30 APRIL 1892, Page 32

ART.

THE NEW GALLERY.

IN a year when the dearth of good pictures makes the re- viewing of Galleries a heavy task, it is doubly a pleasure to applaud the achievement of a veteran like Mr. Watts. He has left the doubtful ways of moralities and allegories, where form and colour so often play him false, to produce a noble portrait of Mr. Walter Crane. Love is so apt, if you paint his picture, to go off into muddy iridescence; Life, when you look into her abstract face, has features so plain and characterless ; the fashion of Death's coat and collar is so hard to fix ; and the Lesson, when Toynbee Hall has ex- tracted it, is so naked a platitude ! Here is a human head seen clearly and painted well. Measured by this standard,. the other portraits in the Gallery inevitably appear somewhat cheap. The glow and colour of Mr. Tadema's Paderewski are remarkable, and minute care and extreme skill have been used to make out the hair and ingenious background, and the face too ; but it is like a fine story read by a finished elocutionist without emotion or personal accent. That this smooth, equable rendering can be closely reproduced, the version of the same- subject by the Princess Louise shows. Mr. Shannon, again, has certain qualities of a good portrait-painter. He can pro- duce a characteristic and a taking portrait, as his Mrs. Hitch- cock shows ; but his interest flags when he comes to colour and quality. The difference between him and Mr. Watts is parallel to that, on a higher plane, between Frans Hals and Rembrandt. Frans Hals is the master of a vivacious flick by which the salient features of a head can be strikingly expressed.. The head tells on a first glance as an unmistakable likeness ; but scrutiny reveals the superficial mannerism of the handling,. and the colour is green mud and crude red. Rembrandt, even in his earlier work, has not only vigour but also refinement of characterisation, and when he leaves the glazed-photograph surface and green ivory colouring of the famous Anatomy Lesson for the rich colour and quality of that other Anatomy Lesson at Amsterdam, or The Jewish Bride in the same collec- tion, he has made a virtue of elements in painting which for the other exist as little in the greater number of his works as if these were drawings in black-and-white. Mr. Watts's por- trait is so good because it combines so many elements of beauty, hits so many marks at once. There is one other capital portrait in the Gallery, and one that is likely to be passed over because the name of the artist is unfamiliar, and his work is carefully concealed in the farthest corner upstairs ; it is a head of Mr. Leslie Stephen, by Mr. Bosch Reitz. In colour-scheme and handling, it is as modern as Mr. Watts'h work is antique; but alike as a portrait and as a picture it is admirable. Let no visitor give pp the circuit of the balcony in boredom before reaching this. Another portrait that has charm as a picture, is Mr. Mouat Londan's little girl on a red sofa. This is skied.

Mr. Burne-Jones is absent, and his place is taken by a remark- able understudy. M. Fernand Khnopff, the Belgian painter,. has taken over the raise-en-scene and properties of the English- man, and has arranged them with very great skill. Indeed, in some respects of execution his skill goes beyond that of his original ; his design has great simplicity in strangeness ; the panelling, the landscape, and the blue and black stuffs are very happily conceived and managed. It is in his human type that he breaks down,—the face is repulsive.

A design by Mr. Albert Moore hangs opposite the Watts. The carpet is a fine patchwork of colour, but the picture is unsatisfactory. A figure without life and character can never be decorative, though if life and character be expressed, the convention may be as narrow as you like. Thus, Mr. Moore's flesh would be better if it were quite flat, for its semi-realism is not successful as such, and spoils it as decoration. Mr. Albert Goodwin's imagination has still more serious incoherences. He has a fine taste for sea- coasts with an Arabian suggestiveness about the forms of their rocks, and he will supply gorgeous wreckage from a fancy that rings oranges and lemons as readily as the bells of St. Clemens. But the figure in yellow, and the cliffs and sky, are sadly out of relation to all this. A picture, on the other hand, which is right in its main rela- tions, and singularly bright in effect, is Mr. Macbeth's Alsatian Flower-Stall. The girl's flesh is poor on a closer view, but she takes her place well in the general scheme. Mr. Edward Stott's pictures are always well imagined. How jolly, for instance, the idea of the blossoms against the brown field, in the ploughing scene ! And the painter's observation is very true up to a certain point in carrying out these ideas, as in the main relation of shadow and sunlight in the picture with the ducks ; but there comes a point where it gives out, and dabs of tentative. too pretty colour take its place. Mr. Tomson's hay-making scene has fine elements of design, but its colour and quality are hardly equal to its arrange- ment ; it has the effect of an expanded sketch. Mr. Swan's Storm Siren is a puzzling work. It is extremely accomplished, it is delicate in drawing and colour, but there is a want of grip in it; so that the total result is petty, whatever the charm of the invention in parts. For coherence of effect, Mr. Lindner's Swanage Bay is perhaps the best land- scape in the exhibition.

Mr. Halle continues to confess his admiration for his own works by hanging them in the Gallery of which he is a director. Damaging though the admission is to his reputa- . tion for taste, it enables one to believe that it is in all sincerity of respect that he hangs many other paintings equally childish. But with what conscience does he admit the artists ? D. S. M.