FINE ARTS.
THE ROYAL ACADEMY EXHIBITION.
A SECOND visit to the Royal Academy has confirmed our impression that this is an exhibition of more than accustomed interest. Works in the highest class of subject, though not perhaps more numerous than usual, are of a more equable rate of excellence. The best themes are generally illustrated by the best men ; and the insults to the Bible, lampoons on history, or libels on great names in literature, are few. Of the average worth of the collection we have already expressed an opinion. Nor must we omit to record, in no narrow or exclusive spirit, one occasion for fair congratulation : among all the foreign works, of which, in various walks of art, a sprinkling appears on these walls, there is scarcely any Which does not display a more rooted and hurtful mannerism than works, otherwise of nearly corresponding merit, by our own artists. We do not wish to force a conclusion from this as to the comparative excellence of the foremost representatives of the British and foreign schools; or to strike an exact balance in single cases. We only seek to establish one assured ground for hope in the vitality, the opportunities, and the future of our own art.
This hope for the future has already become in some cases a present fact. Within a year or two we have witnessed the most significant signs of who are to be, as the French term it, masters of the situation. High purpose, seconded by earnest endeavour, has declared itself so strongly among some of our latest aspirants, and they have now worked out for themselves so solid a position, that any slurring over of their claims has become an anachronism, no less than an injustice. The classification according to Academicians, Associates, and outsiders, has ceased to repre- sent our real position ; for we find the highest points of attainment among the elite of the two extremes. We are in a moment of transition. The impulse comes from without, not passing in regular gradation through the whole body : and we expect to see the supremacy, while the time ad- vances for the worthiest of its present holders to relinquish it, pass into other hands altogether. We will not then, on this occasion, search through the rooms to find out what pictures are by Academicians or others long familiar to the public ; but, taking the several classes of subjects, will bring together whatever works are assimilated by their own merits.
The most important Scriptural subject is Mr. Armitage's " Samson" (631),—the grinding, blinded, in the prison-house. Like the " Aholibah"
of last year, though for somewhat different reasons, this is an attempt of the extremest danger : a little would have made it mean—a little more, comic. Mr. Armitage has avoided both pitfalls ; yet without any sacri- fice of that nationalism which, strange in feature and accessory, and ap- proaching the grotesque, tempted sorely to the second excess. The theme is in itself of grand proportions ; and its true sense has been caught. There is an indignant protest of endurance in the Samson as he faces the light with his blind eyes, and turns his face from his taskmasters and the petty jeers of his tormentors. The hungry hate of these—men, women, and children, and those who watch him through the prison-bars—is fully rendered, without violence. There may appear at first to be too much variety of country in the picture. The sharers in Samson's teak are Africans, of different race : but this recalls the last bitterness of his grief—he is in prison, joined with slaves or criminals. Independently of its intellectual qualities, this is a work of high artistic standing.
Mr. Herbert exhibits "A study for The Judgment of Daniel,' being the centre figure of a composition now in progress " (84). The boy Daniel, standing up to speak the Divine denunciation, yet retains his human reverence, and knows of how small account is he himself. It is hard to say what may be, in a completed work, the effect of a single figure ; but the purpose, if we read it aright, is deep, subtile, and lofty. The colour is both attractive and dignified ; and the study altogether shows Mr. Herbert's command of means.
No. 229, "The Flight into Egypt—Mary meditating on the Prophecy of Simeon," by Mr. Redgrave, is a work of moderate success; de- pendent for its elevation on that easiest of resources, an universal tone of twilight blue laid level like a tea-board surface, but presenting some of its more essential components in the figure of the infant Christ. The at- tainment, whatever its sum may be, must be counted to Mr. Redgrave's credit ; as no glories or symbolic attributes of any kind are resorted to in explanation. The kneeling St. Joseph is mean in character, and too small.
