ART.
MR. HOLMAN BUNT'S PAINTING.* [TIIIRD NOTICE.] he our last article upon this Gallery we spoke at some length of the " Awakened Conscience " and the " Light of the World," and pointed out that the latter picture in some ways held a unique position amidst Mr. Hunt's works. In this, our last article upon the subject, we propose to speak of the character of the landscape-painting here, and sum up, as far as it be possible in a few words, the impression given by the collection as a whole. Perhaps after the " Light of the World," the " Scapegoat " is the most widely known of all Mr. Hunt's Scriptural subjects, and practically this is a landscape picture. The goat, which gives the title to the work, finely conceived and painted as it is, and truly as it strikes the intended note of suffering and isolation, is, after the first look at the subject, forgotten in the consideration of the gaunt, desolate land, with its covering of crystallised salt and bleaching skeletons, of the narrow strip of sea, drearily dark under the shadow of its surrounding mountains, and above all of the peaks of the
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mountains, as they rise flushed with the scarlet and crimson of the sunset, into that wonderful sky, which the artist seems to have painted with the actual gold and purple of Nature herself. There is a good opportunity to notice, with re- gard to this work, how infinitely the dreariness of this scene is increased by the two matters which ought, from a conventional point of view, to take some of it away,— the presence of a living animal, and the presentation of the landscape under a flush of beautiful light. Under no grey sky, with no hint of human occupation to connect it with ourselves, could this end of the Dead Sea look as dreary as it does here. For a contrast to this, look at the little drawing called " An Opening in the Sussex Downs," which shows us such an English landscape as we might discover on our South Coast half-a-dozen times in the course of a day's tramping, and beyond it a summer sea, sparkling in bright sunlight. From its own quietly record- ing, simple point of view, this is perhaps the most perfect bit of work in the exhibition, as it is certainly one of the most techni- cally skilful, the rendering of the sunlit ripples being especially original and dexterous in its method. Beneath this hangs a little bit of Cornish coast (such as one might see at " Bed- ruthen Steps," or, indeed, in a dozen spots between New Quay and Tintagel), which has all the brilliancy of one of Mr. Brett's pictures, with a far more beautiful sense of colour. Turn from this to the large oil work of the " Illuminations " on the bridge at the occasion of the Prince of Wales's marriage, and we perhaps see Mr. Hunt at his worst. His worst, and in a measure his best too, for this is, on the one hand, a thorough technical triumph on account of the enormous difficulties presented by the subject, which have been fairly and squarely encountered, and in many respects vanquished, —and on the other, the composition is, on the whole, very nearly vulgar ; the painter has had no sympathy with his subject, save the artistic sympathy of rendering it as perfectly as possible ; it is, or, at all events, it looks like, a picture painted to order, or for the sake of a little popularity-hunting. Those who do not recognise this at first will see it plainly on looking at the composition of the " Ship," which hangs as a pendant to the last-mentioned work. It is painted in a somewhat quieter key of colour, and the lighting is not so intense ; but in many respects the pictures resemble one another. In both the time is night ; in both the greater part of the picture seen under artificial light ; and in both a dark, starlit sky surrounds the subject. Both, too, are of modern—we will not say prosaic—subjects. Here, however, the resemblance ceases entirely. The "Illuminations " is a picture of tumult and struggle ; the " Ship," one of peace.—the one is crammed with figures ; the other has but two or three, for whom we have to look here and there upon the deck. A sailor at the wheel, a Lascar bending down to the saloon skylight to talk to some one within, an old Anglo-Indian soldier with a puggaree round his wide-awake, a woman leaning her arm upon the bulwarks and looking out into the night,—these are all the actors in this scene ; and it is perhaps worthy of notice how entirely Mr. Holman Hunt has succeeded in presenting them to us quite clearly and plainly, and yet carefully avoid concentrating our attention upon any or all of them. The Passage of the Ship through the Night is the subject of this picture, and the clearness with which the artist has realised this scene and given us its very essence, is hardly to be over-praised. It was the fashion when this work was first exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery to run it down, and call it ordinary and conventional ; but time is remedying that, and people are beginning to see—though slowly—that there is more true imagination in realising the essence of a contemporary subject, than in reproducing the outside form of an antique life ; that we had better have true pictures of what is nearest to us in feeling, thought, and action, than of what lies far behind, and is made beautiful, as are the shadows of the hills, by remoteness only.
