ART.
SOME AUTUMN PICTURE GALLERIES.
WE do not intend in this notice to attempt any adequate review of the contents of the Galleries which we mention, but only to speak here and there about any pictures which are specially noteworthy, either from their merit, their treatment, or their authorship. And first, Mr. McLean's Haymarket Gallery, in which, at the end of the room, we find three works by Millais. All three are the same size; we had nearly said all three represent the same subject. But this would be scarcely accurate ; for though there is nothing in each save the single figure of a child, though that child is in each case a girl with rosy cheeks and bright eyes and picturesque costume, yet in one case she sits upon a bank—a very evident " property " bank it is—of flowery seaweed, and in another upon a mass of " pro- perty " snow, and in the third upon a bank of gravel, with limp little tufts of grass and scattered stones, and a large red
• " To the majority, the effect of last Monday's performanoe was, doubtless, that of pure cacophony, excepting when the orchestra entered with the 'Dresden Amen,' the only phrase haring the least resemblance to an air."— Standard, November 12th, 1885.
spider spinning its way towards her. The spider does duty for the subject of one—" Little Miss Muffet," of course; a broken bottle and a scrap of paper suggest the title of another, "A Message from the Sea ;" while behind the back of the third is a bunch of mistletoe, from which the picture is named, "The Mistletoe Gatherer." It is rather late in the day, perhaps, to regret once more the absence of motive, the entire surrender of all attempt at any high pictorial aim which these last works. of Mr. Millais show. They are at least absolutely fitting for the purpose for which, we may say, with perfect security, they were produced,—purposes of quick sale, instant popularity, and facile reproduction. Colour-plates for the Graphic or the Illus- trated London News there they hang, the ultimate result of the work of the best painter in England, after thirty years of increas- ing fame. It is perhaps only painful to remember that there was a day, when the artist—who has here painted snow which looks like wool, and seaweed which looks like oakum, and children who look like nothing in the world but what they are, models dressed up for the occasion—could paint every flower, and weed,. and tree, with the perfection of the " Ophelia," could touch the feelings of the least sentimental amongst us, with the "Vale of Rest" or the" Huguenots," or could give us such simple pictures of English life as the illustrations to" Orley Farm" and" Framley Parsonage." Here is a specimen of what Art patronage and fashion do in this nineteenth century of ours for the best of our painters—grinding-out first the heart, then the intellect, and lastly even the energy of the band, till it becomes a question of how with the least expenditure of brain and labour, to fill a canvas which will look well when reproduced behind a Strand shop-window.
By the irony of fate, however, an irony which is in this in- stance very delicious to us, Mr. Millais has this year been surpassed in his own special line by another member of the Academy. Mr. P. R. Morris is a man wise in his generation, and discovering, at least so we suppose, some years ago the popularity of Mr. Millais's child-pictures, and the fact that it- rested mainly upon their easy comprehensibility and super- ficial prettiness, resolved to out-Herod Herod, or rather perhaps to out-Markham Mrs. Markham. For two or three years he has been producing babies of gigantic size and brightest colour- ing, whose cheeks are rounder, whose eyes are bluer, whose bonnets are bigger, and whose frocks are smarter than any babies' ever yet seen in this smoky London. Where on earth they come from when they are not being painted, God and the dressmaker alone know ; but anyhow, here they are in shoals, tumbling over one another, pressing one soft cheek to another soft cheek in ecstasies of infantile affection, or sitting with mildly goggling eyes in full lustre of their babyhood, staring straight out of the picture. Of course, they were not to be resisted. The manager of the Graphic opened his arms, the proprietor of the Illustrated London News danced with joy ; out came the- colour-printers, and out came the double plates, and now from one end of England to another is heard this new "Cry of the Children," free by post for one shilling and twopence-halfpenny, warranted to vex no one's mind, to excite no one's emotion._ So, as we said before, this Christmas Mr. Millais has been beaten at his own game, and it is hard to see what is left for him, unless he takes to infants in long clothes, accompanied by the monthly nurse.
Let us look at some different Art to this. Mr. Wallace's- French Gallery is one of the oldest exhibitions in which foreign pictures have habitually found a place. It suffers from the- usual defect of picture-dealers' galleries, many of the works having been seen before, and the whole collection being of a somewhat low average, redeemed here and there by a few pictures put in to attract the public.
