ART.
THE ROYAL INSTITUTE AND THE PAINTER
SOMEWHERE in the scriptures of William Blake there is a vicious phrase about Albion being given over to strong Feminine Delusions. The practice of water-colour in Albion is very grievously vexed by Feminine Delusions, and the Royal Institute makes a pride of exposing yearly in its three large galleries the consequences of that affliction. This is not to say that all the deluded are women, though many of them actually are. It is to assert that hardly anywhere on those walls are to be found the more masculine virtues of largeness and strength, whether in the relating of forms or of colours or of emotions ; the qualities of dignity and of tranquillity, of controlling, adjusting, excluding, summoning, marshalling thought, are absent indeed; the conception that in pictorial addition two and two should make not four, but one; that the beauty of a picture is a give-and-take among its parts; and that more is given when much is taken away;—all that is denied. For the Feminine Delusion in
decoration (it is responsible for most "decoration "), is to think that the greater the number of pretty things collected together, the prettier the general effect ;—its ideal is a close-packed assortment of nicknacks. This idea may be more clearly disclosed in the arranging of what they call an "over-mantel," than in the treatment of a land- scape; but the idea is the same. A slice of nature is taken by some haphazard (because the window commands it —there is a sheltered seat from which it may be seen— some one else has painted it—no one else has painted it—and so forth), and the objects included in the slab are picked out and dusted and stuck in with that pretty, birdlike way of adding twigs and moss to a neat that may make a home homely, but does not make a scene pictorial. And if the action of the eye upon this series of objects within the frame is of the kind that singles e. eh one and fastens it like a little separate ornament in its spot, the emotion that the collection reveals is as trivial,—as simple-additional. It is only roused from the mood of tidy enumeration, tedious sorting and docketing, by little starts at this and that. Or, if one feeling animates the whole, it is the despicable emotion of a half-suppressed giggle or a determined sob. Neat labour is of course redundant, of the kind that a little thought would have spared or made impossible. Still-life without grouping, scale, or balance, and flayed of the tender integu- ment of light and air, displays in the baldest terms this limitation to a trashy view of things; but hills and clouds and people are dealt with on the same level of understand- ing and feeling. Let there be no mistake. It is not a ques- tion of technique. It is a question of feeling and seeing. Good technique follows upon these. No sort of technical training would convert the majority of exhibitors here into anything essentially different, —a trivial eye is a trivial eye.
It would answer no purpose to name examples of these defects. Another defect does deserve naming,—viz., the flashy assumption of a strong manner. Mr. Dudley Hardy, for example, has without doubt the power of taking the stage, of hitting the eye. But the style of which he parodies the imitation is itself too remote from truth to allow of cheapen- ing. And one would a thousand times rather have the nice and pretty view of things than this loud and false epigram at their expense.
It is difficult amid so much that is irritating to allow for the men who display certain good qualities. Sir James Linton is master of a certain kind of drawing. It is a hard and iron kind ; but the lines are beaten out and clamped in their places with an idea of where lines should run. The Celia is well designed and firmly stated. It is, I believe, one of the stereotypes of criticism to speak of Sir James's fine colour, or "learned colour" perhaps is the mysterious term. Sir James's tinting is obtained at enormous expense of toil, but it is quite rudi- mentary; there is none of the play or gradation of colour that would justify the toil. He would secure this amount of truth of colour and a fresher and pleasanter effect into the bargain, if he executed his drawing with its tones in monochrome, and washed a brownish yellow over the flesh, a slate over the back- ground, and so on. He is simply one of the numerous black- and-white draughtsmen who, for unknown reasons, and with great pains, use water-colours. Some of them are frank in their employment of brown, and therefore have smaller pains, like Mr. Wimperis and Mr. Orrock ; others, by the use of brilliant tints, assert that it is not in brown they paint,— vainly, for it is brown more than ever.
After all this disagreeable faultfinding, let me point to an example of something rightly seen and rightly fitted to the water-colour medium. It is a little sketch by Mr. Harry Hine called White Chrysanthemums. It is not equally good throughout. The chairs in the foreground take awkward places and importance, and their red cushions are not quite in tune. But the picture is beyond, when the light striking through a window from the side drowns a mass of white blossoms in its passage, finds the wall, glances from a picture- frame there, and filters down over the seated figure of a woman. The painter follows the guidance of his light, which has arranged for him a beautiful effect. He teases nothing out of its due prominence, but allows the light to swell into its big note on the flowers and to lessen away upon the figure. Therefore, instead of a doll beside the diagram of a bush, we have the moving account of that story of light. Seeing in a broad way, the painter insensibly found his natural technique; he recognised in the limpid flow and flushing of his water-colour something akin to the beautiful nature of light, the main fact of its life that a mossy stipple will never give.
Among other names deserving praise are the familiar ones of the late H. G. Hine, and Mr. Aumonier, who comes nearer being a great artist than any one in the galleries ; and for one quality or another, Messrs: Claude Hayes, Fulleylove, Barratt, Wetherbee. Mr. E. J. Gregory displays his wonder- ful nicety of drawing and some tenderness of apprehension in the picture of a small child in a wheatfield. But the arrangement and colour are too piecemeal and photographic.
The exhibition of the Painter-Etchers is much more satisfactory. It is small and fairly select. Block after block of work can be looked at with pleasure, and one or two blocks with extreme pleasure. The Society has its foibles, and among them a deference for eminent R.A.'s who are not eminent etchers; but this form of snobbery has not gone far to rot it yet. First on entrance comes Mr. D. Y. Cameron, with good work in the school of Meryon.and Seymour Haden. Then Mr. Holroyd, strengthening every year since he began in the school of Legros. Then some pleasant architecture by Mr. C. J. Watson ; dry-points and mezzotints by Mr. Frank Short; aquatints by Mr. Urwick, with a pleasing old-world air. Then the Claypits of Sir J. C. Robinson, the Work on the Beach, Pine-Trees, Apple-Tree, and Dawn of Colonel Goff. Then Mr. William Strang. He stands alone in the exhibition, his master excepted, for portraiture in precise line, and his work of this year strikes one as the best he has done yet. His Slaughterhouse and Hangman's Daughter have a vigorous swing of composition, and the figure crushed under a cross is a startling invention. Mr. Oliver Hall is another man who has bettered his work. A Pastoral deserves to be named with etchings by Sir Seymour Haden. Mr. F. V. Burridge is a new-comer in the same field. Messrs. Charlton and Monk, Wilfred Thompson and George Gasecyne, are also interesting. But nothing gives so lofty a note to the exhibition as the block of Professor Legros' landscapes and inventions, struck through as they are with a solemn poetry that expresses itself in the forma of land and tree as much as in the forms of men. By the touchstone of such a spirit, in its single- mindedness, the =distracted weight of its utterance, its con- tempt for superficial prettiness and flashy appeal, the walls of the Institute stand condemned, and those of the Painter-
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