ART.
PICTURES ON LOAN AT THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION.
WILKIE, Constable, Roberts, and Egg are the four oil-painters this year specially selected for representation at South Kensington. Except that each in his way was limited in range, and each is typical of a school, there is not much to connect them. So we will speak of them singly, beginning with the figure-painters.
There is a connecting-link with last year's exhibition in the case of one picture of Wilkie's, which bears a certain resemblance to the painter's fellow-countryman, John Phillip, whose works were there the leading feature; it is called "The Guerrilla's Re- turn," and was painted in London in 1630, two years after Wilkie's return from Spain, and it seems to mark one point in common be- tween these two painters, where their paths in a manner crossed. Each of them began life with the same class of subject ; among the earliest pictures by each there was a Scotch fair, and each had his style entirely changed by the influence of Spanish travel. But thereby the art of one was made and that of the other marred. And the cause was the same. Phillip began as a follower of a school (that of Wilkie himself), and ended as a painter of the life he saw. Wilkie began as a painter of the life he saw, and ended in the attempt to follow a school. So Phillip's last and Wilkie's first works remain their best. Sir David Wilkie's paintings in general are so well known, and the difference between his two styles so marked, that there is less cause than usual to regret the want of chronological order in the arrangement of his pictures. Had that order, however, been adopted, it would have been seen at a glance that the Exhibition, though not large, is a fair repre- sentation of the painter's career. In his early and best manner are "The Recruit," with that inimitable pair of figures of a man drawing the cork of a beer-bottle, and another sitting on the table, mug in hand, waiting for the pop, as if he were thinking of the enemy's fire, a picture painted in 1803, when Wilkie was twenty ; "Blind-man's Buff," painted in 1813; and "The Letter of Intro- duction," in the same year. These pictures are in excellent pre- servation, and exhibit the thorough and minute finish of his work at this time, the conscientious expression of every detail, and what is far more important, its delicate unobtrusiveness, and its complete subordination to the subject of the picture. There is a plate-rack in the first, which might have been painted by Teniers in his happiest mood ; and as a matter of simple imitation of the real look of things, the china vase, inkstand, chair-back, and more than all, the book-case in the last, seem to us to be more worthy of imitation by English Art students than anything in the brilliant French miniatures which are now selling at the rate of £100 the square inch. Wilkie's " Re- cruit " was originally sold out of a shop-window for six guineas. There is evidence, however, that the extraordinary completeness of his pictures at this period was due more to sted- fast industry and painstaking, than to natural facility in drawing and painting. There are few more interesting modes of analysing a painter's art than those afforded by the comparison of his sketches and studies with his finished works. On one of the screens here are some frames of pen-and-ink studies for rough figures and groups in some of Wilkie's principal pictures, and scattered over the walls are oil studies, in various stages, for their general effect and composition. It would, we should think, have been no very difficult task, with the time and resources here available, to collect a tolerably complete series of the preparatory steps which cul- minated in some one at least of the painter's chief works, and to have placed them together in juxtaposition with the finished work itself. But this was not to be expected, and indeed it seems to be a rule of hanging, as we observed last year in the Phillip collection, never to place a picture in such a position that it can be directly compared with the study from which it has been elabo- rated. Even in their isolated positions, however, these sketches of Wilkie's are enough to show the timid and uncertain efforts by means of which he worked out results so complete and successful in the end. It is particularly so in the small pen-and-ink scraps above referred to. Some of the first ideas, indeed, as is often the case (perhaps more often than not in the history of paintings), remain, after every effort, unequalled in the finished work. We may see this in the original design for the "Penny Wedding," where the bride was first sketched with a simple grace which re- minds us of Stothard, whereas in the picture itself she is simper- ing and not particularly graceful. 1Vilkie's lassies are apt to be on a large scale, and in the little picture of the "Death of the Red Deer" they are considerably taller than the men. "The Penny Wedding" is dated 1818, and shows a deterioration in, colour, whether the brownness now apparent be the result of age,. or of the approach of that change of style which became confirmed after his visit to Italy and Spain seven years later. He had already made his first trip to the Continent, in 1814, and he may have modified his practice after the studies he then made in the Louvre. The "Chelsea Pensioners reading the Gazette" of Waterloo is not here, which is unfortunate, for besides two frames of pen-and- ink sketches for it, there is a brilliant finished study of the whole, which is singularly complete in itself ; and it would be most in- teresting to see, even by Burnet'a engraving, how far, if at all, the additions and alterations he afterwards made were improve- ments upon this design. The collection also contains one of two pictures of minor importance, painted in Italy, and several of the Spanish series, as "The Maid of Saragossa" and "The Guerrilla's Departure," both inscribed "Madrid, 1828," and "The Guerrilla's Return," which we have mentioned above. Of the last decade of Wilkie's life there are two notable examples, the well-known "Columbus in the Convent of La Rabida," painted in 1835; and, what is probably the most intense in expres- sion of all his pictures, "The Confessional" (1833), where a young monk, with a look of deep remorse, is confessing to an old one. "The Escape of Mary, Queen of Scots," some Eastern sketches, and a feeble portrait of the Sultan, painted in the year of Wilkie's death, 1841, close this series of his works. The un- failing unity and concentration of light in the composition of Wilkie's pictures is well illustrated by a frame of small sketches of which he made several. This one he sent to his brother in India, and it is here exhibited. In this respect, the pictures by Augustus Egg show to comparative disadvantage. They are not always happy in the arrangement of light, and in the "Life of Buckingham " the grouping is unpleasantly confused. But the individual figures are excellent, and for the peculiar line of character which he chose to paint, the artificial and rather showy people whom we see in the Nell Gwynne and the Esmond pic- tures, his talent was well suited. His firm line, telling contrasts of colour, and the sound modelling of his figures are adapted to subjects where the animal has to be painted as well as its anima- tion-expressed. But there is now (whatever there was originally) an unpleasant blackness in the shadows of some of his finished pictures, which will be seen at once on a comparison of ths lustrous sketch for " Pepys and Nell Gwynne " with the work itself on the opposite wall.
