ART.
THE ROYAL ACADEMY.
[SECOND NOTICE.]
LN our first notice, we dwelt upon one or two prominent features of this Exhibition, and we shall now endeavour to point out, as briefly as possible, the majority of the better pictures,—that is to say, of those which have some little pretence to be works of Art. The best landscape of the first gallery is beyond controversy one by an Academician (No. 26, " Oxhey Place, Herta," by F. Goodall, RA.), and is chiefly remarkable for the first-rate drawing of the cattle ; perhaps it should be rather classed as an animal painting, than a landscape. "No. :39, "Richard Savage," by W. Holyoake, is a record of a much-painted incident in the life of Savage,— that of his sleeping under the Piazza of Covent Garden Market. The chief figure is conceived and painted with no little skill, but the accessories and background are hardly adequately ren- dered, and the compassionate market-woman has little life or individuality. At any rate, however, this is a work which means something, and has been thought out, to the best of the artist's ability. No. 41, "Conditional Neutrality," by W. R. Orchardson, RA. Elect, is a portrait of Master Orchardson, in a very bad temper, interesting perhaps to his relations and nurse, but hardly to the outside public, which already understands the artist's clever manipulation of black and yellow, and cordially agrees with the Academy, who have re- warded it by making him an Academician. Poynter's " Zenobia Captive" is an elaborately worked head, interesting only from its thoroughly good painting. No. 46, "The Hour," by J. Pettie, RA., is a tour de force in black and red, and will be more interesting to ladies and milliners than the artistic public. It represents a Spanish lady descending a staircase, presumably to an appointment, holding a mask in her hand. Nos. 54 and 57, by Sealy and Murray respectively, are both clever, painstaking landscapes, and deserve notice ; the latter, if regarded as an autumn study, is exceptionally good, but there is per- haps hardly sufficient interest in it for an Academy picture. Nos. 58 and 231, by J. It. Herbert, HA., are two religious pictures, painted with considerable feeling and technical skill. Of the two, we prefer the latter, a moonlight view at Bethlehem. No. 60, "Cotton-pickers, North Carolina," two figures of negroes "picking cotton in the fiel'," in the twilight, is a modest, clever
piece of work, very delicate in tone. No. 61, "Lieutenant McGregor," by C. Pellegrini, shows curiously how utterly unable a clever caricaturist may be to paint a good likeness. The young lieutenant in question looks as bard and wooden as if he were Andersen's celebrated "Toy Soldier," and the management of the scarlet coat in this painting is anything but successful. No. 64, "Home, Sweet Home," by G. A. Leslie, R.A., is one of the pictures which give us a little hope for English Art,—for Art, we mean, which is essentially English in feeling and conception, as much a product of the soil as pork pies and bitter beer. The sub- ject is half-a-dozen girls, in simple, old-fashioned dresses, singing the well-known refrain, to the accompaniment of the school-room piano. A sentiment which is pure, without being either mawkish, affected, or unreal, pervades the picture, which looks, amongst its surroundings, as a field-flower might look if stuck amongst a bunch of artificial ones,—a witness of freshness, beauty, and reality. No. 70, by Otto Weber, is a good piece of cattle paint- ing spoilt by the colour. No. 65, "Lieutenant-Colonel Loyd- Lindsay," by IV. W. Ouless, is a failure as a picture, but we should imagine, a good portrait of the coarser kind. We see with regret that fashion is already beginning to spoil Mr. Ouless's work, and that it is by no means so thorough as it used to be. No. 68, by Aumonier, is a clever, quiet picture, not perhaps aspiring to any great success, but pleasant to look upon, and unmarred by any straining after effect or sensation. No. 77, "A County ICricket-match," by John Reid, is a vivid character-sketch, painted in a very forcible manner, somewhat similar to that of the French " Impressionist " school. A little more care in the landscape portion of the picture would, we think, have improved the work greatly. In the second gallery, No. 84, by Sir Francis Grant, P.R.A., is a portrait of Master Gull, about to play football, a very typical example of this artist's work. No. 96, by C. E. Perugini, "Girl Reading," is perhaps the most perfectly pleasing single figure in the exhibition ; if there be a fault to be found with the painting, it is that the flesh is almost too purely transparent and smooth for nature, and approaches somewhat to the delicate waxwork in which Mr. Leighton has been modelling human beings of late ; but with this exception, we have nothing but praise to bestow upon Mr. Perugini's work. The warmth of sunlight which shines throughout the picture, the painting of the white dress (which is white, and not grey or yellow, as white dresses in pictures are apt to be), and of the