ART.
THE GROSVENOR GALLERY.—I. GAINSBOROUGH. TILE present exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery of Gainsborough's paintings is very incomplete, and therefore comparatively uninteresting. Many of the painter's finest portraits and landscapes are absent, and in their stead a good half of the collection is taken up with likenesses of little interest, either from their personality or their merit.
Nearly all the best have been seen within comparatively late years at the Academy Exhibition of Old Masters, and to tell the truth, seen to better advantage. The collection seems to• have been made in a somewhat perfunctory manner, as a pendant to the one of Sir Joshua's works which was held at this gallery last winter ; and those who have been responsible for the choice of the works seem to have shown little qualification for the post. Moreover, the truth is that the present writer is growing a little tired of Gainsborough's portraits. They are now suffering from the reaction consequent upon the over-estimation in which they have been held; and they have little in common, either in conception or execution, with the practice of modern portraitpainting. " So much the better !" we fancy many of our readers will say ; but such is not our opinion. With all their merits,. they are still the result of the false, artificial conception of portrait-painting which was prevalent a hundred years ago ; the ideal of the Book of Beauty," rather than the " Book of Nature." We do not deny that there is a certain charm about the style of the portraiture of this time which is at first very attractive,—the rose-leaf complexions ; the arched eyebrows; the large hats and flowing draperies ; the unveiled bosoms and arms ; the satins, feathers, pearls, and the rich surroundings of beauty which at first " takes us in." A hard phrase that last; but is it not a true one? Did any number of human beings ever look so much alike as these portraits, except in the conventionalised eyes of a fashionable painter ? Were any number of fair women so universally fair and smooth of skin, with such curled lips, such large eyes, such placid smiles? Was the eyebrow always so arched, the finger so taper, the foot so small Of course, the question is "answered in the asking." And, even beyond this, is it true that when we have granted all deductions for the conventionalities of the time, when we have ceased to expect minister individuality and detailed truth, that the art of these portraits is so very precious ? Let us divest ourselves for a moment of all preconceived ideas, and ask whether, if we were ignorant of the name of Gainsborough, what we should find to admire in the majority of the portraits shown. in the present Gallery ? It is too late at the present day to describe any of the better-known portraits in detail ; no one wants to enter again upon the never-ending discussion about "The Blue Boy,' or hear anecdotes about " William Pitt " or " Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire ;" that style of criticism has been done to death of late years. Let us forget all his fashionable clients, all hisattraction for the historian, the archaeologist, and the snob, and ask ourselves why this painter of ours should live as an artist, and on what special qualities we should found our admiration of his work ?
The first matter that becomes evident, goes far to account for his popularity,—at least for his enduring fame, for popularity is hardly the right word in this instance. Behind his conventionalities—which, after all, are but the fruit of the time in which he lived—we see a sincere
and singularly unaffected artist, lacking in all the higher imaginative qualities, but simple and strong wherever he is not forced into triviality or affectation. We say wherever he is not forced, for it is difficult to see how an artist could make a simple, unaffected picture of a fashionable lady of the last century, who either insisted upon every puff and furbelow, or wished to be painted as a rustic maiden (with elaboratelydressed hair) scribbling verses upon the tree-trunks. Even in the portraiture of these, however, Gainsborough shows an amount of sobriety and solid English common-sense which remove him very far from his great rival, Reynolds. Sir Joshua, one sees, had plenty of imagination (not of the highest kind, though), and, at his best, great insight into character ; and, as we said last year, amid the howls of our critical brethren, was in much of his work rather vulgar and snobbish, delighting in misplaced luxury of surrounding, and much given to sham simplicity. Gainsborough has not one whit of imagination, and but little insight into character, and has no trace whatever of the affectations or vulgarities into which Sir Joshua continually fell. He had, we say, but little insight into character ; but that as it stands is scarcely true. It would be nearer the mark to say that he read character without any great desire to penetrate below the surface. It was, in portraiture, the outside which charmed him ; he delighted chiefly in an unruffled exterior. Never have women been painted so well from a superficial point of view. The painter seems to have loved their prettiness of face and prettiness of attire ; their sweetness, their frivolity, and their grace, with equal fervour. And with a bland, unconscious cynicism he made them all very much alike. If we may exaggerate a little in order to make our meaning more plain, we would say that his painting is, as compared with that of Reynolds, both sombre and stolid. It is plain to affectation,—the work of a practical, one-idea'd man, who, though raised from poverty to wealth by his industry and genius, always remains at heart a son of the soil. We have come to the great secret of his worth in this last sentence. He was not only a great artist, but a man, and essentially one of ourselves. What little of the courtier overlaid his character, is easily scratched off, and beneath it we find a quiet, practical artist, —a rustic, not a dweller in great cities, at heart a lover of shade rather than sunlight, of Nature rather than artifice.
