ART.
THE WATER-COLOURS AT THE DUDLEY GALLERY. THERE is sore tribulation at the absence of Mr. Burne Jones, and the decline of the Archaic school at the Dudley Gallery. We are heartily glad that it is going, and shall be more so when it is gone. It was a sickly kind of sentimentalism, born with a weak constitu- tion, and not fit to live long in this climate. The true spirit of British Art has always been of a more robust kind, and finds its healthiest outcome in work of a different sort. These pseudo- pre-Raphaelite painters may be romantic, or melancholy, or poetical, to their hearts' content, but if they would condescend to open their minds to the beauties of nature constantly before- their eyes, in London as well as in the country, they might learn that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy. We therefore do not join in the chorus of regrets by contemporary critics that imaginative painting is at a. discount at the Egyptian Hall. To judge by the few remaining specimens now exhibited, sentimental archaicism is nearly pumped out, and although many of the remaining drawings may be fairly open to the charge brought against them of being common-place, still it is to them that we must look for healthy germs of future art.
At present there certainly does seem to be a dearth of coming men of distinction, and we are afraid it must be- admitted that in this large congregation of drawings, there are many which belong to the class familiarly known in the profes- sion by the name of "pot-boilers." Not that we have any want of respect for the employment to which the term refers, or that it necessarily implies either bad or defective art. When a painter- has achieved sufficient mastery and a recognised standing, it is only reasonable that he should seek to maintain himself and his family by minor works lying easily within the scope of his powers, and which his name will suffice to sell. These may be quite of first-rate quality as works of art, and they need in no- way interfere with his progress as a painter. But it happens. that there is one essential particular in which the prevailing, class of drawings at the Dudley Gallery differ from the kind of pictures above mentioned. They are not the work of masters of recognised position, but of artists wholly or comparatively unknown to fame. They sell readily, not because collectors desire at moderate cost an example of this or of that painter, but because ordinary people of fair culture like to enliven their sitting-rooms with. framed drawings to give pleasure to themselves and their friends. One may infer, from the present result of nine years. of experience gained by exhibitors at the Dudley Gallery, what sort of drawings best answer this purpose. Sunny glimpses of green fields and flowery brook-sides; stretches. of breezy moorland ; wave-washed beaches, and sea-girt cliffs ; reminders, in short, of pleasant summer sojourns or wanderings,. or generally of life beyond brick walls and smoky streets ; some fresh flower studies to afford spots of gay colour, and a few nicely painted heads or rustic figures to give variety, are what one would expect to have the readiest sale in a market thus frequented. A glance round the walls of the Dudley Gallery will show that the. staple of the exhibition is constituted precisely of these materials. This, then, is the sort of demand which determines the line of art pursued by young water-colour painters of the present day. The influence is not very high in artistic requirement, but it is, at any rate, innocent and healthy. How far it can foster the development of better art, as well as the extension of what exists, may, indeed, be a doubtful question. It is the artist alone who can really advance his art, and his proper function is to lead, not to follow, public taste. While a certain amount of careful copying of nature will ensure a brisk market, it is unlikely that many of our younger painters will take the trouble to qualify themselves. to. lead the taste of purchasers by studying those elements of their art which exercise the higher functions of the mind.
The ordinary spectator judges by present results. If they be pleasing, he is pleased accordingly, without considering, and without having the artistic education to perceive, the expression, and not to substitute an interest of their own.
how much more pleasing they might have been made. Thus there are here a host of careful drawings, pretty enough and true enough to the facts of nature, but the subjects of which have evidently contained material for something far more artistic and interesting. Most people think that a landscape painter has nothing to do but choose a pretty spot or a picturesque object and sit down and paint it. They are quite unaware, and few of our modern painters care to teach them, that language is an element as im- portant in a painted representation as in a verbal or a written one. The rhetoric of the brush is as much a branch of mental philo- sophy as the rhetoric of the tongue, and there is at least as subtle an influence required to captivate the eye as to persuade the ear. What our young artists want is a little of that spirit of portraiture with which English landscape painters of the old school were wont to enter upon their task. The artists of the last generation conceived it to be their business to form a careful estimate of the value of the characteristic features of the scene or object they had to deal with, and then to strive above all things to embody such views in their pictorial report of it, taking care, at the same time, to represent it under an aspect of nature which gave chief prominence to the nobler elements.
