ART.
IN that small group of artists who may be said to have given a new character to the painting of English country life, and to have shown the possibility of treating that subject both real- istically and poetically, George Mason was at once the least known to the outside public and the most respected by his artistic brethren. He died about 1875, only a year before his great rivals, Walker and Pinwell, and thus England lost almost at one blow the three painters who had discovered that her land- scape and her children contained all the elements of poetry and beauty for which an artist could wish.
The art of each of these men was of a special, individual kind, and in the case of Piuwell and Walker was most strongly and strangely influenced by personal peculiarities. In Mason's case, the style, though equally distinct, was far less egotistical; his art had a serenity, a breadth, and a freedom from self-conscious- ness, which could not be found in the work of either of those artists with whom he is naturally associated.
Though so short a time has elapsed since his death, his paintings are little known to the general public ; and as most of them are but small in scale and unimportant in subject, they have been but little reproduced by the engravers. Indeed, line engraving is peculiarly unfitted to reproduce the beauty of Mason's work, a beauty which depends less upon resolute per- fection of form and skill of hand than upon the intense sym- pathy which the artist feels for the subjects of his pictures and the manner in which he communicates that feeling to all those who study his work. Throughout his compositions of English rustic life there runs an element of tender roughness, if we may use such an apparent paradox ; the beauty of his figures and their actions is consistent with a certain superficial want of refinement, and seems to be derived from the study of an earlier civilisation. But upon this we must not dwell, our object in this notice being chiefly to call attention to the fact that the two finest pictures of Mason's life, "The Evening Hymn" and "The Harvest Moon," have now been etched, and etched. most successfully, by M. Waltner and Mr. R. Macbeth (the last elected Associate of the Academy). The former of these has been done some little time, and it will suffice to say that in our opinion it is thoroughly successful. The latter plate has only just been finished by Mr. Macbeth, and the first-proof of the etching is now to be seen side by side with the original picture at Mr. Dunthorne's, in Vigo Street. Mr. Macbeth has done his work supremely well, as all of those who know his powers as an etcher expected; and we can say in praise of this work that it gives the spectator pleasure of a similar kind to that which is gained from the picture itself. A little of the luminous quality of the colouring has been lost, as was almost inevitable, and there is a patch of whitish cloak on the right-hand of the picture, which is unnecessarily out of tune with the rest; but with these exceptions, of which one was unavoidable and the other trivial, the etching is entirely successful, and is, perhaps, the most successful reproduction of a celebrated picture that has been done for many years. It is finer than Waltner's "Evening Hymn," for two reasons,—one is that it has been executed on twice as large a scale, and this enables it to preserve more of the character of the original artist's work, —enables the etcher to have used a bolder, freer manner of interpretation, more akin to the original painting; the other reason is that it possesses that extreme sympathy with the colours of the work it reproduces, in which consists Mr. Mac- beth's greatest power as an etcher. The original is full of colour, and so, in its way, is the reproduction. Lastly, it has the feeling of quasi-originality about it, which is hard to define, but which almost inevitably belongs to a copy which has been made, not mechanically or servilely, but by an artist whose own personality was not entirely banished from his work. In saying this, we have no wish to depreciate the worth or beauty of M. Waltner's etch- ing generally, or of that of "The Evening Hymn" in par- ticular. His work at its best is most exquisitely skilful, and far more minutely accurate than Mr. Macbeth's, and perhaps it is because the latter artist has previously only etched his own oil paintings,twhich has given its peculiar character to the plate of which we have been speaking. We would recommend all of our readers who take an interest in Art to go to Mr. Dun- thorne's, and look at this picture of Mason's, and say whether there is so much need to go to France for the filling of our picture galleries, public and private, when we can produce such work as this at home. It must be remembered that Walker, Pinwell, and Mason were all painting at the same time work of similar quality to this, work which owed its beauty to no tradi- tion, and which found its chief subjects in such every-day scenes as a village alms-house, a country lane at twilight, or some reapers and their lasses returning home under a harvest moon.
In both Walker and Pinwell's painting, there is to be traced, by those who care to look beneath the surface, an element of recklessness which, if it does not mar their beauty, at least causes it to affect us strangely. We feel that tragedy is not far off, though "fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows." This is, perhaps, more evident in Pinwell's pictures than in those of Walker, but it distinctly exists in both. There is a certain touch of " swagger " in the last-men- tioned artist's work, a tinge of uneasiness and of weari- ness in the characters of his pictures. And in Pinwell, as we have said, this is more plainly evident; it is a very strange, half-real, half-poetical world with which he is concerned, and many of his compositions are analogous in the impression they give to the spectator with those oil North-country ballads which, commencing quietly with a maiden at her spinning-wheel, or a page riding across the heather, end in shame and death. Though rarely displaying the tragedy, the artist gives us all its elements. We feel that the love so commenced, can, as Lawrence once said, "scarcely end in happiness and honour, even if it be not cut short by the dagger."
