ART.
THE DUDLEY GALLERY.* -AFTER all the reports as to its moribund condition, the exhibi- tion of Water-colour pictures known to the Art world as the Dudley Gallery, has opened its doors at the usual time, and shows no diminution of interest. Certainly, the interest was never of a particularly stirring kind or very great in quantity, but resembled the slow currents that meander through the Fen district, and are apt to be thought of as dykes by the gonaccustomed stranger. Such as it is, however, it is here again with unaltered features, and sufficient of the Conservative is left in our nature to enable us to find a certain pleasure in its reappearance. At least, we know its capacities and its short- -comings, and even its dullness is of a friendly, tolerable kind, as the oft-repeated story of an old chum.
There is one light in which this Gallery has a specialty of interest, one that we do not remember to have seen noticed else- where. If a Frenchman, a German, or an Italian, were to come to England, and want to know our national, social, and in- tellectual characteristics, his friends could scarcely do better than take him, for part of his instruction, to this gallery at the Egyptian Hall. It is wonderfully English in sentiment, and English, moreover, not of the moment, or the metropolis, but of -the general character and the country at large. Perhaps it may be worth while to explain this a little. The first thing that strikes a visitor to a French gallery, is the amount of art and the de- ficiency of beauty in the mass of the works. In a German exhibition, it is the industry and the knowledge which are evident, with both the art and the beauty deficient. In Italy and Spain, again, we have a glittering outside splendour, dashed on with apparent power, and real recklessness, which is productive of an almost painful impression, much as if we were to see an actor's robes flung hastily over a dissecting-room table. When, however, one goes into an English gallery now-a-days, the fact that strikes us most, amidst many discordant notes, is the ignorant, blind, pathetic, but still most real, striving after beauty. An Englishman does want to make a pretty picture ; the Frenchman knows he will succeed in making a picture, and does not care whether it is pretty or not; and the German has learnt how to make pictures, and, given such and such elements, thinks the picture must result,—only, it does not. In the Dudley Gallery we have this national strength and weakness fully exemplified, uncomplicated, too, as a rule, with much knowledge of what artists in other countries are doing, or have done, or doubts whether it is necessary for a picture to be anything more than pretty.
• The Egyptian Hall.
Taking this exhibition as a whole, it is a fairly good one, though one or two of those members whom we are accustomed to consider as most prominent, are hero conspicuous only by absence. The best works are the quietest, and there are one or two little premising bits by young men which deserve notice. Mrs. Percy Tarrant's " Evening," a peasant coming through a cornfield, with a sunset sky behind her, has nothing in the subject and its details to specially recommend it. But the work is treated with considerable feeling, and arrests the eye from its truth to nature. Perhaps there is a good deal of the foreign element in this composition, a certain rather ostentatious sur- render of careful drawing, and general smudginess of effect ; but it gains the quiet poetry at which it aims, and gains it without the surrender of any very essential fact. Some praise must also be given to Mr. E. J. du Val's picture of "A Calm Afternoon." Mr. Philip Norman's " Rotherhithe " (97), is one of those " down- river " compositions which have grown into such favour of late years. It is strange that their peculiar charm wholly depends upon a certain mistiness of atmosphere ; paint them clearly, and sharply, and in full light, and they do not seem to have any poetry in them. All the artists who have done them best have recognised this,—as, for instance, Tissot, the Wyllies, Arthur Severn, Herbert Marshall, &c. Why, we wonder, should masts against a grey sky be poetic, and against a blue sky photo- graphic P Perhaps Mr. Huxley or Dr. Liebreich will tell us. This specimen is a good, though rather a prosaic one, and can- not compare with Mr. Arthur Severn's " Ice on the Thames at Battersea" (81), one of those large studies of winter river, which for absolute truth could hardly be surpassed. In the fore- ground of this there are great masses of broken ice, in which two boats lie half-overturned. The rest of the river is choked with floating ice, and the sky is a sunset one, of misty yellow and grey. These pictures of Mr. Severn's present very curious problems to any one who sees many of them, reflecting as they do a frame of mind which seems to hover between the theoretic and the practical, between the most literal prose and the most unformed poetry. They are composed almost equally of facts and dreams, and have these so curiously interwoven, that the real element in them is hard to select. Given, a mind imaginative enough to feel the poetry of a certain scene, and yet not strong enough in its imagination to reduce the facts of that scene to their due imaginative rela- tions, and we should probably get pictures somewhat similar in quality to these of Mr. Severn's, which are certainly " Laodi- cean. " in their nature. "A Souvenir of Algeria," which hangs close to the above-mentioned work, by Miss Milicent Grose, should be noticed for its excellent painting. The pottery in this " souvenir " could scarcely be better done, and the whole picture is harmonious and strong in colour.
Mr. Frank Cox, whose work we have had occasion to praise in these columns, is, we are sorry to say, going at present steadily down the broad path that does not lead to any worthy goal. His pictures are becoming more and more given up to unnecessary prettinesses of colour, and, indeed, even depend for their attractiveness upon nothing else. This is the more to be regretted, as Mr. Cox has undoubtedly the power, if he chose to cultivate it, of giving us works in which the grace and happiness of youth and health shine out clearly. There is no one who could paint country scenes with a little, tender, human interest, more freshly or more well. "A Scene in Venice of the Seventeenth Century," by Signor Vincenzo Cabianca, is more accomplished work than most of that here, and possesses greater power of colour. It is, to a certain extent, unreal, both in feeling and treatment, but it at once strikes the spectator as aiming at a higher level of art than most of its surroundings. There is a touch of tragic fire about it, though it is tragedy of the footlights. Mr. H. Pilleau's picture of "The Two Colossi, Thebes," is a fine specimen of unemotional skill well directed.
The picture is a beautiful one, if any picture can be beautiful in which there is no touch of human feeling. It is the best coloured photograph we ever saw. Contrast with this Mr. David Carr's " Devon Roses." Mr. Carr has a touch of genius in his paint- ing of flowers, as indubitable as it is hard to characterise. It has the effect, however, of raising them altogether out of the ordinary category of flower-paintings. The hardest piece of water and architecture painting, which is completely successful, is Mr. Henry Darvall's "Winter Twilight" at Venice, with Santa Maria
in the distance. The painting of the water in this work is espe- cially fine, both in colour and general truth of effect. There is a nice little head, by Miss Ethel Webling, entitled " Rosalind ;" it is unpretentious work, carefully executed. Mr. B. W. Spiers' "Bit of Wardour Street " is a representation of a collection of old books, prints, and brit-ii-brat, painted in pure water-colour, touch by touch, as only he can do such subjects. It could not be more finely executed, but the choice of objects is, perhaps, hardly so happy as usual. And what a life it is for an artist, to never paint anything but the outsides of old books, and copy the stippling of old-fashioned engravings ! The best bit of 'young man's work—if we take " best " to mean the one which is most successful in the highest style—is the " Kittenhood" of Mr. E. R. Hughes, a little picture of two children at an open piano playing with two kittens. The picture aims at an old- master scheme of full colour, is very carefully and minutely worked, and is distinctly a success, despite a certain uncertainty of drawing.
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