Our past acquaintance with Mr. Lear makes us vouch for it that his " Christ borne from the Mount" (202) did not deserve that immediate proximity to the ceiling to which the hangers have condemned it. Here is a woj-k, evidently not destitute of severe feeling and concentration, utterly lost, save in so far as the eye is drawn to it by what appears to be its crude colour. We guess, however, that portions stand much in need of finish ; nor do we judge the sentiment to be distinctively sacred. We may couple in one sentence of reprobation "The Sermon on the Mount"( 678), by Mr. Le Jeune, and "St. John leading the Blessed Virgin to his home after the Crucifixion" (513), by Mr. Dobson. The latter is perhaps the more forlorn and sneaking ; but the former is not less dead to all higher sense. Mr. Le Jenne conceives Christ (we hope the words do not violate the reverence of our thought) as an actor step- ping on to the footlights to deliver one of his points. Equally wretched, and, if possible, some shade more pretentious and self-satisfied, is Mr. O'Neil in No. 514—the reading of the chronicles to Ahasuerus. Does he really imagine that moonlight turns a man at a few paces' distance into a blue ghost, or that any one will accept such as the fact because Mr. O'Neil feigns it ? Yet this is the least of his offences. The remaining religious pictures may be briefly disposed of. Mr. Crabb's "Ahab in Naboth's Vineyard" (424) is not without thoughtful intention in character, and shows a strong feeling for colour. There is a rather nice arrangement of colour also, with some sentiment, in Mr. Des- surne's "Maid of Judah" (512) : but it sins wofully in drawing. The simplicity of material of " King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba ' (332), by Mr. Woolnoth, is preferable to the tinselly commonplace he often gives us. "Job and the Messengers" (133), by Mr. J. T. Linnell, and "The Accusation of Haman" (329), by Mr. W. J. Grant, are soulless versions in a descending scale : and Vr. Vinter has managed to divest his subject —" The Recognition of Jeroboam's Wife by Ahijah" No. 697—of the small sum of meaning it ever possessed for pictorial purposes. We may, however, add, that the Academy, in placing this picture at its present height, have left the critic a choice of two matters for wonder—either that they should have bestowed their last gold medal upon Mr. Vinter, or that they should now adopt this opposite method of giving him a lift. " St. John writing the Apocalypse " (752), by M. S. Scheffer, and H. Chauvin's "Flight into Egypt" (652), illustrate, by their dull colour and generally conventional treatment, our opening remarks on foreign art. Of Mr. Millais's Biblical subject, "The Return of the Dove to the Ark" (651), we shall speak together with his other pictures. Mr. Maclise challenges all comers to the lists of historic art with his large work—" Caxton's Printing-office in the Almonry at Westminster" (67). Mr. Maclise's genius is a great fact, the sense of which comes on us with fresh power at every new embodiment it receives. There is an immense elastic energy in his productions—a luxuriance of imagination, action, and accessory. He is one of the few men who can afford to do more for a subject than it strictly demands, without weakening it : and this because the informing and combining mind speaks in his works. The comprehensiveness of view with which he undertakes a subject is exemplified in the picture before us. An ordinary painter would have found himself amply occupied with the one great event of the proof-sheet of "the first complete book published in England " ; but Mr. Mediae must carry out his work in its minor relations not less than in its sub- stance—rounding it off, as it were, in all directions : a bias which might be traced, we think, from the artist's mind to his practice with no over- strained intricacy of parallel. He reminds us, therefore, that " the de- signer, the illuminator, the wood-engraver and the bookbinder, all worked at their several trades in the office of, the first English printer." Of the composition as a whole, which is crowded with figures, these general remarks must suffice : were we to enter into the special part which each personage bears in the action, the task would grow under our hand; and the copious variety of Mr. Mediae is too well known to re- quire proof. But the discrimination of character in the three royal bro- thers is too fine to be passed over in silence. The King smiles, interested, but merely as at a surprising piece of ingenuity ; Clarence is simply a spectator, present there in his brave person, but one whom the matter touches not ; Gloucester alone, politic and secret in his silence, revolves the uses of the new power and what is to be his own share in profiting
by or dealing with it. With Caxton himself we are not so thoroughly satisfied. He is intelligent, but scarcely so imposing as the associations
of the occasion warrant : nor is the resemblance to the received portrait at all strongly pronounced. Perhaps we should notice the monopoly of bright colour by the left hand and centre as a fault of arrangement.
