ART.
THE NEW ENGLISH ART CLUB, AND THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF BRITISH ARTISTS.
ALL readers of the Spectator who are interested in the present and future of English painting ought to pay a visit to the exhibition of the New English Art Club. Their quarters this year at Humphreys' Mansions, Knightsbridge, are not such as to show all the pictures to advantage, because the lighting is that of ordinary rooms, not of the usual picture-gallery.
But some of the pictures themselves appeal much more to the art-student than those in the more pretentiously housed exhibitions as yet open. And for this reason. The older societies are chary of admitting experimental work. The free air of experiment that nowadays pervades the Parisian Salon does not, for instance, characterise our Academy ; the Academy waits till the experiment has made itself popular elsewhere. But the Club we are dealing with welcomes experiment, and only demands from the artist that he should do what will command the attention of other artists.
We hasten to add that the range of attempt is not a very wide one. Some of the audacities are imitative, and the influence of one or two masters, notably Mr. Whistler, is very marked.
Again, a whole section of the Society, the painters roughly known as the Newlyn School, refrain from exhibition this year,—perhaps because they have now made good their footing in the Academy, perhaps reserving themselves for the later exhibition of their work that is talked of. The result is, that there is no picture whose subject is dramatic—(Mr. Roche's " Wenceslas " is purely decorative)—the strength of the exhibition is in single-figure portraiture, and what remains is landscape and town-effects. But the portrait work is really strong. It has the look of work done to satisfy only the painter's picture-sense,—not distracted by the external standard of what the sitter and the sitter's friends con- sider desirable. The large gallery contains a quartette of portraits arranged in the four corners. Mr. P. Wilson Steer's "Jonquil" (16) deserves notice first, as being not only fine in execution, but original in motive and manner. Visitors to last year's exhibition will remember Mr. Steer's experimental work with its strongly marked scheme of colour, in which a purple- blue played a great part. This year, it seems to us, Mr. Steer has not only tried, but has eminently succeeded. The design has invention, but also the restfulness and simplicity that comes of completed invention. As one looks at the colour, too, there is first the same sense of simple clear effect in the golden- yellows and purple-blue : afterwards one notices with pleasure the subtle variations of colour in different parts from which this harmonious effect results.
Diagonally opposite Mr. Steer's portrait is a singularly charming figure, Mr. Maurice Greiffenhagen's "Miss Lily Hanbury " (34). The height is no doubt exaggerated, and other defects might be insisted on ; but one notices rather the beautiful face, the graceful pose, the delicate colour (in par- ticular the opposition of the fan and dress). On the same wall is Mr. Starr's " Mrs. Brandon Thomas." The lady sits at a piano, playing. The painting of the whole is good, but if anything, the piano is better than the lady, the very successful dash with which it is painted calling away one's attention from the face. Mr. Walter Sickert's " Miss Fancourt " (9) is the fourth of the large portraits. In its dusky corner it tells as an effective black-and-white sketch. To these four portraits downstairs should be added the full-length portrait of a lady upstairs, by Mr. Fred. Brown (113). The dress is an uncompromising common green, against one of those drab floors and dark, empty backgrounds that Mr. Whistler has adapted from Velazquez. But the whole painting is in admirable keeping, with a careful eye to atmospheric truth, and the transient action of back-turned face and hands clasping the boa is skilfully caught. Mr. Walton's portrait (126), hung as a pendant to this, is badly lit, but does not seem to be very successful. Mr. Guthrie's figure of a girl in a con- servatory, " Lily " (148), is a surprise, coming from so capable a craftsman, in its feebleness of treatment. His pastel head (61) is better. Mr. Lavery's " Master Hubert " (40) has a decorative intention, but is a fiasco. His sketch, " A Girl in Black" (48), is clever and effective, in the Japanese vein.
