ART.
THE BURLINGTON HOUSE EXHIBITION.
THE visitor to the present Exhibition at the Academy who craves the stimulus of variety will certainly not be dis- appointed. If he wishes to be soothed by the opiate of Venetian colour, with its gorgeous richness and unfathomable depth, the Tintorettos from Hampton Court hung in the big room are all that can be desired in this direction. But if after these have worked their spell the visitor to the gallery feels the want of daylight and ozone, he has but to go into the room where hang some of the freshest and most breezy sea-pictures of Henry Moore. If these after a while appear too much like mere windows opening on to the sea to satisfy the sense of rhythmic beauty in design, he need only fare a little further to find some noble works by Wilson and Constable. Again, when cloyed by the cheap beauty of Romney's ladies, an antidote is to be found in the throne of Minos or a plan of the drains of the Labyrinth, for a room is devoted to the wonderful discoveries in Crete of the Palace of Knossos. The mixture of old and new pictures is of great interest, and one could wish that the policy had been pursued with a little more boldness; that some, at least, of Henry Moore's sea-pieces had been hung on the same wall with older work instead of being kept apart in a separate room. Here we are brought face to face with a question. Does the attempt to realise the intensity and whiteness of daylight out of doors, and the consequent high tone of modern landscapes, make them as beautiful as adornments to the wall of a room as older work ? A picture such as the noble Lake Scene (No. 1) of Wilson seems independent of everything, the very artificiality of its stately composition keeps the subject completely within its frame. We feel that what the artist has shown us is the whole. It is not a great sweep of country of which the artist was free to include as much or as little as he chose. It is rather the whole, and beyond what he chose to include within the boundaries of his picture, nothing exists. A dignified and harmonious decoration expressed in terms of sky, lake, hills, and trees is presented to us, and not a fragment of natural scenery isolated from its surroundings by a frame. Now look at Henry Moore's sea-piece, Nearing the Needles (No. 137). In spite of fine colour, balanced composition, and most masterly execution, there is a sense that we are not looking at a self-contained whole. Rather we seem to look out of a window upon an unusually beautiful piece of sky and
sea ; and if the artist had chosen, he could hare enlarged his' window or narrowed it, and though the picture would have been different, it need not have been worse. These considera- tions raise the question, What do we want a picture to be ? Is it to be a creation—a new idea—which we shall never meet with in reality even if we search the world over for it ? Or do we want the artist to record for us something which we feel, had we been fortunate enough to have been present at a certain place at a certain time, we should have seen for our- selves. The comparison might be worked out into endless detail, and with figure-pictures as well as landscapes. But here we must leave the subject, merely indicating the problem, and not attempting a solution.
The first two rooms contain a number of fine landscapes by English painters. Beside the Wilson already mentioned, which is so remarkable for the largeness and freedom of its handling, is another picture by the same painter, which is of great beauty. It is the Atalanta and Meleager (No. 28). Though not so architectural in the balance of its composition as the Lake Scene, the picture is a very beautiful one, with its filmy veiled colouring. The name of Peter de Wint is usually associated with water-colour, but here we see him as an oil- painter. The Landscape (No. 5), though not so good as the cornfield at South Kensington, which it resembles in subject, is a fine and poetic rendering of English country. So sombre is it in colour that one cannot help wondering if it has been a victim to the madness which seized people some half-century ago, when pictures used to be varnished with thick brown compounds to give them what was then called "tone." Among the most beautiful things here of its kind must be reckoned John Crome's Household Heath (No. 35). It is a small canvas, recalling the composition of the famous picture in the National Gallery. There is nothing that words can lay hold of and describe in this picture, it is so simple, so solid, and so painter-like. Quite unlike in point of view is Constable's Salisbury Cathedral (No. 33), with its audacities of execution. But wonderful it is, though little more than a sketch, with the dark ground of the canvas showing everywhere between the vigorous brush-marks. Here we see the artist at work, analysing the forms and masses, laying his foundations with security, making sure of essentials before considering the re- finements of the painting. The finest of the three large pictures by this master here is the Leaping Horse (No. 14). In it there is seen Constable's wonderful power of building up a noble and coherent structure, all the parts of which contribute to the whole.
Of the six pictures by Turner, the most beautiful are the Modern Italy (No. 23) and the Fifth Plague of Egypt (No. 66). The former is a wonderful vision of light and the beauty of harmonious spaces receding into finite distance. The good preservation of the picture has left unspoiled the marvellous subtlety of the division and subdivision of the high tones out of which this astonishingly luminous work is made. The other Turner is an earlier work, and much darker. The striking feature of the picture is the storm clouds in the centre. Has any one before or since ever realised the in- tangible, yet definite, movement of clouds in the way in which this painter realised them ? From Turner to Cuyp is a long drop, and the latter does not gain by being seen by the room- ful as he is here. A single picture might look warm and sunny, but when seen in rows they appear to be examples of the combined effects of yellow ochre and linseed oil.
In the last room is an unexpected portrait by Landseer of the sculptor Gibson (No. 118). It is not much elaborated, but the head is so finely felt, and has such true painter's instinct, that for it we would willingly sacrifice a wilderness of dogs, horses, and stags, with all their titles, jocose and senti- mental. Landseer, like Millais, in his last phase atoned for terrible faults of bad taste by every now and then producing a fine piece of pure painting.
Lovers of Venetian art are provided with a satisfying group of three pictures in the big room. The two large Tintorettos have come up from Hampton Court, and between them bangs a splendid Veronese. First-rate Tintorettos are rare outside Venice, and if neither of the two pictures here is a work of the painter at his very best, they are no mean examples of what an eighteenth-century guide-book called "furious Tintoret." Esther before Ahasuerus (No. 53) is the finer in colour of the two here, and the depth and vigour
of the shadows out of which emerges the crowd of figures are characteristic of the master. Notably fine is the head of the beautiful woman who bends down to support the fainting Esther. The other picture, The Nine Muses (No. 57), seems to have suffered a good deal from the discoloration of the varnish, but this cataract of human forms is con- trolled in a way that few besides Tintoretto have ever dared to attempt. The linking of the figures one to another as they recede from the central seated Muse is a piece of splendid arrangement. The Venus and Mars (No. 55) by Veronese is unusual and striking both in colour and composition. At first sight the figures appear to be a little awkward, but after closer study many things which seemed accidental reveal their organic connection with the whole. The head of Venus is a fine piece of expressive painting, more human and less ideally beautiful than the goddesses of Giorgione and Titian perhaps ; but this fair- haired Venus has a wonderful amount of life and animation in her face. Mars is a Venetian gentleman ; but what a colour harmony Veronese has made of him, of which the cloak is the central feature. It is made of a colour in which russet and lilac interchange, and the effect is as original as it is beautiful. The preservation of the picture leaves little to he desired, and if there seems a stain of varnish on one of the legs of Venus, the surface of the picture shows little sign of • having been rubbed down, a process which has ruined so many masterpieces. These three great Venetian pictures dominate the whole of the big room in which they are hung. There is such a rush of full-blooded life in them that in their neighbourhood Rubens looks thin and Frans Hals cheap. The present time is one of scrupulous care and destructive criticism. Wealth of imagination and creative force are not characteristics of our epoch. Therefore it is good to look back to the golden age of Venice, when the energy of her arts was like that of a river in flood, and productive impulse was not stimulated by the
Previous page