We come next to a work of very prominent importance, by a gentle- man who has hitherto been a stranger to the walls of the Royal Academy, —Mr. F. Madox Brown's large picture, " Geoffrey Chaucer reading the ' Legend of Custance' to Edward III and his Court at the Palace of Sheen, on the Anniversary of the Black Prince's Forty-fifth Birthday" (380). This work cannot fail of establishing at once for Mr. Brown a reputation of the first class ; which, indeed, he might have secured before now had he contributed more regularly to our annual exhibitions. And we confess to some feeling of self-satisfaction in believing that, while we watched with interest in various exhibitions the surefooted and unpre- cipitate career of this artist, we belonged to a comparatively select band. His works have, as we have said, been few in number, and of a different class from those which, to judge from the circle of their admirers, would seem to possess a talisman somewhat akin to the enigmatic " ductlanie" of Jaques. Yet there must doubtless be many who have not forgotten and will not easily forget the solemn beauty of " The Bedside of Lear" ; and we will even hope that some few must have received, like ourselves, a potent and lasting impression from his cartoon of " The Dead Harold brought to William the Conqueror on the Field of Hastings,"—the only real work we have yet seen in connexion with that now dead-ridden sub- ject, a very knacker of artistic hobbyhorses ; for here alone was present the naked devil of victory as he is, gnashing and awful. We believe that there is no one individual in our younger generation of art whose influ- ence has been more felt among his fellow-aspirants, whose hand has been more in the leavening of the mass, than Mr. Madox Brown's. Of his pre- sent picture our space will not permit a detailed description, which is fully supplied in the catalogue. The subject is a noble one, illustrating the first perfect utterance of English poetry. The fountain whose clear jet rises in the foreground, as well as the sower scattering seed in the wake of the plough at the furthest distance, have probably a symbolical allusion. Among the hap- piest embodiments of character, we would particularize the languid and wasted figure of the Black Prince, propped up in the cushions of his litter; that of his wife, full of a beauty saddened to tenderness, as she sustains in her lap the arm that shall no more be heavy upon France ; the foreign troubadour who looks up at Chaucer—his feeling of rivalry absorbed in admiration; and the capitally conceived ]'ester, lost to the ministry of his mystery, spell-bound and open-mouthed. For the figure of Chaucer—whose action and the appearance of speaking conveyed in his features are excel- lent—Mr. Brown has chosen to adopt a portraiture less familiar than the one which he followed when he had occasion to introduce the poet in his picture of " Wycliff." In effect, the work aims at representing broad sunlight, a task perhaps the most difficult which a painter can undertake. Mr. Brown has been unusually successful ; and the colour throughout is alike brilliant and delicate. It may be said, indeed, that, owing to the great variety of hues in the draperies, the picture has at first sight a rather confusing appearance. This might, perhaps, have been lessened by restricting each figure, as far as possible, to a single prevailing colour, and by a more sparing admission of ornament and minute detail of cos- tume. Yet this degree of indistinctness may be mainly caused by the light in which the picture is hung, casting a kind of glare over the entire surface, and rendering it impracticable to obtain anything like a good view of it except by retreating laterally to as great a distance as possible. These, however, are but slight or questionable drawbacks. Upon the whole, we have to congratulate Mr. Brown on a striking suc- cess ; a success not to be won, as he must know well, without much doubt and vexation, and many fluctuating phases of study, and whose chief value, in his case, however worthy the immediate result, consists in the attainment of that clear-sightedness which can still look forward. " Laurence Saunders, the second of the Protestant Martyrs who suffer- ed in the third year of Queen Mary " (381), is one of the finest works Mr. Cope has produced. The sorrow of the theme is a silent sorrow, and its passion a contained passion. There is a sense throughout of the motive which sustains the wife knocking at the prison-gate, and the martyr pass- ing to execution ; nor, if their's is a tearless resignation, is the sombre fanaticism of the monk who follows in the procession to death a frowning bigotry, but preserved with inflexible self-possession. The general reserve of this the third compartment of the picture, its judicial orderliness with- out stiffness, and the thoughtful incident of the garland laid in the mar- tyr's path, entitle it perhaps to the chief praise. But there is evidence of the artist's self-respect in all parts of the work : the backgrounds es- pecially, and all relating to the getting-up of the picture, are treated with the_ resources of advanced practice ; and the colour is less inky than usual with Mr. Cope, though still chargeable with this blemish.
The eminence of some among the works above noticed has caused our remarks to extend to such a length that we must hold over several histo- rical pictures till next week.
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