THE ARTS.
ROYAL ACADEMY : THE LANDSCAPES.
THE most prosaical of pictures must be a design conceived in the artist's mind; the most faithful to nature must be something different from mere imitation. If you hold a looking-glass to catch a reflex of the view, the effect of that framed prospect on the mind is different from what is pro- duced by a painting; and is inferior to it, not only because you miss the skill which aids the moral effect of the elaborated workmanship, but for reasons still more direct. The mirror dues but repeat the shifting scene; the picture arrests it, for fuller and deeper contemplation. The incessantly shifting traits of nature are too transient even for the photograph—they pass and leave only a blur to mark their passage: the eye of the painter catches them, and his faithful hand reproduces them after they are gone for ever. For you he repeals the law of ceaseless change, and reverses it. Hs does more. The scene before you is too complex and intricate for your comprehension, yet you cannot divorce from its context the traits upon which you desire to dwell; thoroughly to take in that which excites your desire to absorb it, you need some intermediate process of assimilation: that office the painter performs; in the picture the scene for which you crave is half-humanized, for the better nourishment of your sense. The artist, in all arts, is the bee gathering the sweet from the flowers around you in such shape that it can be digested and become part of yourself. There is nature, and your contemplation of nature; but art is a third term, by which nature is sanctified to human use.
In this office, different painters cull with different genius, each after his kind. Each selects for retention that aspect of nature which most accords with his own faculties. In the process, he necessarily imparts to honey that he hives the peculiar flavour of his own genius: you see nature through a Cooper medium or a Creswick medium; but still it is nature that you see. If, by some defective vitality in that process of semi-organization, the painter gives you, not elements derived from nature, but something alien or contradictory to nature, the honey is poisoned, and you cannot appropriate it; you dislike it, and cannot be nourished by it. Styles may differ, but not ons must contradict nature. The painter must select the traits which he will retain, but he must introduce nothing which is dis- cordant or adverse to fact.
The landscapes in the exhibition of the Royal Academy this year will very happily illustrate our meaning. Each man is powerful ac- cording to the completeness with which he can seize and reproduce some trait of nature. Stanfield is a matter-of-fact designer ; sub- stance is the main object of his design: the characters of form, especially of the more solid forms—the gradations of perspective in line and force of tint—are very distinct to his perception, and he follows what he sees. Hence the perfect clearness of his cabinet scene-painting: you have " Lu- gano," " Lego Maggiore" and its mansions, " Mori," its " clear-shown tower and bay," as if they were before you. The passing cloud, the ambient air, the burning sun for the sake of sun, are not so distinctly impressed upon you; they were not the subjects present to the artist's awakened sense: that subject was the mise en scene, and the mise en scene you have—not as you would have glanced upon it and departed, changing for ever and un- seen again by your wandering eye, but fixed for ever on the canvass, fixed for slow contemplation and stored at home. Redgrave goes into the quiet wood; he sees the branches interlaced over him; the leaves dapple the vault of shade and ring the changes on sunny light and sombre dark; the grasses rear their slender spears, the flowers laughing between—" some very red, and some a glad light green"; the unmoved waters repeat the living picture: his heart is filled with pleasure and love—he notes the growing grasses one by one, and he blesses theta for their beauty and their happiness: he retires to his studio, and from that quiet abode he reproduces to you that solitary pool, those checkering leaves, those spiky grasses, "lush and strong," that glassy pool, where nature, Narcissus-like, seems in love with its own beauty. Your eye would weary with trying to collect the traits of the Deane, your step could not stay there for ever: but here it is, for ever. More practice will enable Redgrave to use with greater effect that chiaroscuro which an excellent temperance makes him use so sparingly—will enable him to give those
dashes of blue sky, with less positive opaqueness, though not with less brightness. But his design is admirably conceived and reproduced.
Creswick watches the fitful shadows of the moving boughs, the waving grass, the passing clouds, over the broken ground: he sees the inorganic movements of nature,-he sees faster than you can; but he holds them while you look. " Passing Showers" is one of the happiest samples of his work.
Lee catches many simpler characteristics of English scenery; but in- clines to an inorganic sameness of tint and surface: his " Mill on the River Ogwen" tends to a mechanical structure like that of some Dutch and Ita- lian pictures which we have seen, half made of painted wood. It is when he is associated with Sidney Cooper that Lee thoroughly escapes from that weakness. The sun, the tranquil fervour of animal life in oxen and sheep, the physical sense of broken ground and shifting atmo- sphere, strongly impress the keen and vigorous sense of Cooper, and are re- produced by him with power because his keen observance is followed by a modest and faithful hand. " Clearing off at Sunset " and " The Rising Mist" are full of this transmitted life.
Two painters of considerable power have run into caricature by over- passing the modesty of nature. Danby's " Morning on the banks of the Zurich Lake " is one of the most rational pictures from his hand that we have seen fqr some years; but in the effort to attain stillness and depth, the painter has run into beardlike smoothness and opacity. The contrasts of nature are not copied but travestied. The great broad shadow made by the trees on the right is dense and corporeal; go close to it, and you find that, to make a contrast with his glowing lights, the artist has built it up of cold opaque pigments-it is a board, and looks nothing else. Correct it by Turner's " Wreck Buoy." In this sea-piece a broad shadow lies upon the middle distance; seen across the room, the view is sombre in the extreme; approach, and the shadow expands, as it would in nature, into a gentle and transparent twilight: it is a cloud shadow, not a board. But in aiming at the undefined, Turner has lost his power of painting the defined: he "dashes" at a rainbow, and leaves nothing but a splash of washy pigment, visible as pigment across the large room; and the faultless arc is shaped no better than the vault of an ill-built wine-cellar. A lesson on two of painting's moral virtues, modesty and patience.
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