orange-tree behind, are all first rate in their way, and the whole work gladdens the eye as a picture should, and is thoroughly enjoyable. No. 110, "A Summer Sea, Scilly Islands," is a masterly piece of rock-drawing and sea-painting, very hardly tried by being placed next to Brett's vivid picture of the "Cornish Lions" (previously described). Anywhere else, Mr. Naish's "Summer Sea" would have looked as bright as could be wished, but here it is in the position of a duplex lamp, placed by the side of a lime-light, and suffers accordingly. No. 111, "Beat/ Possidentes," by E. Armitage, R.A., is a clever paint- ing, uninteresting as a picture. Long's large picture this year is No. 129, "The Gods and their Makers," Egyptian girls paint- ing the little deities, replicas of which are offered to unwary travellers in Egypt to this day. Little can be said in favour of this picture, except that it shows industry and research. It is lifeless and spiritless, a collection of models and objects of antiquarian interest, and the one touch of nature and feeling in it, the way in which a young negress holds a kitten, can hardly justify so ambitious a composition. Regarded as an illustration of ancient life, it is dully correct; regarded as a picture, it is poor and unsatisfactory, although it is industrious and careful. No. 130, hung above it, a picture of "A Worker in Brass," by R. B. Browning, should be noticed as a good piece of work, especially the metal-painting. Leighton's best work this year is not his largest, but a single figure, called " Nausicaa," the name being singularly inappropriate to the picture. It represents a woman leaning slightly against a marble wall, and is chiefly intended, we suppose, as a study of drapery. As a piece of subdued colouring it is eminently satisfactory, the clear, wan brown of the skin, the olive-green of the scarf, and the graduated white of the robe harmonising completely. No. 167, " Martaba, a Kashmeer Nautch-Girl," is a gorgeous piece of colouring, by Val. C. Prinsep, quite out of his usual style of painting, and in our opinion, quite inferior. No. 172, by G. H. Boughton, is entitled "The Waning of the Honeymoon," and represents newly-wedded couple sitting discontentedly back to back, the one reading, the other drawing figures on the ground with her parasol,---a very good example of the furniture-picture of the genre kind, and one which has a touch of humour which goes far to redeem it from absolute common-placeness. No. 175, "Evening Light," a cattle picture, by H. W. B. Davis, R.A., is the best cattle painting in the exhibition, and is thoroughly clever and satisfactory through- out, the rendering of the light and the landscape being equally fine with that of the cattle,—a realist picture, pretending to no sentiment, but in its way carrying pictorial photography to the very verge of genius, as in the case of Mr. Brett. Nos. 201, 392, 496, and 1,008, are by Britain Riviere, A., the only animal painter in England who has taken the place which was vacated by the death of Landseer. He may be described as a painter of the sentiment of animals, as was Landseer, but there is between their works one great difference. Landseer saw that to make animals interesting to men he must connect them with human feelings, but he fell into the singular mistake that the way to do this was to make them human altogether. Of animal nature, in the majority of Landseer's pictures, there is nothing but the outside. All the raison d'être of the work is in attributing to them the sympathies, passions, and sorrows of men. And it is here that Britain Riviere has surpassed Landseer in his own way, for be has given feeling to his animals, and yet kept them strictly within their own nature. He has not burlesqued man in a dog, but he has connected dogs with men. Never attempting to render in his works human expression in a dog's face, he has nevertheless mastered the points where canine and human nature touch, and painted them with an insight and Comprehension with which no other artist of whom we know can at all compare. In his great picture of "Circe and the En- chanted Swine," exhibited some years since, this was particularly evident. His swine had no human expression, such as Landseer- might and would have. given them, but the piggish affection with which they all crowded to the feet of the sorceress was a wonderful thing to see. This year Riviere has nothing which is in our opinion first-rate. His first picture (201) is an illustration to the "Rubaiyat"- of Omar Khayyam, and represents lions wandering by moonlight amongst the ruined halls of Jamshyd's palace. This is a fine conception, but hardly sufficiently worked out, and little beyond a suggestive sketch. Of his other works, " Sympathy " is a trying piece of colour, and "An Anxious Moment" a somewhat, unsatisfactory subject, very cleverly treated. " Victims " is a-.. definitely unpleasant picture in subject, redeemed by the painting of the dogs. In "Sympathy," also, the painting of the white terrier is exceptionally fine.
Previous page