The collection of Constable's works is not nearly as large as that of Wilkie's, but it comprises three of his most celebrated pictures,. "The Hay Wain," "The Jumping Horse," and the "Opening of Waterloo Bridge." The first is one of the two which were exhi- bited at the Louvre in 1824, and attracted such attention that they were removed to the chief places in the room, were awarded a gold medal by the King, and finally laid the foundation of the modern French school of landscape. It will be remembered as having been at Burlington House three years ago, in the Exhibition of Old Masters. "The Jumping Horse," so named from a barge- horse leaping a bar which crosses the tow-path in the foreground, is as large, and as it seems to us, at least as vigorous a painting. It belongs to the following year, and was, at any rate while in pro- gress, a favourite with the painter. "The large subject on my easel," he wrote, "is promising ; it is a canal, and full of the bustle incident to such a scene, where four or five boats are pass- ing, in company with dogs, horses, boys, men, women, and child- ren, and best of all, old timber, props, water-plants, willows, stumps, sedges, old nets, &c." There can be no better description of the subject, and it is interesting to observe bow important he considered these human incidents to be, although he loves the foreground, with its stumps and sedges, best of all. Constable was always singularly happy in the introduction of his figures. They seem to come in naturally, and never- fail to heighten the effect of reality in his pictures. How admirably conceived, for example, and how fitting to the situation, is the well-known boy drinking, in "The Cornfield," in the National Gallery ! But there is no picture of Constable's in which the figures play so important a part as the "Opening of Waterloo Bridge," which is the third of the large works of his here exhibited. Leslie tells us that Constable was always uncer- tain about the success of this picture, and with reason. He began to think about it in 1819, but it was not exhibited till 1832, and then it was generally regarded as a failure. It certainly is an exceptional work of the painter's, and that not only from the necessary absence of the rural sentiment which he felt so deeply, but by reason of the prominence of the human element. Most likely the public eye, which had learnt to read
his broad generalisation of trees, and clouds, and river pastures, did not understand that a living and moving multitude of people was capable of being treated in the same comprehensive manner. To us it seems that the suggestive way in which all this busy scene ofLboats and barges on the river, and royal folks and lines of Foot Guards, and bevies of ladies with waving kerchiefs, is indi- cated and arranged without confusion, and yet so as to give the impression of infinite variety and life and movement, and all without painting more than it was possible to see at one glance, without:altering the focus of the eye, is simply marvellous. It is but another example of that unity which should be the first aim of all painters, but more especially those who would give an impres- sion of nature. It is curious how much more interest one takes in these figures of Constable's, slightly as they are indicated, how much more one is inclined to inquire what they are doing, than in the skilfully arranged, and in their way thoroughly appropriate, groups of market-women in Samuel Front's Normandy streets, of which there are some good specimens here. One sees at once that these are put in to balance the maims of a composition or relieve a patch of shade ; that the white caps and aprons are spots of light to give a sparkle to the work, just as David Roberts's groups are introduced, not for any interest in themselves, but to give a sting of dark or a bit of richer colour which may relieve the great grey masses of his stone-work. They are, in each case, a well-drilled troupe of supernumeraries engaged for the studio or the stage. At a wave of the artist's mahlstick, or a tap on the ballet-master's tambourine, they all fall into their right places. The class of beings that people the pictures of a Constable or a Turner are of a more unsophisticated class. They all seem to be minding their own business, instead of watching the movements or obeying the will of the artist. This " Waterloo Bridge" picture has doubtless lost much of its original freshness, for a year after the painter's death a dealer laid over it a coat of blacking to give it tone ! How large it looks, even in its pre- sent state, one may see by a comparison with Roberts's views on the Thames, which hang on the same wall. Of course, merely clever works of this kind will bear no comparison to those of a real observer of nature like Constable. Compositions conceived with a view to the requirements of the picture-gallery or the stage are simply wanting in reverence, when they take a fine, impressive subject from nature, and deprive it of all its natural expression for such a purpose, as Roberts has done in some of these works, notably that of "Edinburgh from the Calton Hill," where the main features of the place are ren- dered insignificant to reduce the picture to a set pattern, which could be adapted alike to all subjects under the sun. The "Temple of Edfou" is more luminous in colour than most of his works, and of his wonderful power of drawing architecture and its details there are some excellent specimens. But these properly belong to the interesting series of architectural drawings by some of our earlier water-colour painters which are also included in this exhibition, and with which we have no space to deal. Neither can we say a word respecting the drawings of J. S. Cotman, except that they are well worthy of study, as the works of an artist of rare power and knowledge.
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