We do not say this with any object of depreciating the Gallery ; it is simply a necessity of the case. This year the- attraction is found in three large works by Carl Heffner, all. representing Italian scenes, two of them being on, or in the vicinity of, the Campagna. In some ways these are excessively fine landscapes, though Mr. Heffner's painting has a strange power of reducing the local colour of any scene into a system of very delicate browns and greys. And in the same way that, he treats colour, he to a certain extent treats form, not so. much generalising it upon any given plan, or according to any- preconceived notion, but slurring it over and endeavouring to make his picture do without it. Especially is this the case with_ the details of his foreground; and it occasions frequently a feel- ing that the interest of the painting is entirely in the middle
distance. We look over the foreground without noticing it, much as we look over the heads of the orchestra, at the play on the stage beyond. This defect would render his painting almost intolerable, were it not for his exquisitely keen perception of what Mr. Seymour Haden would call" the atmospheric planes." In our experience, there is no painter, living or dead, who has Tendered great distances of aerial space with such perfection as Mr. Heffner. In this, the work may be said with truth to be unsurpassable; and it is the possession of this quality which renders it delightful. It is not great landscape art, because it has no sense of the relation of the landscape to the humanity which inhabits it, no reverence for its myriad beauties of colour and delicacies of form, no strong sympathy even with special kinds of places. But if we may use such an expression as "atmospheric landscape," then we may call this painting great -of that kind. It seeks to do a special thing, and it succeeds in doing that thing better than any one has ever done it before ; the painter's place is one which only he himself could fill.
There is another picture in this Gallery of Mr. Wallace's which is remarkable for its truth of atmosphere. It is a scene in an English fishing-village, with some girls hanging out clothes in front of a row of cottages, behind which stretches a sunny sea. Mr. Bartlett is an accomplished painter; he evi- dently, so to speak, "knows every trick of the trade ;" he has learnt his business thoroughly, and executes it perhaps with a trifle too much professional dexterity. It may be a condemna- tion to say that we cannot imagine an unfinished work by this artist. Bat with this hint of drawback, we have nothing but praise for the character of the work. It is almost the only painting we know which combines the French truth of value, with a sturdy attempt to express that truth in terms of sunlight rather than shadow. And it makes, too, a strong effort at painting the colour as well as the tone of Nature, and in draw- ing, it grapples firmly with all the matters of which the picture treats. Nothing is scamped, nothing neglected ; the picture is finished from end to end, honestly, as well as the artist knows how to do it.
Mr. Arthur Tooth's Gallery shows, on the whole, a better 'collection than that of Mr. Me'Lean, though it is one of a very similar character, the great bulk of the pictures being small, highly-coloured specimens of the Italian, Spanish, and French Schools. The chief exception, a remarkable one, is a very large composition, by M. Lon Lhermitte, called -"La Moisson," representing some peasants reaping in a most intensely realistic manner. The work is well, if some- what coarsely drawn, and in perfect tone throughout; but the ugliness conveyed by the whole composition is as intense as its ability. The chief figure in the composition is a man who stands in the centre of the picture, resting one arm upon his scythe, while with the other he wipes the sweat from his fore- head. The two other figures are women, gaunt and ill-favoured; and the surrounding cornfield is of a pale ipecacuanha-lozenge colour. The question inevitably forced upon one's attention by such a picture is for what purpose it was designed; it is scarcely possible to conceive any human being caring to live with so
gigantic a realisation of an ugly incident. It appears to us that realism of this kind, which deliberately selects the offensive, or the uninteresting, can only be justified in cases where, as in the pictures of Francois Millet, the artist has been able to impart something of an epic quality to the prosaic scene he selected. In any case, these large pictures -of M. Lhermitte—and he has been painting them with little variation for several years—just lack that very quality which made Millet's pictures interesting. They do not appear to be simply veracious, but wilfully so. Selection has been -exercised, not to obtain, but to get rid of, the beautiful. It is notable that a small picture by this artist in the same Gallery, called "Mid-day Rest," representing another phase of the same subject, has much of that attractiveness which the larger picture lacks, simply because in it the artist has been content to give some grace of composition to his incident, and to select an inci- dent which is in itself a pictorial one. What it is, however, that both pictures lack, may be seen easily enough by comparing them with the little figure-sketch by Israels, in the same Gallery, of a girl sitting by the sea-shore. For the upshot of the whole matter is, that an artist is not justified, artistically speaking, in painting what are ordinarily called prosaic subjects, unless he sees in those subjects, some beauty and some poetry.
For an antidote to all this French and Italian facility, which ends in nothing pleasurable, it is a relief to get into the little back-room of the "Pine Arts Society," and find there half-a- dozen sketches by Walker, and the same number by Piuwell, and an early drawing by Mr. Burne Jones of the " Annuncia- tion." George Pinwell was an artist whose method would have driven a Frenchman mad, indeed, he never could be said to the end of his life to have had any method at all. He slobbered his whole picture over with masses of body-colour, of every con- ceivable tint, in the roughest possible manner, and on this chaos of hues, he worked piece by piece with the greatest delicacy, till at last the whole composition grew into perfect colour and most exquisite delicacy. His picture of "The Last Load," in this exhibition, has almost the iridescence of a shell, and coming to it from the "La lloisson "of M. Lhermitte, gives us much the same impression, as it does to see a golden sunset shining above the mud of Gower Street.
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