FINE ARTS.
ARTS AND MANUFACTURES.—NO. I.
AN interesting movement is perceptible in the progress of the arts: a want is felt almost universally, and at the same time in several different quar- ters efforts are made towards supplying that want. To the future we may look forward, if not without some doubt as to the capacity of this country for art, yet not without hope. Looking to the manufactures and those crafts which minister to our ma- terial wants, the arts are seen to be in a state of transition. In some things the utmost perfection of manufacturing skill has been attained, but with- out proportionate advances in the development of that beauty which is the crowning point of all perfection. Our cotton wefts are a marvel as to the process by which they are made; but they are only beginning to be eman- cipated from the curse of ugliness in the patterns. The pervading want is strikingly illustrated by the exhibition of ornamental manufactures at the Society of Arts. Mechanical skill is there, supplying the materials and the tools for art, and giving to processes the facility of magic; the pre- siding genius is absent. There is industry, there is even a newly-awa- kened ambition, but there is not complete success; there is aspiration, but not inspiration. The artist is not there.
Survey the specimens of crockery and china. They are very beautiful; Wedgwood succeeded in lifting them completely out of the low and rude state in which they were before his time; collectively they constitute a cento of select foreign ideas: but there is no originality, no advancement beyond the set patterns. Wedgwood turned from the atrocious forms that amused our grandmothers, to the Greek and Roman; our potteries have rivalled Dresden, with its dense opaque colours, and Sevres, with gilding, and its elaborate and fantastic forms; but it is enough to imitate: we have copies of Roman, German, and French ideas, but having reached to where the pattern reached, in each case, we stop. It is not our manufacturing skill or ingenuity of application that stops. Our porcelain and earthenware are applied with excellent fitness to small statuary; bet it is only the ma- terial that we have extended to that branch; we have no osier al art engaged in it: we borrow the forms from other countries or other branches of art; we supply nothing but the gross substance, and have no spirit of invention ac- tually engaged, to seize that substance, endow it with new forms, and make- the most of its peculiar nature and texture. We have applied the art of transferring colours from paper to earthenware,—of which there is a very pretty specimen in the collection,—but a style of painting for earthenware is wanting. So in glass. The most beautiful substances of Bohemia and Venice are rivalled: you have the pellucid tints, the brilliancy, the exquisite delicacy of Bohemia; the varying texture, the fairy-like tissue of Venice; but having come up to that decayed republic and unadvanced kingdom, we stop: we have produced the material glass, in its several forms; but we have no English glass, of a new school in design. Even the inventive faculty of application is limited. The chandelier, with its cut lustres, has been car- ried to a high pitch of mechanical elaboration: geometrical forms are mul- tiplied and combined; the substance is purified and cut prismatically, until the whole, with its refracted light, seems like a mass of jewellery; but we cannot go further than that very old. idea. We lavish industry, labour, science, cost, but cannot get beyond the great candlestick. Yet glass is a material in itself so beautiful and fairy-like, that it seems to pique inven- tion. It is a mine of jewellery ready made to the plastic hand of the deco- rator, if he only had ideas. The magic feat of Aladdin's attendants, who built a-jewelled palace in a night, might be outdone by the glass-maker. Thousands have been spent—not unworthily—on the chandelier of the new Italian Operahouse in Covent Garden, and thousands have before been bestowed in such manner; but let fancy dictate, and like sums might hang our walls with jewellery mocking the stalactite of the cave and the gem of the mine in brilliancy and variety, splendour and beauty. Again, glass is applied to figures: semi-opaque statuettes and grotesques might be intro- duced into decoration with all the effect of a tangible poetry. It is not the material that is wanting, nor the mechanical invention, but the fancy —art.
Our bronzes are a reproach to the country, so destitute are they of -every
artistical quality. • Of wood-carving the Society's collection contains some interesting speci- mens, worked by machinery. There are two processes. In one, the wood is stamped by a hot mould, which burns away the surface. This is very good for general forms not requiring life or delicacy; but it is heavy, and the markings are of necessity somewhat clogged. In the other process, a pattern is moulded, the apparatus is regulated by that, the surface is cut away, and the work is finished by hand. There are specimens in both stages. As it first issues from the machine, the work looks well, and has the agreeable freedom atoll-generalized effect belonging to sketches. The finished work is capable of the utmost delicacy. Figures after Ghiberti, a bunch of grapes, and ornamental devices, are among the specimens: it only wants a Grinling Gibbons to develop the full use of this new process. The universal want, however, is no longer unknown. The appoinment of the Fine Arts Commission was a confession, not only of that low state of art which has received such fearful illustration in the tampering with the great pictures at the National Gallery, but also of the unnatural divorce between art and the manufacturing crafts. In the building of the new Houses of Paliament a great impulse was given to the newly-awakened zeal. Not only has painting been encouraged, but architecture has been called into conscious activity, and the decorative arts have been profusely employed. The newly-finished House of Lords is the most recent speci- men of what decorative art can do in this country. There we see, once more, high art joined to decoration. But no master mind has ruled impe- rious over the whole-no Raphael has been sovereign of an united king- dom. Mr. Dyce, who painted the picture which is finished,-and which looks on the whole very well, far better in its way than anything yet seen in this country by native hands,-had, we believe, nothing to do with the "mere ornament," The general effect is rich, gorgeous, often tasteful; but a more exalted taste would have checked the profusion of gold,-which, about the throne, becomes offensive almost to the gilt-gingerbread degree. Mr. Edward Adams's illustrated treatise on the Polyehronzatie Ornament of Italy furnishes a lesson in that abstinence from gold which marked the development of the Raphaelesque style, and the growth of fancy. Har- mony, power of execution, and exuberant invention, imparted a splendour which the carver and gilder cannot command.
Still the Houses of Parliament constitute a great "step in the right direction"; and there is a very general disposition to follow it. Decorative artists are rising into existence; though as yet they belong rather to the handicraft and shopkeeping order than to that of art. That is where we still fail. We begin at the wrong end: we neglect principles and ideas, and elaborate processes. Our theatres are almost the only class of archi- tecture among us, of which the style springs directly from the purposes of the building; and accordingly they are perhaps the most complete in their kind of anything we have. Our street and domestic architecture is a wretched farrago of borrowed incongruities and impertinences, of con- tractors' meannesses, of trading counterfeits, and substitutes for ideas. Our manufactures exhibit constructive skill, but want the true feeling of plastic art. Everywhere there is want of invention. Could we but join the spirit of art to the body of skill, we should display what the world has not yet seen-the art of the middle ages joined to the manufacturing power of the nineteenth century.
We have glanced at a collection of photographs, brought over from Ame- rica by Mr. Highschool, a professor of analytical chemistry, who has turned his attainments in that branch to use in photography. The collection is remarkable on two accounts. It comprises some views of Niagara, which convey a more lively idea of the Falls-have more the aspect of living reality-than anything that we have seen : it is like seeing the Falls themselves in a diminishing-mirror. And there are specimens of photo- graphs containing the germs of colouring; in other words, the colours of the natural objects are indicated, as well as the light and 'shade. We are assured that this is effected exclusively by the solar influence acting on the prepared plate; and a distinction of appearance in the surface is pointed out between this spontaneous colouring and the colouring by hand. Its some instances this distinction is unequivocal; in others we have the as- surance of a gentleman whose word we have no reason to doubt.
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