrote. The picture is called "Smugglers," and repre- sents a scene in an old fishing-town after the smugglers' capture. The real criticism to make on the picture—the genuine, though cruel word to say about it—is that, with all its merits, the composition produces a distinctly comic effect. The actors in the little drama are transpontine, their expressions melodramatic, their dress picturesque but im- probable, their juxtaposition effective but inexplicable. The old smuggler (one of the virtuous kind), with manacled hands, and placid, benevolent expression ; the Revenue officer, with drawn sword, no neck, and eyes glaring horribly ; the beautiful young woman, who sits, in a sort of rustic ball- dress, in front of her shop,—all these people are comic, jumbled up together without rhyme or reason. Let us, however, do full justice to Mr. Reid's power. He has shot his characters together as a dustman might shoot the contents of his cart, but he impresses us with their reality, with their life,—they are comic, but they are alive. Look, for instance, at another of the important works here, wherein the actors are not comic and are not alive,—a picture, by-the- way, which marks a distinct advance in the artist's manner, and which, though belonging to a picture-maker's style of art, is pleasant to look upon as a mass of bright, pure colour,— looks clean and wholesome, and is intellectually perhaps a little twaddly. These young people whom Mr. Jacomb Hood has taken to embody "The Triumph of Spring," are strolling in procession down a pleasant meadow, in which the bright grass, overhung by flowering apple-trees, seems made for their pretty faces and smooth limbs. Like Nature it is not, nor does it pretend to be, and somehow it is not quite like Art ; but the picture is careful, refined, and unobjectionable, the classical age treated from the point of view of a delicate- minded governess, evidencing much careful work, and well thought out in its composition and its scheme of bright colour.
The strongest piece of colour in the Exhibition is Mr. E. J. Gregory's portrait of Miss Mabel Galloway, in which the girl's red dress, the chrysanthemums, the Turkey carpet, the gilt leather of the wall in the background, make up a scheme of colour such as perhaps no English artist except Mr. Gregory would dare to attempt. The girl's cheeks are perhaps brighter than anything in the picture ; Mr. Gregory presumably chose her surroundings for that reason. Yet, though the picture is extraordinarily dexterous, though, for instance, the painting of the hair is simply splendid, the work is not as a whole com- pletely satisfactory. Without being actually vulgar, it lacks refinement, and though it is not commonplace, still less is the composition poetical or suggestive; above all, everything in the work looks new, the table, the chrysanthemums, the embossed leather, the peacock-feathers, the carpet, Miss Galloway's dress, and Miss Galloway herself. There is a trail as of Shoolbred or Whiteley over the whole picture. Notice as a contrast to this the little landscape by Mr. Aumonier of an English village scene, which seems to take us pleasantly far away from Mr. Gregory's decorative portrait.
There is a picture by Mr. Keeley Halswelle here which has a peculiar attraction from being the one which was, we now understand, rejected by the Royal Academy. It is chiefly noticeable as being a better piece of colour than usual with this artist. The subject is a river enclosed between "October woodlands."
Mr. Alfred East's "The Ebb-Tide of Day" is probably the most poetical landscape in the Exhibition, but it is not a particularly good example of the artist, and has rather a cheap effect of distant hills and sunset sky. Mr. Fairfax Murray sends one of the largest, and in its way one of the best pic- tures here, two life-size figures standing against a background of landscape, and clothed in very full-coloured draperies ; but this artist's manner is simply an echo of the great period of Italian painting, and lacks the personal qualities of the artist almost as completely as it evidences his acquaintance with the work of the older schools. Specially unpleasant to the present writer is the colour of the flesh in this picture, which has a sort of strawberry-ice tint, and a texture akin to nothing in human nature. Still, there is no doubt that, with all his defects, Mr. Murray is a colourist, and it is rather amusing to see to what a drab uniformity of hue this composition of his reduces all the surrounding pictures.
The last work which we shall mention in the present notice will be Mr. George Clausen's "Ploughboy," a remarkably finished study of a very pink rustic model, very powerfully painted in the manner of the late M. Bastien Lepage. It is lifelike, but like life which is profoundly uninteresting, or, in other words, not like life at all. Still, for a realisation of the absolutely superficial characteristics of a model, Mr. Clausen's study—we cannot call it a picture—is the most successful thing in the Gallery.
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