ART.
THE GROSVENOR GALLERY.
[FIRST NOTICE.] Or all the picture exhibitions of the year, the one which is familiarly known as the " Winter Grosvenor " is the most en- joyable; and it would be strange were it otherwise. The pictures of one or two great artists, selected so as to be adequately repre- sentative of their work, and carefully arranged in two or three galleries, in which chairs, light, and warmth are all liberally bestowed, go far to make up a pleasant picture show ; and if we add. to this the fact that the merit of the pictures is generally in proportion to the comfort of the place in which they are shown, all the conditions of success are fulfilled. Something of the private house still lingers over the social aspect of the gallery, and pictures can be enjoyed as well as seen there.
The present show is in no way inferior in interest to its pre- decessors, though there is in the work displayed little of the high poetic ideal that distinguished that of Mr. Watts ; that is to say, such an ideal is not to be found in the figure-painting, which is exclusively restricted to the work of Mr. Alma Tadema, B.A. that may be called the sccoud portion of the exhibition, though it is scarcely inferior to the first in general interest, is the collection of the works of the late Mr. Cecil Lawson, a young landscape-painter who lived long enough to do great things in his art, but hardly sufficiently long to adopt a settled manner of work, either in craftsmanship, or in his way of treating his subject. Ilis art had many faults, or rather many shortcomings ; but when all these have been allowed for, there is a solid residuum of truth, beauty, and poetical feeling to be found such as is very rare in contemporary Art. We do not purpose in this first article to enter into detailed description or criticism of the paintings of either of these artists, but to show, as clearly as may be in so small a space, some of the aspects of their art, and to point out wherein the great difference between them lay. At first, they seem to form a very complete contrast. A Belgian and an Englishman, a figure-painter, and a landscape-painter, an his- torian and a meteorologist, a dweller in the past and a depictor of the present, a realist of the most thorough type, and an idealist scarcely less uncompromising, and, as many would add, a colourist and a chiaroscurist. These are surely differences as total as can well be imagined, and it is difficult to believe at first that the contrast can escape being too violent to be pleasing. . But in the exhibition itself no such unpleasing effect is felt, any more than one is annoyed, on turning over a penny, to pass from a picture of her gracious Majesty, in full nineteenth-century attire, to a to- presentation of a classically-draped female, sitting in an un- comfortable fashion upon a shield by the side of the sea. For the two sides of. Art are as much a part of the whole as are the two sides of a penny ; both are needed, and it is hard to say which is the more valuable. Whether what Mr. Tadema achieves, or Mr. Cecil Lawson suggests, is the best, depends in some degree upon the person who looks at the pictures; and just comparison of the two, must rest more upon what each accomplishes in his own direction, than upon the power of drawing a hard-and-fast line between the relative values of their aims. For in Art, the technical question affects the aim in a very subtle and very complicated manner; and as mere execu- tion, when carried beyond a certain point of skill, possesses a distinct glory of its own, so is the lack of this technical skill powerful to enfeeble and degrade much painting of which the spiritual and mental sides are high and praiseworthy. Between the art of Meissonier and that• of, say, Hayden, there is every possible gradation from perfect execution of trivial matters to- thoroughly inadequate representation of great ones, and the effort to determine how far meaning and nobility of aim may be thrown overboard in order to attain a higher standard of• technical perfection is one which has always been the grandest of problems for the Art student.
Mr. Tadema's painting, from some points of view, may be con- sidered almost perfect ; from others, it does not even approach. to perfection ; and while Mr. Lawson is, in regard to technical matters, compared with the foreign painter, as is a child to a giant, his work possesses mental and (what we are forced to call) spiritual qualities which reverse the standard of merit. A great painter (perhaps the greatest of whom England can at present boast) said to us at the private view, " What a svouder- ful fellow he is ! He doesn't paint marble and silver,—he makes them,"—a shrewd remark, intended wholly in admira- tion, and yet hinting, when examined closely, more at blame' than praise. For one is tempted to ask,—Do we want marble and silver made in a picture P That is the whole question, for' it must be remembered that we cannot have things made without paying a price for them, and the price asked for this splendid perfection of material is a high one. If we
look closely at the pictures, we shall see what it is plainly enough. We shall see that it results in a certain choice of sub-
ject, and a certain way of treating that subject ; we shall see.
that the first thing that strikes the spectator in .any of these• works is the magnificent realisation, not of the scene itself, so
much as of the details of the scene, and that the truth which gives us so much pleasure in them, is the outside truth, rather than the inner verities of feeling and thought. This is the more- likely to be overlooked, as the dramatic realisation of the scene• is, as a rule, perfect, and the pictures impress us much as do one- of Mr. Irving's recent Shakespeare revivals at the Lyceum.