We have happily an illustration at hand of sound treatment of this good, old-fashioned kind, in Mr. Vincent's fine drawing, "Corry n'Aradh, Ross-shire" (26). Here the artist does not content himself with setting out a row of mountains, as in a photograph, for the spectator to choose from, but at once assumes command of our sense of sight, and directs our eye to a simple contrast of dark mountain mass against an opening amongst rolling watery clouds. This is the subject of his picture. And then he tells us of the grand massive look of these big, wet, western hill-tops, their desolate space and the mysterious blending of colour on long stretches of bog and heather, and shows how much larger and more enduring their forms appear, when their outlines have to thread their way through varying mists and moving vapour, than when they are seen in hard, uniform contrast against a clear sky. A comparison with the drawing of a 'Welsh moun- tain subject (24), which hangs below, and which is as careful and true in its imitative painting, shows at a glance the value of artistic treatment. Mr. Vincent's work is thoroughly real, and yet it is full of poetry. Nor is it less to be commended for com- position of the sesthetic kind. The eye moves easily over its surface, and conveys to the mind a delightful feeling of repose. "Milford Sound, Otago, New Zealand" (551), is interesting not only on account of the glimpse it gives us of the scenery of the colony (the beauties of which are little dreamed of here), but also because it is the work of a Colonial artist or (as the Hon. J. C. Richmond is better known in the colony as a public minister) amateur. The steep precipices descending sheer into the sea, and the great snow-mountain seen between and reflected in the scarcely rippled water, present a scene of considerable grandeur and of a certain strangeness which has a peculiar charm. This strangeness means, of course, that the artist has seized on real character,—the all-important ingredient of a good landscape. The colour is agreeable, and the work is marked by great refinement. In the more ordinary class of picturesque rural landscapes, however far removed from the sublime, there is too marked a difference between good treatment and no treatment at all. It is not needful to prove this by examples of simple defiance of unity of composition, like Mr. J. Macbeth's "Vale of Health, Hampstead" (398), where, obviously to satisfy the exigencies of the wood-engravers, a donkey-chair group seems cut out as with scissors, and laid down upon a hard-edged path, behind which appears a flat sheet, heavy with houses, trees, and roads, to pre- sent-0 shade of Constable !—Hampstead Heath. But take an average example (221), pretty, sunny, and fresh in colour, and quite characteristic of the rural architecture and vege- tation of Surrey. Why has the artist here chosen to fix the attention upon two figures in the foreground which are attractive only by their size and position, instead of leading the eye on a pleasant little tour up the path on one side, or down through the village on the other, and so round the houses to the bit of fir-clad hill beyond? The path and road are both left empty, and the thought of pursuing them into an unseen country is in no way suggested to the spectator's mind. A similar and more obvious misuse of figure incident occurs in a drawing near the door (486), where a village street, ending in a country road, affords a pleasing subject, but one's visual course along them is stopped, instead of being led onwards, by the principal group, and by a cart further on. It seems indeed to be rarely felt that the object of introducing life and incident into a landscape is to aid It would be well if the rising generation could perceive how thoroughly subordinate, and yet how powerfully instrumental to the general motive, these devices are in the works of the greatest landscape painters, with Turner at their head. But a large proportion of our young artists leave them out altogether.