But not to dwell upon this point, the mental flavour of Mason's work has none of this suggestiveness, and its chief interest is owing to another view. A more educated and a more cultivated man than either of those with whom we have been associating him, he was also, at the time of his best work, considerably older. He knew, very soon, what he could do, and what he could not. His early pictures of Italy are, with but few exceptions, of little worth, and, so far as we have been acquainted with them, contain no faintest hint of his later success. They differ in no essential way from the work which any moderately intelligent and skilful painter would do in such a country. But with his first pictures of English rustic life, we find that the artist has gained a power which is at once delightful and peculiar to himself. His children stand and run and play as no other children that our
artists have painted; there is a reciprocity between his figures. and the landscapes in which they are placed, which renders them mutually serviceable. Perhaps the most special characteristic- of the work, taken as a whole, is its serenity, its absolute con- viction that the thing it displays is sufficient. Occasionally, a subject is painted, such as "The Evening Hymn" or "The Harvest Moon;" but more frequently there is no subject, pro- perly so called, nothing but a child standing in a meadow, or a.. boy leaning on a stile ; a girl driving her cattle home in the twilight, or sitting in the shadow of the pine-woods.
The flavour, however, of these simple pictures is exquisite,. and it is a strange fact that, as works of art, they will hold their- own in any company. Three causes may partly account for this,—that they give us truly what is almost unknown in Eng- lish painting, the combination of figure and landscape; not landscape with figures in it, not figures with landscape behind.•
them, but the two in just relation and subordination to each. other. Again, they are exquisitely graceful, and that with the kind of grace which is more akin to dignity than to elegance ; which smacks of the Parthenon rather than the dancing- academy. Again, the pictures show throughout a colour
faculty which, though limited in its range, is, within that range, perfect. More lovely harmonies in the minor key have never been executed than those which Mason paints..
But, after all, these qualities are insufficient to account for the charm which this painter exercises over many minds, and in criticising his work it is even more than ordinarily difficult to discover in what this charm consists It seems to. us, however, as if it must be somehow connected with the innocence and simplicity of his people, with the fact that he, has really been able to grasp pictorially all that makes child- hood and girlhood so beautiful,—the freedom of movement, the pausesof wonder, the movements of doubt, the grace of gesture,.
and the outbursts of feeling,—in fact, to give expression to all that a fair, unthwarted life might feel and show, when it was developing under natural conditions. He has been blamed for- making his children too idyllic, for giving too much classicat grace to their movements ; but after all, what we call classic grace is nothing but the beauty that comes from the free move- ments of a healthy body. The Greeks were not taught to turn their toes out, or anything of that sort, by an Athenian- D'Egville.
To dwellers in the noise and bustle of London, amongst the thousand jealousies, enmities, and falsities of the metropolis,. there is something inexpressibly refreshing in these hints of uncomplicated, unthoughtful, rustic life. We ask ourselves with pleasure which is almost pain,—Do children really live such< lives as these, somewhere beyond the city's glare and gas ? Are there really country lanes down which wander at twilight, hand- in-hand, the girls of the village singing the Evening Hymn, or where the lovers linger amidst the shadows and brightness of the "harvest moon "P Mr. Mason takes us to Arcadia,—that is. his power, and his secret is that it is an Arcadia not too remote, not too impossible. If his peasants are more simple, more graceful, and more poetic than experience teaches us, they are. at least not so in any conventional manner ; they do not ape the graces of "the garish town," they borrow no sham senti- ment, and are indebted to no Sunday-school teacher. Just a little too graceful and sympathetic for the average are they, but seen, as he shows them to us, in the twilight, we can almost believe in their truth ; they are, at all events, such as they should be, if not such as they are. And of one thing we may at least be proud,—that the work is,. in its essentials, thoroughly English. Something of beauty- may have been gained by the painter during his stay in Italy, but the atmosphere of his work is wholly and entirely that of his own country. His pictures are little colour-cameos of English life, in which, through the crust of ignorance and superficial ugliness, the artist has penetrated to the fact that our skies and' our fields are still as beautiful, and our women and children as graceful, innocent, and true, as any that can be found "across- the sea," or that lived in former years. All honour to him, that in a short artistic life he preached so hopeful a gospel ; we have enough pessimists in Art, to render it very necessary. Here, at least, is something in painting which savours neither of the boulevard nor the casino, but is as fresh as the air on the Sussex Downs, and as national as "Rule, Britannia."
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