ART.
THE ROYAL ACADEMY.—I.
IN its hundred and forty-fifth exhibition, which opens on Monday, the Royal Academy presents to the world an assembly of works of art representative of at least half of our most gifted painters and sculptors, and a considerable quantity of works showing temperament, skill, and charm, and many modest pieces with shy hints of the beauty in nature that moved them to paint. Yet it is impossible for persons with sensitiveness to art to enter these galleries without feelings of oppression and dolour, or to leave them unaccompanied by the well-known Academy headache which haunts these galleries as faithfully as the admirable detective of that institution. At other shows one may be moved to anger, indignation, or puzzlement about what one takes to be the wrong-headedness of the artists, or one may merely endure a half-pleasant dullness, or again one may experience unalloyed the keen communications of delight that prove the existence of art. At the Academy there is nothing without alloy. And it is always so. How this sense of a hostile neighbourhood has reacted on the Academy exhibitors is one of the better-known tragedies of English art. In no other exhibition nowadays are the pictures fitted and packed together like bricks with- out an inch of space from the skirting of the room to near the ceiling. A hundred years have passed as yester- day and Queen Anne is very dead, but the ideas of Queen Anne print-shop dealers who wished to have their small window as full as it could hold still persist in Burlington House, although the rest of the English art societies have joined the Continent in recognizing that if a work of art is worth showing it is worth showing well. Why should the wealthiest, the most influential, and the official body of English art treat its members, associates, and adherents like a racecourse crowd P Surely the Academicians do not like it, for it makes their pictures look worse; and surely the public do not like it, for they cannot see the pictures on the heights, and they can hardly, without blinkers, see the pictures on the line. Of course, in a way this all reflects credit on the Academy, which took up the burden when it was the only exhibiting society, and if it did not provide room for outsiders there was nowhere else for them to go. To- day it is quite different. There are dozens of societies, and Bond Street offers scores of opportunities for " one- man shows." The time has come for the Academy to lay down the burden it has borne so long. Its prestige, its good faith, would be recognized in a new way if it threw out the cumbersome third which does so much to damage and make grotesque the whole. It may be argued perhaps that the Academy has often been very unsuccessful in its rejections, and that once it attempts to make its standard more severe it will cut itself off yet further from the most vital develop- ments of modern art. The answer to that is that modern art must risk it. Possibly the increased responsibility might make the selective committee more keen to discover the unknown which is perpetually coming into art and by which art lives. A number of shillings would no doubt be lost, but with its prestige challenged on all sides the Academy can hardly at this moment stop to think of shillings. And, more- over, it must be remembered that Burlington House is vacant more than half the year, and that the Academy is not bound for ever to a single annual exhibition. Everyone knows that it must soon take the step, and that art must come into the method of display as well as into what it displays. Why not now P In the present exhibition the bad pictures are more insistent, more futile, and more numerous than one can remember in recent years. With the increased scholarship and onnoisseurship that are coming from the popularizing of the Old Masters, even the slowest public is becoming more critical.
The friends of the Academy must surely hope that the step will be taken before it is too late. Within the past ten years it has repented some of its old blunders, and called to itself the younger artists of other societies upon whose services its future largely depends. Why not accept the methods as well as the men ?
In the circumstances one does not wonder that Mr. Brangwyn and Mr. Charles Shannon join with Mr. William Strang, whose
.dortrait of Mr. Masefield was one of the most memorable
pieces of portraiture the Academy has seen in the present century, in showing no paintings ; and that Mr. Orpen is con- tented with one contribution, and prefers to show his more individual work elsewhere. The predominance of Mr. John Lavery, the President of the International Society, in the present exhibition makes the question more urgent, through the injury done by the present barbarous system to his com- positions of subtle tones and delicate colours.
