Sin arts.
TBEE PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION.
The Photographers are still a very long way behind the genuine artists, and though they make very strenuous efforts to be artistic' and to earn some right to the title of artist, we are obliged to own that the difference between a picture and a photograph is immense. The last few years
have shown us that the photographers, by placing figures together, after dressing them up in certain costumes, supposed to be picturesque and sur- rounding them with real landscape, were aiming to surpass the painter by their minute advantages of copying ; but the results have very rarely been oven tolerable, and frequently positively ridiculous. With all the fidelity of the process, too, it constantly happens that errors arise in light and shade as well as drawing, not to mention these of taste in selection. There is in the present exhibition a composed photograph of this kind called "k Holiday in the Woods," by Mr, , H. P. Robinson. The grouping is thoroughly unartistic and unnatural, and the whole affair is not a picture at all, but an inanimate pose plait- tique, with a quantity of smudge serving as so much property foliage. The trees have merely the ghostly form of trees ; no painter who has studied the varying and delicate greens and greys of leaf-beauty could for a moment regard this sort of work as like nature. We have no wish to be too hard upon ingenious operators with mechanical and chemical arts; only let them keep to their last, and be content to aid the miniature painter, the antiquarian, the architectural student, and the historian, and not attempt to be pictorial. Their landscapes are really strange produc- tions—so cold and colourless that one can scarcely glean a suggestion of the real beauty of the scene. In the whole collection, it is difficult to find one that recals the sunny atmosphere of nature ; the best ap- pear to us to be those by Mr. Vernon Heath, taken at Endsleigh ; more especially the view from Leigh Wood; but, by the same operator, there are some which have all the common defects of photographic foliage—lifeless flatness, and dark shapeless masses. A view of Raglan Castle, by Mr. Earl, upon a large scale, possesses certain advantages of truth in the stonework and the reflections in the water ; but, beyond this, it has none of the interest of an artistic picture ; in fact, it has no touch of art. The Views in Warwickshire, of Mr. Spode are capital tran- scripts of skeleton trees, useful as studies of branch form, and serving to astonish the multitude by the maze of twigs and branches upon the paper; but, when we know that a child may weave the most lovely patterns of lace or damask with similar unerring accuracy, our interest is exhausted. It is, as we have hinted already, to the simply copying purposes, that photography must look for its future. There are in the exhibition many excellent examples of this application of the process. The marbles of the Parthenon are only too faithfully copied by Messrs. Caldesi and Co. Such facsimile mementoes are mournful enough ; they convey a terribly real idea of ruined beauty ; but the effect of the original marbles is just the reverse ; in looking at them, we are more struck by the imposing grandeur and nobleness of the Greek ideal than by any of those miserable defects of decay which, in the photograph, are so prominently set before the eye. The copy of the Aurora of Guido is well enough, but not to be compared, for one moment, with the fine engraving of the picture. The facsimiles of Lieutenant-Colonel Crea- lock's Sketches of the Indian Mutiny Campaign, are admirable, and show a most legitimate use of the process. The microscopic photographs, too, have a similar excellence ; the accuracy with which the tip of a butterfly's tongue, or the acarus, which is a parasite upon the bee, are copied, is surprising ; and in this respect the photographer becomes in- valuable as an illustrator of those minute structures which elude the draughtsman's art. The application of photography to direct printing from copper-plates appears to be advancing towards something like a reliable state of per- fection. Several copper-plates engraved, so to to speak, by light and electricity are exhibited, and some very tolerable prints from these have been struck off by M. Pretsch. Portraits, of course, abound, and many of them, even in the untouched state, arc very good, particularly the small whole-lengths of the Royal Fa- mily, and political and other notables personages of the day. M. Clan- det exhibits a remarkably good frame of portraits. Messrs. Maul and Polyblank, Gush and Ferguson, are also to be named amongst the best of the operators.
A most interesting exhibition of sculpture has been brought over from Paris, and is how exhibited at the French Gallery, Pall Mall ; it is en- tirely the work of one artist, M. Cordier, who must have devoted a life of enthusiastic study and labour to the production of what he calls not inaptly, an Ethnographical Gallery, illustrating the most prominent iypes of the human race. To begin with, M. Cordier is evidently highly en- dowed with the invaluable faculty of perceiving the characteristics of form in all their nicety of expression ; then he has acquired extraordi- nary facility of hand, and general technical dextmity ; in that he has carved out for himself a perfectly original line of realistic art; without contemning the grand ideal of the antique, he has studied the living Greek model of the present day, and in his principal work—an heroic Venus of the Roman type—he has equalled the bold style of Michael Angelo, and combined it with the picturesque feeling of Correggio, slightly touched with the affectation and fantastic manner of Parmigiana 'This seems to describe the peculiar style of M. Cordier's more legitimate sculpture ; the other works are, with the exception of two or three busts of life and heroic size, from Greek and Roman models, truly ethnological, so accu- rate are they in all the distinctive peculiarities of race, and so finished in every adjunct of colour and costume. These, with their true ornaments and costumes, from the Negro and the Moor, the Kabyle and the fair Algerian to the Chinese and the Japanese, with many admirable studies in marble from the Caucasian branches of the human family, form the striking feature of the collection, and, in fact, give it considerable scien- tific as well as very great artistic importance. We have no hesitation in saying that M. Cordier has carried realistic art in sculpture to a point never yet reached at any period, and we are sincerely glad to receive so interesting an exhibition of sculptural art ; for, we believe, if our own sculptors will give themselves the trouble to examine it, they must per- ceive something more natural; more invigorating and healthy than those inane repetitions of pretty poses in their Cupids and Psyches, their Nymphs coming out of, and going into, and about to go into the bath, with their many Achilles and Hectors, such a very long way after the antique ; let them see these works of M. Cordier, and give up their dreams of the antique ideal, the age of which, like that of chivalry, is gone for ever.
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