ART.
THE OLD AND NEW SALONS.—I.
To those who study what may be called the politics of picture exhibitions, the present season in Paris, the capital of painting, is one of critical interest. As opposed to our Academy, whose constitution is oligarchic, the Salon is, roughly speaking, democratic,—that is to say, the juries that select and hang pictures and award honours are elected by the votes of the whole body of exhibitors. This is no doubt the fairest system yet devised; but in Paris it seems to have run the risk of reverting to the oligarchic type,—for this reason, that certain painters are also popular teachers, and command in their own atelier votes enough to return them to office with undue frequency. This is one alleged reason for the split that has taken place this year, and, whether borne out by the facts or not, it is a possible danger. Anyway, dissatisfaction with the actual control of the Salon and its awards came to a head with the Exhibition of last year ; and this spring a number of the younger and more vigorous artists, but headed by the veteran Meissonier, have seceded, have opened a rival exhibi- tion, and have abolished in it the system of medals and men- tions in vogue at the Salon. A battle of this kind is, of course, fought on much more equal terms where it is a conflict of one band of artists against another, not of outsiders against officials, as in our revolts and combinations against the Academy. In Paris, the State remains neutral, or rather, helps both parties by giving them houseroom ; the spacious galleries of last year's Exhibition are handed over to the seceders. The immediate result is a triumph for these last. It is forcibly brought home to one afresh how few, after all, are the first-rate talents in even the largest and most lively of schools of art, and it is surely beyond denial that the life of the French school of painting has gone over to the Champ de Mars. There remain the veterans and the recruits of
academic style ; the dealers in motives that were once de- spised and rejected, but are now popular in a cheaper and second-hand edition; and a certain number of respectable but hardly first-rate painters. The quantity of paintings is, un- happily, as great as ever; the gaps have been filled up with anything that came to hand, and the visitor paddles through a boundless swamp of mediocrity, startled now and then by glimpses of the seoond-rate. The new exhibition, on the other hand, is limited and well hung ; there are spaces between the frames, and each man's works are grouped together. But in fairness it should be added that some of the beat men send to the new exhibition as many as from six to ten works, and this by the rules of the Salon, where no one may send more than two, would be impossible. In a second article we shall give some account of the new exhibition; this week we confine ourselves to the old.
To contemplate a second-rate exhibition is to be driven back on secondary considerations. To talk about the politics, the mechanism of the thing, is in itself a symptom of a wandering mind. Another is to find oneself engaged in the kindly- seeming but delusive search for the "good points" in pictures that the phrase itself condemns, or keen about the classifying of artists into schools. The most deadly, perhaps, is to find oneself reduced to being moral about the subjects, or anxious about the size of canvases. We proceed to exemplify these tendencies.
Let us take the familiar names first. The best of these represent the severe discipline of drawing that is in itself a fine tradition of the French school; but to have that, and that only, is to have the merits of the prize schoolboy. Bouguereau, for instance. He has a picture called Les Saintes Femmes au Tom,beau. If the best drawing of the drawing-school, and the beat composition of the drawing-master, without design, colour, life, feeling, were fine art, this would be very fine. It is accomplished, wonderful, decent, and altogether as pleasing as sand in the eyes. In another canvas, Petites Mendiantes, this academic art changes its Biblical for its sentimental pro- perties, and is, if anything, more tiresome. Lefevre, again. On the strength of a pasteboard background, he styles his nude figure Lady Godiva, and . . . the legs are nicely drawn and modelled. Bonnat, a forcible draughtsman to begin with, and with an eye for character, has come to paint portraits with such an exaggeration of his original defects and tricks, that the convention cracks. It might be excusable if the painter were reduced to smearing on his colour with the end of a blunt stick. The colour always was abominable. Henner sends two decompositions in his fashionable manner. His green and burnt sienna are, if anything, more pronounced. Benjamin- Constant just misses it somehow, with his Beethoven playing the " Moonlight Sonata."
The veteran of another tradition, that of landscape and the open air, Francais, has this year won the medaille d'honneur. It is the first time it has been given for landscape, and it is given to the painter's age and record, rather than to his pictures of this year. Of Dupre, there is the whitest of white cows, and a pleasant dusty-green landscape; Harpignies is not at his best, and Pelouse tends to paperiness in his skies, and to reminiscence rather than to study.
