ART.
THE GROSVENOR GALLERY.
[LAST NOTICE.]
IN this last notice of the Grosvenor Gallery, the majority of our remarks will be confined to the pictures in the east gallery, the two smaller rooms, and the entrance-hall. But there are two or three compositions in the large, west gallery which must first be briefly mentioned. Mr. Frank Ho11's portrait of John Tenniel is a striking and characteristic piece of work, but it lacks that finer dramatic quality which used to distinguish this artist's paintings ; and it is worth while to observe here that in the portraits which Mr. Roll exhibits this year, both at the Academy and Grosvenor Gallery, there is to be traced a distinct decrease of refinement, and a very marked increase of conventionalism. The work is as strong as of old, but not nearly so individual; and its individuality, as we have often pointed out, made most of its charm, for its method was in many ways an abominable one, consist- ing as it did of an almost total abnegation of local colour, and an excessively exaggerated use of light and shade. But in his flashy chiaroscuro, Mr. Roll's mind worked intelligently and sympathetically. He gave us lime-light portraits, it is true, but his flashes of the lantern were accompanied by flashes of insight ; and if in the depth of his shadow and the brightness of his lights many minor details of form and feature vanished, there was sufficient left to give us a clear interpretation of the sitter's personality. But now he is halting between two stools ; he has, apparently, been so overwhelmed with work, that he cannot find time to feel, as well as to paint ; and nearly every one of his portraits exhibited this year have upon them that stamp of mechanical similarity which, desirable as it may be in a rifle or a billiard-ball, is almost wholly destructive to a work of Art. It is worth while to enlarge upon this point a little, for Mr. Roll is one of the finest portrait-painters in England, and one whom we can ill afford to let fall from his high estate. As we have been of the number of those who, from his earliest efforts in this line, recognised his powers and praised his ability, we are in some sort entitled to say now, at a time of almost universal panegyric, that he is degrading his genius to the level of common-place. In another two years, if his work continues to decrease in quality as it has done for the last two years, he will be simply a less accurate and second-rate Ouless. It is bad enough for a painter who has a distinct power of touching our sympathies to confine himself to the reproduction of any Tom, Dick, and Harry who will pay for a portrait ; but it is far worse that he should get into a conven- tional manner of turning out Toms, Dicks, and Harries by the dozen. This is the Nemesis of portrait-painting for an artist,— that it is almost inevitably bound to result in the destruction of the sympathy which is as the very life-blood of his heart. For an artist's sympathy is by its very nature of a somewhat exclusive, personal kind, and destroying its personality destroys its power ; and its personality must be destroyed if it is allowed no opportunity of asserting itself in work of a different character. So long as Mr. Roll made all his deans, doctors, and divines look equally dramatic and disreputable, his work, though he frequently failed io giving a true interpretation of his sitter, always succeeded in giving a true interpretation of its artist, and so was always of real power and real value ; but now that he is too hniried, or too weary to think or feel much beyond how soon he can paint this sitter, and get on to another, his portraits have become as dull as they were previously dramatic, and are as like one another as sausages that are turned out of a machine. One cannot blame the artist, for the public, which would have left him to starve when he put his soul into his work, now floods him with commissions for ten years because he is the fashion ; but long ere the ten years comes to an end, the public, like the unwise old woman in Tennyson's poem, will have killed its goose with the golden eggs, and there will be no more golden eggs. We will not attempt to criticise or to estimate the worth of Mr. Whistler's two contributions, but will only say that his admirers will find two good examples of this painter's work in the west gallery.
Mr. John Collier's picture of " Pharaoh's Handmaidens" deserves notice, as a piece of singularly vivid realistic work. It is not quite easy to see what intention the artist has had in painting it, for it can hardly be called a subject-picture, and the three naked, brown girls are not specially beautiful or inter-
eating ; but, like all Mr. Collier's work, it is well painted, an& has a certain sincerity of speech, which is, perhaps, almost too marked for the artistic merit of the picture. Very certainly there is no mystery here, nor does the artist probably find anything mysterious in any subject which his pencil depicts. He is per- haps to be likened, in portrait and subject-painting, to Mr.. Brett in landscape ; he sees very clearly, very accurately, and very minutely ; he does not see very far or very much, and this is because he cannot believe that there is anything which he does not see.