He would have been the last man in the world to have claimed for any of his portraits the high-falutiu' admiration which has been lately showered upon them ; he painted them to live, just as he painted the houses of the nobility and gentry. In so far as he was a great artist, it was as a landscape-painter ; and it is notable that even in the busiest years of his life, at the very height of his popularity, when he must have had more portrait commissions than he was able to execute, he still found time to exhibit large landscapes by the side of his portraiture, sometimes sending as many as six to a single exhibition. On
these ultimately his fame will rest. His plainness, his sincerity, his common-sense, and his artistic power combine to snake his portraits valuable; and these pictures will always remain good, serviceable, honest pieces of work, of which any one might well be proud, but in them there is no quality of genius. Neither in depth of insight nor splendour of colouring do they approach the work of his great rival ; a Gainsborough portrait is to one by Reynolds, almost as is an" Ouless " -to a " Watts." Nor in qualities of execution will he stand the comparison. Though there is not the inequality of Sir Joshua's painting; though, thanks to his not playing tricks with all kinds of mediums, his pictures are, as a rule, in a state of better preservation ; yet his handling is frequently dull and heavy, approaching to a mechanical smoothness, and the colour demands praise less for its depth and power than its delicacy and harmoniousness. If we may use a comparison of sounds, we would say that Gainsborough's pictures are harmonies of tint resembling the music of a " sylvan pipe"; while in the full, luscious tones of Sir Joshua's workswe bear the deep notes of the organ. It is notable in this connection that when Gainsborough paints landscapes, his colour almost invariably strengthens and deepens in tone, grows at once more sombre and more rich, till one is tempted to trace some connection of cause and effect between thin delicate tints and his fashionable beauties, and conversely between the rich colouring and the country scenery. But, in truth, as the strength of his likenesses was their simplicity and air of Nature, so, when he came to the .painting of landscape, he found his real subject, and succeeded in a way and to an extent
that Reynolds could never have attained. His character, as we have said, being, in the main. a rustic one, torn and bred in the provinces, and but thinly overlaid with town prejudices, he seems to have gone back every now and then, like Antreus, to his mother-earth, and gained fresh life and strength from the contact. In the best Reynolds landscape, we seem to smell the sawdust, and see the oil-lamps half hidden beneath the boughs ; but even in the most hasty smudges of waving tree and rolling cloud which Gainsborough dashed-in behind his Dukes and Duchesses, there is the scent of the flowers and the freshness of the winds. And in his pure landscapes there is not ouly the superficial aspect, but the real secret of the country, its quietude, its innocence, and its security, the absence of fret, the simplicity of intention, the fullness of meaning and delight in even the simplest things. It is rather strange to notice that though 'in the landscape backgrounds which he continually introduces into his portraits, there is a wild rush of floating branches and clouds, and a geueral aspect of unrest, yet iu the pure landscape pictures the prevailing impression is one of peace. The word " solemn " would be a fitting one to denote the character of this branch of his work ; and there is a curious element of unforced dignity which Gainsborough's landscapes possess in a very marked degree. Technically, of course, they are in some ways infinitely inferior to the landscape of the present day. Their drawing is done upon a vicious system of generalisation which has fortunately passed away ; the clouds are painted in great rolling masses, the foliage iu a succession of loops and twirls ; the composition is conventional to a degree ; and so on in many otIn r details. But when all these drawbacks are made, there remains work in which the nature and the beauty survive all the imperfections of their rendering,—pictures iu which the rich, deep colour is instinct with the freshness of the woods and waters ; in which every detail is bathed in atmosphere, and each incident helps the main impression. This ()eluting is not alone lovely from a technical point of view, but lovely because it has sprung from the heart as well as the hand ; because every manifestation of its power only shows an instance of its artist's sympathy for the shadow and the sunshine of his native laud.
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