ART.
MR. WATTS'S PAINTING.
[THE GROSVENOR GALLERY.—PIRST NOTICE.]
THIS exhibition has more than justified the hopes of Mr. Watts's most fervent admirers. It will be a landmark in the history of English Art. And there is only one thing we regret in the matter,—namely, that it was not held at the Academy, of which Mr. Watts has so long been the most distinguished member. Even in that there is some room for congratulation, since the pictures would not have formed so imposing a collection, if scattered over the larger wall-space of Burlington House. On the other hand, many of the finest works are so monumental in size, that they require even a larger room than the West Gallery of the Grosvenor can give them, and would have gained enormously in importance by being hung in the great room at the Academy. It is a little annoying to think that Academic tradition has allowed this collection to be made at the instance of a private individual. The Acade- micians would have done honour to themselves, had they granted to one of their oldest and greatest members the honour of a public exhibition of his works during his life-time. Mr. Watts, it is an open secret, is becoming an old man ; he has given his life more frankly and entirely to the cause of great art than perhaps any man now living. He has painted our greatest men and our fairest women ; he has lived down censure, and endured with silent courage unmerited neglect ; he has never sullied his genius with a coarse thought, or debased his pride to gain a tem- porary popularity ; and he has literally never rested in his endeavour to make his pictures perfect, as far as his powers went. No artist, we should say, in this generation has had so severe a critic of his painting, as Mr. Watts has been to his own creations. Over and over again have we heard of portraits by him which have satisfied every one but himself, but which he would never part with, because he considered them failures. He has emphatically deserved well of England for the example he has set, no less than the work he has created ; and perhaps, of all the fine portraits he has painted for us, no picture is so fine as that which he has given us of himself, in his steadfast and single-minded life.
How good the portraits are we all know by this time, and their qualities have been discussed usque ad nauseam. Never- theless, at the risk of wearying our readers, we must say a few words upon these qualities, even though our words be a twice- told tale. Take a Watts' portrait, and hang it between a Millais and a Frank Roll, and look at the difference. With all deference and all admiration for the great masters alluded to, we would say something of this kind is the difference. Mr. Millais gives us in a portrait three great qualities. Acute observation, un- sympathetic, yet kindly, Like a surgeon's habitual mood ; mag- nificent colouring, when at his best; and an undefinable some- thing of rendering, that, for lack of a better word, we will call artistic power. Give this artist a subject where the surface beauty of form is very marked, or the surface interest of feature is very strong, and he will make a great picture of it, somehow or other. Miss Eveleen Tennant and Mr. Gladstone are both within his power, but only the surface aspects of both. It is,. perhaps,necessary to remind some of our readers that the two por- traits above mentioned are as fine as, if not finer than any Mr.. Millais has produced. The portrait of Miss Eveleen Tennant is the- one known commonly amongst artists as the "Blue Beads,"—a. girl in a vivid red dress, with some bright "blue beads" round her throat. Mr. Millais is not a comedian or a tragedian in his painting, but essentially an actor of the cup-and-saucer style of play, and this though he has painted "The Huguenots " and "The Vale of Rest." Take Frank Roll, the most power- ful portrait-painter of the Academy, and one of the most original,—an Israels of the well-to-do classes. Roll is dis- tinctly a tragedian ; his very mildest pictures savour of the "dagger and the bowL" We have seen portraits (and fine portraits, too) by him of most estimable people—deans and_ masters of colleges, &c.—who never had a wrong thought in their lives, but to whom Mr. loll has given such a don't-meet- me-on-a-dark-night-kind of look, that we have almost thought he must have in the course of his painting discovered some dreadful secret in those apparently blameless breasts, such " damnable faces" have his sitters shown.
Well, when we look upon Mr. Watts's work in portraiture,. what we see first is absolute self-effacement. Each portrait suggests a mood, but not a mood of the artist, but the sitter,— it is half a picture of the outward man, and half of the inward spirit. It is not brilliant character-painting of superficial de- tails, it is not character seen by a lurid light, as in Frank Roll's pictures, but it is an endeavour to represent the man and the woman in their entirety, flesh, spirit, &c. For every sitter that Mr. Watts paints is a problem that he tries to solve. To come to the purely artistic question of the laying-on of the paint, the strokes of the pencil and the harmonies of the colour, the truth seems to us to be as follows :-- As draughtsman, Mr. Watts is greater in conception, and abstraction of details, than any living artist with whom we are- acquainted. By this, we mean that his aim at generalising form is carried out more scientifically and more successfully than in other cases. We doubt, however, whether he does not carry this practice too far, and the gigantic scale of work in which he frequently indulges emphasises all such pecu- liarities. When, however, Mr. Watts sits down deliberately to, draw the nude figure on an ordinary life-size scale, we doubt whether his work can be surpassed by that of any living English artist in sheer accuracy ; and there are other qualities in it, such as those of dignity and mystery, in which it stands alone. Ex- amples, such as the "Daphne" and the "Psyche," in this gallery (two single, nude, female figures) prove this beyond a doubt; and for beauty of modelling, we know no modern work which is much finer than that of the breast and the neck in the life-size picture of the "Wife of Pygmalion."
The peculiar characteristics of the little landscapes in this exhibition deserve a word of notice. They are excessively quiet in general effect, and for the most part are twilight- country scenes, unrelieved by any human figure. The little one of two haystacks lit up by the sunset, with a farmer's man in the foreground riding one grey cart-horse and leading another, is perhaps the most beautiful of them; and the name
given to it, "And all the Air a Solemn Stillness Holds," might well stand as expressive of the feeling of the other landscapes. They are, in fact, little, quiet verses of poetry, with the same sort of contented sadness over them that we find running through Gray's "Elegy."
Besides the imaginative conceptions which have reference more or less direct to great poems or great questions of human interest, there are two or three scenes of London life amongst -the poorer classes, of great power. "Under a Dry Archway" is probably the most intense expression of that tragedy of hope- less pauperism, that Mr. Fildes touched so dramatically in his great picture of the casuals. And the hand with which Mr. Watts has treated his subject is as unsparing as it is powerful ; -this is no "sentimental, picturesque wretchedness" (as George Eliot puts it), but simply a statement of how low a human being can sink, and how miserably she can die, in the greatest city of the world. It strikes much the same note as Charles Reade struck in his death of Josephs, in the prison scene in Never Too Late to Mend—"Il est onze heaves ! Dormez bien, Messieurs, tout est tranquille !"—but the poor lad is hanging himself all the time, while the visiting justices are sleeping. It has a singular effect, this silent problem that hangs upon the walls of the most .wsthetic gallery in London, and is surrounded by portraits of beauties, and statesmen, and warriors, and divines. Bad policy, Mr. Watts, to confront these "curled darlings" with so vital a question. You come too close home Sir to our consciences, to be agreeable.
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