1 FEBRUARY 1873, Page 11

ART.

GEORGE MASON'S COLLECTED PICTURES.

Jr has been suggested that the impression formed by a great part of the cultivated public as to George Mason's place in modern art would hardly be confirmed by the opportunity for examining his whole work, now afforded under the easiest conditions, thanks to the exertions of some members of the Burlington Fine Arts' Club, and other possessors of the artist's pictures. It has been said that a want of range, a too plainly proved monotony, would at once be perceptible. "It is all the same dream." That is a happy phrase, but the critic who used it saw only the limitations which the phrase expressed, and not its implied tribute. In one sense it is true enough that the main work of Mason is "all the same dream ;" his pictures are a musi- cal suite, from beginning to end the vision and presentment of pastoral beauty and pastoral rest. But there are exceptions, and these should be indicated before one inquires rather more closely into his "dream." One need nob speak of the somewhat disap- pointing very early pieces, which seem to the untrained eyes of those who are not practical artists to contain so little even suggestive of that peculiar gift discovered in his later work. Omit the early pictures painted in Rome, and included in this exhibition surely only that we may marvel the more at what the painter afterwards achieved ; but 4note, at all events, that what he saw and painted best in the Cam- peva, at a moment when he had acquired power yet had not found his own individuality, was a scene of vigorous action, real, unaffected, and to which he was prompted by no sentiment—unless, indeed, the sentiment of Turner when, in drawing his "Peat Bog," he united mountain grandeur with desolate life and difficult, drudging task-work. I'Ve refer to Mason's picture of the "Loaded Wagon in the Salt Marshes of the Campagna "—the only really considerable thing which he pro- duced in Italy. It is all vigour, action, movement ; the solid work of a great capable craftsman, no dreamer at all. One should notice with what art the heavy labour of men and of oxen is made to seem still heavier by the side of that woman, whose firm tread is so light, and who with no effort at all supports the baby-laden basket on her heal. Then, coining to the English pictures, there is perceptible another phase of Mr. Mason's capacity. He is for once common-place, if you will, but at all events he is not " brooding," when he paints the girl wringing out her hair in "Only a Shower ;" but he is neither common-place nor brooding in "Catch," in the "Gander," in the "Unwilling Playmate." Here he has eye and hand for country comedy : a healthy interest in the outside world and the lighter things of rustic life. " Catch " makes you laugh at the expectant child who will receive that treasure of the apple from the passing youth, and at that other child, burdened with water-pails, and flounder- ing about among the shallows of the stream. And " Gander " and "Unwilling Playmate" have the same character. They are pleasant and merry ; but a deeper pleasure is to come.

For, of course, it is true in the main that one dream colours Mason's work,—a sentiment even more Arcadian than that of Jules Breton, conveyed by methods and manner that remind one of Daubigny. He sees generally neither what is intense, nor grand, nor bitter, in human life, but only what is sweet, and even this only when sweetness is associated with a tenderness of pathos. Comparison with Turner will indeed but too quickly show you his limitations ; but to see something of the fineness of his qualities, put for a moment, however audacious be the act, a land- scape of Mason's by the side of a landscape of Claude's. With Claude there is the perfection of means ; an execution accurate and accomplished. He saw the loveliness of his sunrise or of his sun- set sky ; saw it, and painted it with an unequalled hand. But its own first obvious beauty was -sufficient for him ; he neither cared for nor knew of any other. In an imaginative mood one could almost fancy the spirit of the country saying to him, with scarcely too much of severity, what Fifine said to her gazers at the Fair :— "Know all of me outside ; the rest be emptiness,

For such as you

and turning then to Mason with praise and love, that he had read her secret. And, indeed, he felt always much more than he

accomplished,—seems to have struggled, almost till the end, with certain difficulties of expression, and rarely to have overcome those difficulties until the preparations for a picture had given place to

the picture itself. Thus it is that, save when, as in "The Clothes' Line," he sketched from nature, frankly, once and for all his studies and designs have not the merit and intrinsic value which one expects to find in designs and studies by a man of his artistic rank and noble qualities. A readier hand would much sooner have reached the desired point of gracefulness in line and grouping: we know how well "completion speeds with Gerome well at work ;" but Mason perceived long before he could execute, —expressed beauty of form, finally, indeed, with quite astonishing success, but always after a battle with difficulties due to the absence of Academical training. The charm of "The Clothes' Line" is due to its colour and harmony ; what a warmth of atmosphere changes the blank white of the sheet and blends the grey-blue of the hanging gown with the slate-blue line of roof ! Often, however, colour and harmony, as well as form, had to be found slowly, or slowly conveyed. Sometimes a whole study was completed without conveying to any eye but the artist's even a suggestion of the beauty then undoubtedly conceived, and which the finished picture would in due time embody. Take his first effort at" Girls Dancing by the Sea." There is absolutely nothing beyond the pretty curve of a child's quaint frock as it is held in both her hands and caught by the breeze. He saw this thing, and jotted it down, feeling that more could be made of it. But this alone, this simple thing, is the motive of the picture. It dwells with him until the trivial sight itself is nothing, in the perfected beauty of the scene he imagines and at last presents. He has found a better age than that of early childhood. It is early girlhood, in- stead, and the slow dancing is for a subtle pleasure, and no more for a child's fun. A youth pipes to the dancers from his seat in the bent tree-trunk ; there is a new harmony in the sober-hued raiment, and a mellower light over field and sea. So a child's chance movement has been wrought into an idyll. "Es ego in Arcadia' vizi," you say.

The same noble attributes of form and colour and simplicity and poetry are apparent in his last exhibited picture, "The Harvest Moon,"—a band of harvesters, with jagged-edged, dark steel-blue scythes lifted against the quiet evening sky. That was in the Academy last year, and needs no description and no praise ; but note for a moment the not less profound feeling and not less perfect art of "The Evening Hymn "—Staffordshire mill- girls pacing home abreast after their work, and singing as they pace, as the Staffordshire custom is. And if there is profound feeling in the solemn tread and abstracted gaze of that central figure—a good, not goody, girl, whose whole soul is in her worship—there is true rendering of character in these lighter, yet still sweet faces, not quite regardless of the swain's gaze ; not quite insensitive to the pleasures, loves, and hopes of the now present village-world. Here Mason has turned to account a local custom, and has liked to show us the garments of his native Staffordshire. The long child's pinafore, still worn by the older girls,—that is the piece of dress with which, in all his work, be is most at home ; he shows us, too, the mill-hoods of his county. In "The Evening Hymn," in the "Girl driving Sheep over the Hill at Matlock," and in the landscape pure and simple, called "A Farmhouse in Warwickshire"—which last has more than the stillness and sobriety of De Whit—he illustrates as no other artist (not even, in another art, George Eliot,) has illustrated, the life of the Midlands; and through this he has given us on canvas nearly all that there remains of beautiful in the rural life of England. Surveying his work, you see quickly enough his limi-

tations ; but you see also the genuineness of his inspiration and the depth of his tenderness and beauty. F. W.