In French art, ceilings are still thought the fitting place for cunningly foreshortened allegories, and they are doubtless the fittest. The hardened acrobat may gloat over Commerce Bringing Peace and Abundance to the Arts and to Industry, or, as it might be, Industry Bringing Peace to the Arts and Abundance to Commerce, and other wanton devices of the kind ; for a mere ordinary neck and imagination, it is all too high. The largest thing of the kind in this year's Salon is Munkacsy's Plafoncl pour is Music de rHistoire de l'Art a Vienne—Allegorie de la Renaissance Italienne. As perspective science, it is wonderful enough; as art, it is thoroughly vulgar. Ceilings apart, the prospect of commissions for decorative work has a great influence in increasing the size of French pictures. In these huge canvases, one of two things happens. Either an attempt is made at realism on a huge scale, with a full compass of light and colour, which results in dullness or disaster or panorama; or a frank convention is adopted, as by Puvis de Chavannes. His particular convention of light purples and browns is a good deal in vogue, and one of his disciples, P. Lagarde, has a somewhat fascinating composition here called Le Blesse. It represents a wounded man sup- ported on the back of a donkey by a monk. It is a woodland road at evening, in winter-time, and they make for a lighted cottage. The colours and textures are of the tapestry order, but they are used with subtle feeling and effect. The finest landscape in the exhibition, again, is almost• colourless. It is a study of the Loire, by M. le Liepvre, with nobility of design in its great poplar-trunks and stretch of river. The landscape by F. J. Quignon, La Moisson, which wins a medal, suffers from its bigness in another way. The dazzle of the cornfield and the blackness of the trees are well rendered, but there is not study enough of the forms for work on this scale. The foreground is flecked by meaningless touches that look as if they had been magnified from a little sketch. Other landscapes that deserve mention are Les Chardon, Champagne, by A. Guery, a great mass of thistle- down in the foreground, and haystacks behind ; a Dutch railway-embankment by P. J. C. Gabriel (II Vient de Loin : vue prise des environs de la Hays) ; horses and bracken by A. Bandit (Une Lands clans le Midoe) ; and the work of E. Clary, E. C. Yon, L. C. Massaux, Didier-Pouget, C. L. Tragardh, L. Tauzin, A. Vauthier, D. F. Boyden, and G. Cluzeret. About a great deal of this landscape one feels that the motives of older masters linger, and are reproduced and amplified, with here a little and there a little, or sometimes a great deal more of Nature, but not yet a new motive or master. Here, one says, is another sealing-wax sun or moon and dead-green country; or, there is a talented painter looking for Daubignys or Rousseaus, and painting them a little different and a good deal larger. The class comes first and the individual second.
In dramatic painting, the most interesting picture is A. P- M. de Richemont's illustration of Zola's Le Revs. From the moment chosen, the meeting of the lovers in the little white room of Angelique, there is a combination for the artist of motives that modern painting is fond of,—the light of dawn contending with lamplight, the figure of the girl dark against the window, the discrimination of the various blancheurs de la chambre that the writer insists upon. All this is treated with a good deal of success ; and what is more, there is beauty and expression in the two heads and the action of the figures. Another good study of lights—red firelight and lamplight this time—and of character too, is the Veillee of V. Maree,— an old woman telling stories to a child by the fire. Another- good study is Dana la Fumee, by E. M. Liebert,—an old man, with his back to a window, smoking.
It would take too long to enumerate the names of the fairly- good portrait-painters, but among the less familiar, Paul Pee? and Julia Marest deserve mention; and it may be said generally that the most pleasing work often takes the shape of those- sketches of friends made as gifts from the artist and inscribed accordingly, that are so common in French exhibitions. A young Scotch artist, J. Guthrie, sends a portrait of a lady that is one of the most interesting in the intention of its colour_ Butthe painting of the face is less successful than that of the- dress.
It is consoling to observe how in the general press of dull- ness, real artistic distinction tells. The Salon contains, among its three thousand canvases, two little night-pieces by Whistler. They judge the huge fruitless labour round them so quietly and so cruelly ! For the work in them is of the slightest possible,—very little painting, but a great deal of perception. To those who judge art by the evidences of industry it has to show, it must always seem absurd to rank work like this so high. But an artist is an artist not by virtue of labour, but of vision ; and when all his life is an experiment in seeing Nature as pictures, he may be able to render his per- ception by very slight and simple means.
In the matter of sculpture, things are different. Most of the sculptors are faithful to the old exhibition, and in the huge court of the Salon there is a great deal of interesting work,, and one or two admirable things. Falguiere, author of the Diana of some years back, sends a Femme au Paon that might serve as a companion figure of Juno. There is something very proud and fine about her. But perhaps the most beautiful figure is that of an Eastern girl, designed by E. L. Barrias for the tomb of Gnillaumet, the painter of Oriental scenes. She sits cross-legged at the head of the gravestone, with a flower raised in one hand about to drop on the medallion of the painter ; the action is lovely, and the tenderness of modelling (in wax for bronze) in the face and throughout is exquisite. It would take too long to describe the many graceful little works that might be originals of Greek Anthology epigrams, and others of a more heroic mould ; but one figure more must be mentioned for its sculpturesque qualities, and also for itA restraint and concentration in the expression of a feeling that is apt to bring on all the turbulence and flutter of Bellona. It is by the Comte d'Astanieres, and represents a French boy- conscript. Round the pedestal is Dido's imprecation for legend, Exoriare aliquis nostril ex ossibus ultor.
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