If we lament the absence of what we have called the spirit of portraiture in modern landscape, we have, on the other hand, to rejoice at the presence of that spirit in its application to human subjects. Mr. Poynter, by his elaborate and sometimes beautiful portraits of ladies in previous exhibitions here, has worthily led the way to what ought in the present growing taste for framed water-colour drawings, to be an important develop- ment of that branch of art. He is not himself so success- ful as usual in the group (84) of a father and daughter which he now exhibits. Many artists have a marked affinity for some particular colour, and Mr. Poynter's brush seems to be specially attractive of blue. Here that colour has got so much into the young lady's complexion that at first we took the picture to represent a parent asking medical advice on the subject. The palm of portraiture must on this occasion be awarded to Mr. j. C. Moore, whose three pictures of children (224, 333, 318,) are thoroughly characteristic of childhood, happily and artisticilly treated, and agreeable in colour. Perhaps, too, Mr. John Richard. son's shooting scene on the moors, called "The (Mlle's Pipe "(341), should be reckoned as a piece of good portraiture, as well as solid painting. Among the few subject-pictures in the gallery, an arrival of a lady and gentleman of a rather insipid order of beauty, together with other passengers, by the Bath coach, in an antique inn-yard (373), is one of the best drawings we have observed by Mr. Townley Green, and very well painted in parts,—as, for example, a hair trunk and a nosegay of flowers ; and Mr. Brewt- nail's actor and actress, "Called before the Curtain" (128), has more firmness and power than former work by the same artist. If the lady's face is not illumined by much perceptible histrionic power, the pillars of the proscenium do certainly shine out well in the gaslight. Mr. D'Egville sends a clever sketch called "The Riot" (394), in which an armed mob, a barri- cade, a charge of Greys, and a large building on fire in the moonlight are dramatically put together, and which might be expanded into a striking picture. There are neat exe- cution and spirited drawing in a small " Skirmish " of Cavalry (531), by E. Detaille ; some telling bits of colour and clever handiwork in a study of an unattractive "Moorish Lady" (550), intent as a child upon her task of opening a pomegranate, by Louis Leloir, evidently a follower of Fortuny ; good drawing of well-chiselled features in "A Young Greek Woman" (295), by Miss Edith Martineau; much pathos in a little study, by F. G. Cotunan, of a poor" worn-out "old woman (602) ; and unaffected sentiment, together with solid workmanship, in Mr. Edwin Bale's " Under a Cloud" (105), where a peasant girl laments the loss of a pet bird.
Among several views of the Lung' Arno at Florence we prefer the small and silvery one (202) by Mr. II. Macallum, although the houses seem to sit upon the bridge, to the large and luminous one (314) by Mr. Arthur Severn, where reflex lights are over- done, and breadth is lost by repetitions of minor forms. But hia moonlight at Venice (640) is excellent, and among the very few pictures here which show a careful study of the forms of clouds. Mr. Edward H. Fahey's large drawing of a water-mill "At Rest" (319) is remarkable for the consistency with which a mar- vellous amount of highly finished surface is made to partake of a true, if not altogether agreeable quality of yellow light after sun- down ; but the figures are weak, and the sky wants gradation. Mr. Albert Goodwin's "Pleasant Land full of Flowers" (293) tells its simple tale, and leaves a strong impression on the mind ; and so does Mr. Poynter's "Summer Noon" (301), in a garden under grey sunlight ; Mr. Field's " Evening in Hot Weather" (155), on the Thames, Mr. Holloway's "Study of Sea and Sky" (488), Mr. Joseph Knight's " Moorland " (91), and " Spring " (330), and Mr. Talfourd's " Saltick Rocks, Whitby" (GM), are among the most satisfactory of the remaining landscape contribu- tions, and Mr. Heywood Hardy has a careful drawing of a camel and its driver engaged in "Field Labour in Upper Egypt" (60), which seems to promise a new line of subjects by a rising animal painter.
But much of the present strength of the Exhibition lies in a multitude of careful and conscientious studies of subjects in which the painter's skill is as much absorbed in truthful delineation as in pictorial effect. Thus the collection is remarkable for good flower and fruit-pieces. Here Miss Helen Coleman excels, as usual ; conspicuously in the large purple " Irises" (143) in a blue
jar, but at least as much in the "Pomegranate and Grapes" (538) in a white dish, and "Wild Raspberries" (562). Her. "Study of a Red Mullet" (542) is also full of delicate painting and truthful colour. Mr. Bale's yellow " Roses " (204) are imi- tated to perfection, and form a fine harmony with their black background ; and the "Marigolds and Azalea-leaves" (385), by Miss Isabella Green, have a crispness of finish peculiarly sugges- tive of vegetable form, a quality which is wanting in the attractive nosegays by M. Caffieri, in which the geranium-petals are apt to look thick, like the leaves. A study of a young kittiwake "Found Dead" (212), among stones and growing sea-weed, is an example, -which might easily be passed over, of well-directed labour in giving surface and solidity to the several objects. It is hung too high to examine the detail, but it is evidently well modelled, and stands out in good relief. Its defect is a tendency to blackness in the shadows.
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