fiut Iris.
FRENCH AND GERMAN ART-EXHIBITIONS.
Last year we hailed the first experiment at the exhibition in London of a collection of French pictures. The public and the patrons did the same, and with such heartiness as to lead, we trust, not only to the second exhibition, which opened last week at its former quarters, No. 121
Pall Mall, but to the permanency of such shows with the returning seasons. The chief pictures of the present collection scarcely equal those of the first in interest ; Delaroche's " Death of Guise " and reduction of the Hemicycle fresco surpassing his two of this year, and Scheffees " Francesca " throwing his " Ring of Thule" into shade. The gene- ral tone of the gallery is, however, fully maintained. Of the Delaroches, one is the " Lord Strafford going to Execution," be- longing to the Duke of Sutherland, and familiar by engravings even to those who have never been inside Stafford House,—a work which commands praise if it does not extort admiration. The other is a life-sized " Agony of Christ in the Garden,"—painful or piteous without being aw- ful. In physical realization of the phrase " Let this cup pass from me," the Saviour holds a cup—the sole point of symbolism in the treatment, and consequently out of harmony with the rest. Every critic must re- spect Delaroche ; but the three of his sacred pictures best known to us— this one, the head of Christ, and the Holy Family—are conclusive of his having no mission for sacred art. " The King of Thule" is a subject hardly expressible in painting : what M. Scheffer has made of it is a kingly old monarch drinking from his goblet, and beyond this little ex- cept a splendid piece of drawing—how seldom does one see hands like his in an English exhibition ! The dignity of style goes some way to com- pensate for the deficiency of matter. Yemees " Joseph sold by his Brethren "—treated in the French ethnological manner of which he is coryphee—is an admirable work of its order ; full of quick spontaneous lifelike expression, and artistic ease of all sort. The other contri- bution of this unrivalled painter is a life-sized "Peasant Girl of Albano," which we cannot pronounce other than hard and mechanical. From In- gres comes a " Francesca da Rimini,"—imbued with a certain art-life of its own, remote, esoteric, and castigated. We acknowledge it, but without attempting to explain it ; and any one to whom it is impalpable will be quite justified in calling the picture cold, overstrained, and pedantic. The daring, rough-shod, yet ever forecasting, vigour of Delacroix, de- clares itself in an unimportant but highly individual example, "An Arab Fantasia." Robert Fleury, the all-accomplished draughtsman and solid painter of couleur locale, exhibits a single figure of "Charles V. in the Convent of S. Just," and "Titian receiving Michael Angelo in his Studio," the latter a talented essay at the Venetian colouring. That most spirituel of microscopic painters, M. Meissonnier, who seems to doat on his diminutive canvasses not through minuteness of mind or love of petty detail, but with a true artistic idiosyncracy for producing a thorough effect with exceptional means, is represented well by "The Lansquenet Guard" ; very badly by a water-colour drawing of "Laura and Petrarch." "The Judgment of Solomon" is a clever Bible incident as seen by M. Schopin through the spectacles of M. Vernet : some of the figures are or were about in all the shop-windows in the guise of lithographs to be copied by much- believing art-students. Of Biard's several contributions in almost as many different lines, one, "The Pirates," is excellent for ludicrous yet grotesquely horrible invention and vivid expression. The pirate crew, men of all schools and shades of truculence, have descried a vessel ahead, and are inveigling it to its doom by feints of welcome. One stands on a powder-barrel and fiddles ; another has donned a woman's bonnet and hung a shawl over his naked shoulders and parades a parasol; while the rest grovel out of sight like hideous devils, flat to the bare deck, grasping their knives and pistols, and restrained in their brutal eagerness till the golden moment shall have come, by the skipper—a ghastly old hymns, with his bushy white hair and planter's straw hat. An impressible per- son may really feel " goose-skin " at the picture even while he grins. The exquisite art-dandyisms of M. Plassan—which are art, spite of their dandyism—are continued from last year, and now include one or two landscape scraps—gauzy little hazes of nature, yet inde- scribably sweet; and his style is caught up, if by no means rivalled, by MM. Fauvelet and Fichel. Diaz, Frere, Hammen, Couturier, Troyon, and Vidal, have specimens of a merit great in itself, and sometimes to English eyes extraordinary. For absolute paramount excellence in art, however, no other things in the gallery, few anywhere to be seen, compare with Mademoiselle Rosa Bonheues " Calves—a Sketch," or her "Charcoal-Burners." What truth in the first! what feeling for the unadulterated beauty of real farm- yard calves—no studio-bred weaklings or idealisms these! what delightful ease, that does a great thing as naturally as one's head turns on one's shoulders! In the second—which is carried a great deal further as a mat- ter of execution—the artistic power, the vigour with which everything stands out and bears its part, the living character, are fully as wonderful, though our private preference might be for the calves. We suppose that no such important figure in the world of art, nothing approaching Mademoiselle Bonheues force and mastery, was ever before exhibited by a woman. Her brother, Auguste Bonheur, is also an artist of the first class. The solemn deep-brooding tor, the gathering breathless heat, and the general poetry of spirit, in his "Mountain Scenery in Auvergne, Early Morn," are something of the rarest kind. Another fine landscape is M. Theodore Rousseau's "Landscape with Cattle, Early Morning," an originally-chosen scene finely conceived, and painted in true scale, though low positive colour.
The German Exhibition, located in Bond Street, possesses much less in- terest and hopefulness in our eyes than the French. We have on former occasions deplored the limited competence, the uninspired knowledge, the wintry geniality, the observation dead to graciousness and to colour, which form the staple of these exhibitions—not, indeed, of first-rate, but still4 we believe, of honourable members of the German art-body. The more of such collections, however, the better ; and for this reason besides others, that they ought to put our own artists in countenance with them- selves, by showing them how worthless are all diligence and adequacy in art unless based upon that certain open eye for nature which, with all its faults, the English school does possess, and none the less, perhaps, for having plenty of unoccupied space in its brain. There is a considerable proportion of meritorious works in the German gallery; and yards of paper might with all truthfulness be covered in laudation of particular points in some of them ; but to what purpose, when the whole thing is lifeless at the heart ? We shall only name two of the painters—A. Norton and 0. Achenbach. The "Battle of Waterloo— Charge of the Old Guard," by the first, besides being full of descriptive incidents, only lacks colour to be an admirable work, and even as it is, seems one of the most real and fine battle-pieces we have ever beheld. The men are going at it like grim death—frightful men at a frightful mo- ment, and with no shilly-shally about them, but smoke-blackened faces
amid ugly carcasses of horses, clothes bespattered, bursting seams, inexorable death-gripe, and livid enthusiasm. Herr Norten appears to be capable of looking the devil of war in the face. Herr Achenbach has more than one landscape of noble quality, fettered, yet not enslaved, by the trammels of his school. The "Moonlight in Italy" is assuredly a very uncommon performance, with its picturesque groups, and, if not in full freedom the colour, still the swimming and soothing effeot of the cloud-glorifying moon.
• [The third notice of the Royal Academy Exhibition stands over for next week.]
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