Leaving portrait and coming to landscape, we should put in the forefront for largeness and grasp, Mr. A. Roche's " Hill. top " (169). It would be easy to find fault with parts of it, but it is a finely and a freshly chosen subject, and its colour is delightful. Quite successful in rendering what it attempts, and that well worth rendering, is Mr. Paul Maitland's " The December Garden" (58), a pastel sketch of a London mixture of lawn and railway station and vague bulks of building seen from above. The "Hollywood Arms" (112), by the same artist, is a clever rendering of the illumination outside a public- house. Another pastel of great beauty is Mr. Bernard Sickert's " The Last on the Pier " (125). The dull purple sand and lemon gleam on the water are well observed, and as a note of an effect, the thing is first-rate. To make it a pic- ture, the lines of the pier would have to be transformed. Mr. T. Millie Dow's " A Northern Shore" (2) is a deli- cate design of foamy waves and seagulls. Mr. Clausen's Sheepfold : Evening " (15) has a lovely rain-clear sky. Mr. J. B. Knight's No. 167 is fresh and forcible. Mr. James Paterson's "Dusk (107), and Mr. Fred. Brown's " Walls of Montreuil " (173), just miss being satisfactory, the latter in its willows. Mr. Julius Olsson's " Sea, Sun, and Shadow " (46) is study of lighted and not lighted foam in a Monetesque key of colour. There is a double of it at the British Artists Exhibi- tion. Mr. James's flower-studies are pleasing in their slight way. A good deal of the work exhibited might have been discarded with advantage. It only takes away from the effectiveness of the rest.
In the exhibition of the Royal Society of British Artists, there is a very large section which is British, and a small one which is artistic. The former may be again divided into the ancient British and the less ancient,—those, namely, who understudy for the part of eminent living painters. The Society boasts, for instance, a pseudo-Tadema, Mr. F. Hamilton Jackson (297). Here is the marble seat, the lounging figures, and all thereat of it, except the art. Even Mr. Leader has a follower (375). And there are funny traces of the ex-President himself,—witness No. 326. The reigning President is no copyist, however. He has ideas of his own as to what a picture should be. But we are disappointed with his want of thoroughness in carrying them out. The rules of the Society forbid the admission of unfinished works, unless they are expressly described as such. There is no such note of warning about No. 264, and yet, on examination, we are convinced that Mr. Wyke Bayliss might have added one or two more spots in its unregarded corners. With such an example before them, what is to become of the ordinary members? Some Briton will make a sketch, and no longer " blush to find it framed,"— may in the end take to painting.
In the artistic section, the most noticeable work is that of Mr. Frank Brangwyn and Mr. Nelson Dawson. Mr. Brangwyn's " January " (352) has much merit as a design, particularly in its distance of town and shipping, with the lights coming out in the winter evening. The general tone of bluish-grey, however, seems to miss being quite right. The same deduction must be made in praising his other piece, " Conjecture " (294), but there is much in the study and grouping of the sailors on the pier to deserve praise! Mr. Nelson Dawson's best work is the large oil-painting of " A Summer's Day, North Cornwall" (400), a broad stretch of sand with a distant sea. The space of sand, foot-marked and broken by timber and blue-green vegetation, is admirable, the distance not quite so good. Besides these, there are a good many respectable works. In the first Water-Colour Room, Mr. Macmaster's "Fishers' Haven" (11), Mr. Bromley's "Summer Shallows " (15), Mr. A. J. Watson's " Voorstraatenshaven, Dordrecht " (43), Mr. W. C. Cooke's " Palace of St. David's " (57), Mr. Bayes's sketch of "Lloyd's Bank" (73), Miss Nor- bury's " The Garden Door" (94), and Mr. Isaac Cooke's "In Sma' Glen, Perthshire" (101), may be mentioned. In the North-East Room, Mr. F. J. James's " Westmoreland Farm " (147), Miss Sloane's " Marigolds " (183), and Mr. Nelson Daw- son's " Bristol Harbour" (222), stand out from the rest. In this room is hung an absurd terra-cotta panel by Mr. Tinworth. Among the oil-paintings, Mr. Priestman's "Morecambe Bay" (259) is good in colour. In the same gallery is " Changing Pastures" (362), in Mr. Yeend King's well-known manner. But for the figures, Mr. Cayley Robinson's " Drifting" (391) might have been a success. " Low Tide in the Harbour, Littlehampton " (340), by Mr. F. Culver, is fairly good.
In portraiture, some of the work by lady-exhibitors is far ahead of that by men. Compare Miss Taylor's No. '284, Miss Plimpton's No. 539, Miss Drew's No. 563, Miss Connell's No. 571, with things like Mr. Davidson Knowles's " Reverie " (275), or, indeed, with the " Reveries " passim ; for it• is a curious law that the worst heads in a gallery are always called "Reverie." And in many other titles here, the artist displays a simple fatuous belief in his own pictures that almost disarms criticism. "Happy is the bride the sun shines on I" exclaims Mr. Hayllar (429), after painting a sunshine that would check the irrepressible gaieties of a funeral. " Her ways are ways of pleasantness," quotes Mr. George Carline (531), over a road that the veriest picture-dealer would shudder to tread.
Previous page