Mr. John Lavery's royal portrait group, painted on the com- mission of Mr. Hugh Spottiswoode for the National Portrait Gallery, takes first place as the most discussed work of the exhibition. The news of the commission aroused keen
expectation, for with one or two exceptions our Court paint- ing has in the two preceding reigns very ill represented the expressive art of its time—or of its country. It was generally felt that Mr. Lavery's romantic impressionism and pictorial tact presented the combination from which Court painting might take a new flight. He has certainly restored poetry to the painting of royalty. Whatever the reality may be like, the lofty room with its great chandeliers and glim- mer of gold and old polished woods, and the architectural vista through the open doorway, are wrought into beauty by a finesse of blur and accent, and the sidelight from the tall windows yields bloom and shadow to the four figures grouped at the couch ; the Queen sitting very uprightly, the Princess Mary at her feet, both in white ; the King in admiral's uniform standing tautly with his hand on his sword, the Prince of Wales standing behind the sofa. Mr. Lavery has seen the Queen and the Princess with all the romance of royal associations, and here he has not too closely identified himself with the purely descriptive function of his art. With the King he comes to closer terms, and the practical, alert, high-aiming side of George the Fifth is admirably expressed. It is a vision of Royalty where the stage side of royal presentments that has hitherto so overwhelmed our Court painting has at last been overcome. With this work something of the innate aristocratic tradition of Van Dyck returns to English Court painting. Royalty is no longer pre- sented in the inhuman aloofness of the coinage ; in Mr. Lavery's picture the urbanity that links royal persons with the other gentlefolk of England is well seized. The tone and colour are very charming, noticeably in the management of the blue in the ribbons and the muted echo from the blue in the vista and, more faintly, in the room itself. The question arises whether the reduction of the scale of the figures and enlarge- ment of the surroundings is a more successful formula than the former tradition in State portraits, which enlarges the figures and reduces the setting ; but the artist, if he cared, could doubtless find support for his formula as symbolical of royalty in these days. And as to the quiet tone and lack of complete rhythmic lines in the design, it must be remembered that the work is not to be hung in a darkened palace room but in the well-lighted National Portrait Gallery. It is well for visitors to remember that this picture cannot be seen at closer range than ten yards, and is at its best from near the end of the gallery, viewed from ,one side. Mr. Llewellyn's portrait of the Queen (No. 205), painted for the United Service Club, is a highly wrought, carefully detailed State portrait of the con- ventional type. Mr. A. S. Cope has attempted a more ambitious idea in his portrait of the King (No. 192) for the same institution, but the decorative bravura of the great waving flag and the dark line of warships has not spread to the rather dry and literal design and painting of the King. It is indeed less effective than Mr. Llewellyn's less ambitious but single-minded idea. The portraiture on the whole is less interesting than usual. The absence of Mr. Sargent's tall ladies, those delicate caryatides that have supported so many dull Academies on their fair coiffures, is sadly felt. His single portrait, a half-length of a graceful, springing figure, Rose Marie (No. 37), is, however, very good indeed, with its suggestion of a French eighteenth- century portrait come to life. Sir Edward Poynter, besides two characteristic works in his highly finished classical manner, has a landscape, a portrait of the Secretary of the Academy, and another of Sir Edward White. Sir Hubert Herkomer's portrait of Lord Morley (No. 224) in his robes as Chancellor of the University of Manchester is one of his most forceful works, the keen, worn head keeping all its value despite the brilliance of the blue robe. Mrs. Swynnerton's picture of a little boy on pony-back, Peter, Son of Sir John Grant Lawson, Bart. (No. 806), has a high voltage of real zest and invention that makes its whole room vibrant. Mr. Orpen has a very clever but rather " still-life " portrait of a lady (No. 300).
Among the artists whose work marks an advance in the present show are Sir Alfred East, in his panoramic view of From Rivington Pike, Bolton (No. 168), and The Rainbow (No. 504), where the subject itself seems to have dictated the terms of expression, whereas his ordinary, highly flavoured, romantic landscapes hint a ready-made formula ; Mr. Arthur Streeton in his architectural vision of Victoria Tower, Westminster (No. 409); Mr. George Pirie in his Water Birds (No. 345), with its beautiful quality of paint; Mr. F. Craig in his Installation of the Lord Mayor of Cardiff (No. 376), which shows bow a decorative idea will tell here, even although the painting is not more than good; Mr. F. L. Emanuel, in his The Banqueting Hall, Croydon Palace (No. 302), with its large firm design and admirable texture in the great wall-space ; and Miss Hilda Fearon, Mr. A. Douglas, Mr. J. H. Lorimer, Mr. W. West, Mr. G. A. Pownall, Mr. S. B. de la Bere, and Mr. R. W. Allan, in his small By the Seaside (No. 4), where his understanding and skill in expressing the mood and sting of the sea are not spoilt by a papery sky. Other contributions in recent years make one hesitate to write of Mr. G. A. Storey's Pootnip, Kent (No. 161), as an advance in the art of this veteran, but in the whole show there is nothing more expressive of that wayward love of our own countryside that runs like a limpid spring through English landscape than this work, with its astonishingly vivid and tender touch and delightful quality of paint. His other small picture, The First Letter (No. 670), painted apparently many years ago in the tradition of the 'sixties, is fine, but the little landscape which is dated 1912 is a rarer achievement and meets modern painting on its own terms. The fantasies of Mr. Charles Sims, which provide one of the most delightful features of the present show, Mr. Lavery's Swiss pictures, Mr. Arnesby Brown's cattle pieces, and other notable things must wait for a second article.
Conspicuous works by artists whose names are unfamiliar are Miss C. Walton's Marjorie (No. 207); The Garden Seat (No. 160), by Miss A. K. Browning; My Lady's Chamber, by Mr. Cecil Wilson (No. 529); and A Sombre Day (No. 713), by
Mr. A. Abdo, each of whom shows a gift for finding purely pictorial terms for their ideas, and the prominence of these works emphasizes the general absence of that quality in the exhibition. The amount of information one can gather on these walls about good places for holidays, the harness of artillery horses, the fashions in middle-aged women's dresses, the taxidermist theories of wild animals, how to manage a small sailing-boat, and eighteenth-century costume and weapons —contributions more to the useful than to the fine arts—is
positively stupendous. The Academy is, as usual, at once the Bradshaw, the Baedeker, the Who's Who, the Mogg's A Thousand Cab Fares, and Ruff's Guide to the Tull' of art.
J. B.
Previous page
