Art
THE Tate has put on show in one of the small Duveen Turner rooms a group of recent acquisitions, most of which have been bequeathed or lent to the collection; two of them, paintings by George Stubbs, are par- ticularly important in helpitig, temporarily at least, to diminish one of the gallery's most serious gaps. These two small pictures—a group of Mares and Foals from the Duke of Westminster's collection and Two Horses with a Stable Lad and a Dog belonging to Mrs. Edward Hulton—are not of the first order, but they are very worthy and delightful examples; it is to be hoped that when the National Art- Collections Fund comes to distribute the works left to the nation by the late Ernest Cook, they will allot the Stubbs conversation piece to the Tate as a further reinforcement.
Stubbs is the only one of the great English painters whose work has had no significant influence upon subsequent generations, except within the limited field of horse painting, and
that represents one element alone in his very varied output. You will fled in this little show feeble versions of Constable and Hogarth in which only the sentiment and the surface has been taken over. Stubbs is pre-eminently an artist from whom can be learnt many of those qualities which are properly transferable from one painter to another, those which depend not upon a strong individuality of outlook or of method, but upon the very essence of paint- ing. His knowledge of natural structure, his power to realise upon a flat surface the solidity and density of objects, his gift of abstraction, his understanding of space and of interval, his technical integrity and the particular character of his draughtsmanship are unsurpassed in English art.
Also from the Duke of Westminster's collection is a Gainsborough seascape, an exceptionally rough, vigorous and wind-blown piece which would perhaps be more affecting if it showed more stability within the frame. As it is, the picture makes those Morlands which it resembles seem very much out of contact with the things represented.
The Tate has also received from various sources a number of small pictures of the second third of the nineteenth century, examples by Muller, Cope, Gale, C. R. Leslie, Frith, Wallis among others. There can be no charge of wasting money on these things, but one wonders whether the space occupied in the store rooms, to which surely they must be transferred, may not soon be regretted. It is not sq. much the sentiment of these works which is to be criticised—though certainly that is trivial enough—but rather the slippery mean- ness of the forms and the execution, just as whit is most detestable in the body of Vic- torian architecture is not so much the prin- ciples of revivalism as the poverty or tawdri- ness of the design. Much nineteenth-century painting here and in France was made in pro- test against Style, an Academic Style, but Style in its worst sense means a pictorial language which has hardened into an impenetrable crust or has been meretriciously applied. What these paintings lack by contrast with a Constable or a Courbet, both of them, like Stubbs, 'natural' painters—in the Constable sense—is a positive pictorial language, a coherent use of the means of painting.
Mrs. Edward Hutton has lent the Tate its first Soutine, a landscape which suffers, par- ticularly in the centre of the composition, from excessively violent gestures in the manipula- tion of the paint. In sweeping the pigment on to the canvas, the tree, the focus of the painter's interest, has been swept out of existence and we are left with a piece of energy, naked and unattached. The gallery has bought two draw- ings by the living Italian sculptor Emilio Greco which are already embalmed in their manner- isms, and a little water-colour by Afro which seems to me an object for private rather than public purchase.
BASIL TAYLOR
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