Mr. Napier Hemy's "Old Putney Bridge in 1882" is a fine, vivid, and faithful study of the most picturesque bridge over the Thames; it is now either pulled down, or in process of being so. Mr. Hemy is one of those artists whom the public have always treated with a neglect which, though somewhat uncalled for, is easily explicable. There is an element of strangeness in his- work which is apt to affront the ordinary picture-buyer, who likes nothing that he cannot understand; and this strangeness- of Mr. Hemy's is of neither a sentimental nor a sympathetic kind, it is more an intellectual than an emotional quality ; one almost needs a special mental key to comprehend his paint- ings, and the artist, besides, is one of those who utterly- disdain to follow in one narrow track of subject. He paints now devotional processions in an old French town, now a fishing-boat coming into harbour after the bad weather, now- " Old Putney Bridge ;" and this capriciousness, for such it seems to many people, even where it does not offend is apt to cause the picture-buyer, who is always something of a specialist, to- pass the work by. More and more, year by year, it is noticable- how success in art is gained by concentration rather than diffuseness, by the cultivation of some little tiny grass-plot of feeling or incident, rather than a wide outlook over the wider thoughts and passions of mankind. Like the dropping of per- petual water, the artist who hammers away sufficiently long at a tree, a cloud, a nose, or a petticoat, will end by securing his public, and all who love specially trees, noses, clouds, or petti- coats, will go to him for their artistic sustenance.
Mr. J. R. Reid's picture of " The Yarn," like most of his other works this year, shows increased power and skill. The- picture suffers a little from a defective rendering of the values- in foreground and distance, the near and distant objects both appearing to be painted in the same plane. Compare the broken pitcher, which is the nearest thing in the foreground, with the- group of figures behind it and the house in the extreme distance, and it will be seen how all three objects or groups of objects- are treated in exactly the same manner, and have an exactly- equal value. Indeed, Mr. Reid occasionally loses sight so en- tirely of the distinction between distance and proximity as to give more detail to the objects which are farther away ; for instance, the house at the end of the street in this picture shows more details than the wall, which stands half a mile or so nearer to- the spectator; for the rest, this is a very pleasant and faithful picture of the realistic school, and has that sort of homely, quiet humour about its figures which Mr. Reid excels in depicting.
Mr. David Murray's "Haymaking in the Scotch Fens" is e- very fine example of impressionist art ; a more vigorous attempt to tackle a very splendid effect of stormy sunlight we have rarely seen, and the whole picture is full of carefully-observed, truth ; look especially at the lighting of the figures, the reflected gleams in the water, and the mingled gloom and sun- shine which shadow and brighten the marsh. Mr. Howard Campion has a good landscape here, entitled, " Midwinter, Brit- tany," which deserves a word of notice for its originality ofi treatment ; as does the decorative frieze of boys and dolphins designed by Mr. W. E. F. Britten for the Earl of Leconfield. Signor Costa sends only small landscapes to this Gallery, but his work, even on so small a scale, is intensely interesting, and, despite its minuteness and delicacy, possesses a breadth or manner which might teach many of our painters a much-needed lesson ; still more might they learn of the delicate iridescence with which Mr. Costa paints his foliage, his meadows, and his flowers. Mrs. Stuart Wortley's " Partridge Shooting " is a marvellously vivid piece of landscape-painting, executed with a sort of slapdash pre-Raphaelitism which would be insolent, were it not so accurate; it is not a pleasant picture, for it is at once- both hard in effect and exaggerated in colour, and it lacks all touch of sympathy for Nature, but it is uncommonly well painted and carefully drawn, and the attitudes of the sportsmen are all absolutely right —the sort of work, we imagine, which. it would pay a sporting publisher to reproduce in chromo- lithography.
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