Mr. Tadema has found his most congenial subjects iu the luxurious and spiritually degraded days of the Roman Empire,. and he reproduces the appearances of such days to us as clearly and vividly, as if he had Declining Rome, somewhere in the back garden, and could go out and copy it at his leisure. But after going through the whole collection of his paint- ings, there are, perhaps, only two which leave any other• than a material trace upon our minds. The one is the- splendid "Ave, Ciosar !" the other, " The Death of the First- born." Both of these show a tragic power which, had Mr. Tadema cultivated instead of neglecting it, might have raisedk him to a far higher rank than that which he at present deserves. They are great subjects greatly treated, and in them.
the ruling spirit of the scene is the main point of the picture ; the realistic detail only serves to heighten the emotion. Take as an illustration of the opposite tendency the great pictures of the sculpture gallery and picture gallery, two of the largest anct most popular works of this artist ; in all essential respects they are almost furniture pictures. They mean nothing that any one cares to think of,—do not, in fact, impress the beholder' with any meaning at all. "Look here ; here are a lot of folks looking at a picture in old-fashioned dresses !" That is almost all the feeling which can be raised by the picture,. and in looking into it, nothing is thought of, but the skill with• which every detail of robe or furniture has been painted. Critics the last week or two, have been talking, with their usual' sapience, about Mr. Alma Tadema's marvellous imaginative• powers; but it seems to us that the quality which they should rather have praised, is his power of realisation, which is as strong, as his purely imaginative powers are weak. The power of reproducing, bit by bit, the accessories, down to the minutest detail, of an ancient civilisation, is not necessarily an imagina- tive one. Greeted great industry and great knowledge of the archaeology of the subject, the rest is but a question of time and power of arrangement. All of these Mr. Tadema possesses to an abnormal extent. Tho mere facts of architectural structure have never been made pictorially so interesting as he continually makes them, by his novelty of juxtaposition and his extraordin- ary powers of painting. It is an open secret, and may be stated for what it is worth, that the skeleton of the architecture and per- spective in his pictures is drawn for him, with mathematical correctness, by an assistant, who is an architect by profession ; .and it is, perhaps, in some measure owing to this practice that his pictures always seem to be founded upon a rock, as it were,— upon a solid substratum of actual truth. The only deficiency we note in the appearance of his collected works, as opposed to the impression which they create when viewed singly, is that this partly mechanical accuracy, rather strikes upon the eye, and, owing to its constant repetition, becomes at last rather an offence than a pledsure. We get a little crushed by the weight of the great blocks of marble, and the solid regularity of the columns. Indeed, no fact can be more conclusive of the absence, or at all events, the relative absence, of great imaginative power, than the fact that all Mr. Tadema's admirers dwell so especially upon his painting of textures and surfaces of metal and stone ; for imaginative power, though by no means inconsistent with the perfect rendering of detail, has the faculty of subduing the predominance, at the very time that it is making use, of all subordinate matters, fusing them by its own white-heat into " such stuff as dreams are made of."
If we pass for a moment to the consideration of Mr. Lawson's painting, we shall find that in some ways he possesses. this faculty of true imagination of which we have been speaking. His work, especially that of his last years, has not only a pictorial unity of tone and composition, but has also such unity of impression, such grasp of one intense thought or feeling, as is powerful to subdue all the details of the scene into unity with itself. Its method forms a curious contrast to Mr. Tadema's, in that while the last-mentioned artist obtains his effect by in- tense realisation of each detail of his work, Mr. Lawson obtains his by throwing over all his details a veil which, call it what we will, feeling, imagination, or poetry, is sufficient to make them beautiful. If we look too curiously beneath this "silver veil," we may find, perhaps, a "prophet of Khorassan," for it can scarcely be. said that Mr. Lawson's painting was either very lovely or very true ; the right words for it are "suggestive" and -" poetical," and on the bad side " morbid," but still, it is of the prophetic nature, " foretelling " in the right sense of the word. But beneath the surface of Mr. Tadema's marbles, and into the hearts of his men and women, who cares to look, or to imagine anything? Just so luxurious, so debauched, or so picturesque, may old Rome and her citizens have looked in the time of Domitiau ; but surely, then as now, there were gleams of meaning, for those who cared to see them. We feel inclined to deny imagination to Mr. Tadema, as we should do to .any man who imagined a body, and forgot the soul ; he has 'given us the face of antique life, but not the heart.
Se much may, we think, be said truly as to the imaginative qualities of these painters ; upon their technical ones we shall speak iu detail in our next article. Meanwhile, we must impress upon our readers the statement with which we commenced this article. Art is many-sided. Magnificent technical power is .rarely found in combination with a great imaginative faculty ; to realise perfectly even the outside of by-gone times is a decided achievement, and where it is joined to great pictorial ability, produces very splendid, though, perhaps, not very noble art. -0n, the other hand, the inner truths of natural beauty and human feeling, are but too apt to be so imperative in 'their demand upon a painter's powers as to make him un- able to depict them, save with imperfect and even faltering hand. Truths of great value are so hard to grasp, so swift to vanish, as to scarcely admit of perfect utterance ; we entertain 'them, unawares, like the angels, and before we know their faces, they are gone. The comparison between the art, seemingly 'perfect, of the first kind, and that as manifestly imperfect of the 'second, is in the highest degree a difficult one, and the estima- tion in which each is hell will depend in no small measure upon the bias of the beholder. For those of confident, practical, fact- loving nature, to whom heaven and earth bold nothing save what is dreamt of in their philosophy, the shallowly perfect Art will give most pleasure, and gain from them most admiration ; while to those less happy ones, to whom the world of men and Nature holds mauy meanings which they cannot analyse, and
gives many hints which they cannot understand, whose contem- plative faculties are in excess of their practical, and whose sympathies are greater than their powers,—to these, there will be most attraction in the words "uttered not, yet compre- hended," of those painters whose powers fail before their aims are fully attained.
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