There are but few portraits in this Gallery, but there is one very good one, probably the finest which this artist has ever painted. It is of Professor Owen, and was exhibited at the first or second exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery. In the present exhibition, through some accident of lighting, it does not look nearly so well as in its former place; but even here it holds its own amongst the more specially in- teresting work. In several ways, indeed, it is of great merit. No modern portrait with which we are acquainted is so precise and unfaltering in its work ; for a parallel to the extreme vigour and completeness of the execution, we should have to go back to the old Flemish painters. And here, perhaps, we might find an artist who in many ways resembled Mr. Hunt in the char- acter no less than the method of his work, in Quentin Matsys, one of whose wonderful " Miser " pictures was bequeathed to the National Gallery some years since. A peculiar hardness in the painting of the flesh ; the determination that detail shall be represented no less clearly, whether it be pleasant or un- pleasant ; an eye almost too keen to note modifications of colour, and a hand apt to slightly exaggerate the distinctness of Nature in its unfaltering execution. All these are marks of both painters' work, and both, too, give by these qualities, and others less easily to be perceived, a certain unsympathetic air to their personages. But while all allowance is made for these drawbacks, it is but justice to say of this portrait of Professor Owen, that its truth to the man (as well as the completeness of its technical qualities) is most admirable. It may be, from some points of view, lacking as a pleasant picture, but it is the man himself. The work impresses us as a bit of Nature, dug out with infinite difficulty, and bearing rough marks of the spade, but indubitably true. " Thus, and no otherwise, did this man look to me when I painted him," is what the portrait says.
The only oil landscape here of great importance, with the exception of the " Scapegoat," is called " Strayed Sheep," and was painted on the "Fairlight Downs." It represents a kind of little glade of rocks, brambles, ferns, wild flowers, &c., with the sheep in the immediate foreground ; in the distance we see the slopes of the downs and a bit of sea. The whole picture is in the most brilliant light, and every detail of grass and flower, of the sheep's fleece, &c., is given with great elaboration and distinction. The remark which we should like to make first about this work is that it is peculiarly a happy picture. Albeit it is in every respect a pre-Raphaelite work, it is one of those which the people most opposed—as they think and say—to pre-Raphaelitism, nevertheless like. It is, moreover, a picture in which the artist seems for once not to have had any ulterior motive, but just to have gone down to a lovely place in lovely weather, and worked away happily, with- out too much thought. And, without dwelling further upon the technical character of this work, this brings us to the con- sideration of what is at the bottom of both Mr. Hunt's ex- cellences and faults as an artist,—of his excellences, since it spurs him on to overcome difficulties which have seldom been grappled with, and to realise his subjects in utmost minutia; of detail ; of his defects, since it prevents him from seeing the boundary between the possible and the impossible, the desirable and the undesirable. He wants painting to do more than lies within its power,—to perform the office not only of Art, but of religion and literature. He is so anxious to have his meaning made clear to the utmost degree, that he frequently forgets that the most subtle meanings are sometimes, and not seldom, those which vanish when they are brought too clearly forward. The con- sequence is that he is always treading a narrow boundary-line between the sublime and the ridiculous ; for Art is not a pudding which can be made up, per recipe, of so many beautiful, and so many emblematical objects. A picture may be thought out till it is in description on paper a perfect demonstration of its subject, and may nevertheless fail to convey its meaning as essentially as a rough sketch, which has been drawn, so to speak,. " hot and hot" from the crucible of the imagination. Thus, to take examples of this, the red velvet (a kind of fillet) which is bound between the horns of the " Scapegoat," has, no doubt, some hidden significance in Mr. Hunt's eyes, or is in accordance with the best traditions on the subject ; but, nevertheless, there in that picture it strikes the wrong note ; it jerks us back to modern life and the milliner's shop ; it lends itself to a comic view of the situation. Besides which, there is always the danger that if we concentrate atten- tion upon these fringes of the subject, we may lay ourselves open to the Philistine who comes up and notices that we have omitted some actual, essential part of the scene (from the prosaic point of view), as the carpenter remarked about the "Light of the World,"—" Why is there no sawdust on the floor underneath that half-sawn block of wood P" You see, his attention had been drawn by Hunt's wonderful rendering of the shavings, and he straightway expected to find—and quite rightly—sawdust also. The rock upon which Mr. Hunt splits is, we venture to say, this,—that he does not sufficiently remember that true pre- Raphaelitism does not insist equally upon every detail, but insists upon each detail in relative proportion to its importance. When we say its importance, we, of course, mean its importance with regard to the chosen subject. The gain to significance of the perfect rendering of all the subordinate facts of a composition, is right so long, and only so long, as no fraction of significance of the main subject is lost thereby ; directly the detail begins to encumber the meaning, directly it does not fulfil a definite function in the realisation of the scene, the detail ie wrong. For a picture is not a treatise upon a subject, but a rendering of a scene, a thought, or a feeling, and we cannot follow out in it many complicated lines of thought ; what it really teaches must be taught through one comparatively simple idea. We cannot afford space to show how this applies to such pictures as the " Triumph of the Innocents," the " Shadow of the Cross," and the " Light of the World ;" but our readers can easily follow out the comparison for themselves, and with this excessively imperfect notice, we must close our notices of Mr. Holman Hunt's painting.
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