MR. CHURCH'S ICEBERGS.—MR. HA:MERTON'S PICTURES.
IT is no novelty for an artist to endure great fatigue and run great risks to procure materials for a picture. The most unadventurous of sketchers may find himself unexpectedly put on his defence by the uncomfortable freaks of an angry bull, or a farmer's over- strained dislike to trespassers. Among the more enterprising, one is perhaps forced to protect himself from the dangerous intrusive- ness of the wild Arab of the desert by an honest blow, delivered straight from the shoulder ; another is pelted for directing "the evil eye" on his infantine model, or is hooted and treated as "(saving your presence) the devil himself ;" while a third will brave the dangers of dirty weather on a lee shore, that he may fill his portfolio at the risk of his life. Mr. Church is evidently of the latter class. I do not envy the feel- ings of the shipmaster who got his orders to cruise about the mouth of Davis's Straits at the confluence of the Gulf Stream with the current flowing southward from the Arctic pole. Here, and even so far south as the latitude of New York, may be met those stupendous masses of ice which, fallen from some northern glacier, and loaded with accumulations in the quiet Arctic seas, have broken finally from their anchorage, and carry towards the over- heated tropics some part of the excessive Polar cold. It is one of these masses which has furnished Mr. Church with his subject. But on the very threshold, protest should be entered against the strange framing of the picture, which greatly imperils its success- ful effect. It is a pity that Mr. Church was not satisfied with common experience in favour of gold frames, but must needs surround his work with the heavy deep brown setting of American oak.
Let the spectator cut a small parallelogram out of the blank side of the programme given to him as he enters the gallery, and hold the paper at such a distance from the eye as will shut out all but the mere painting. Through this ready-made mount he will see a picture of no common merit. Standing on a low plateau or stunted cliff of ice, worn by the constant lapping of the water into curves and eaves of every conceivable shape, the specta- tor looks across a bay of apparently shallow water, covering a large portion of the submerged base of the berg to the principal mass of ice in the mid-distance. The eye is at once attracted, as it should be, to this central mass, which is carefully drawn and modelled, and lighted with the slanting rays- of the even- ing sun. The colour of warm sunlight on the frozen semi- transparent mountain is happily caught, and beautifully con- trasted with the pale gray and violet of the shadows, which again are broken by innumerable reflected and transmitted lights. Through a gap on the right of the principal mass the eye is led into the heart of the berg, which here rises into the spire-like peaks and pinnacles so often described by Arctic travellers, and is partially lost in the mist and vapour into which the warmer air, whither the berg has floated, is being perpetually condensed. This is the best part of the picture. Great size and mystery are gained by delicate transitions of colour and the faintly defined outline of the ice against the sky ; a sort of enchanted stillnelss and repose pervade the solemn ice-cliffs. It is strange that with this apparently nice appreciation of the good effects of finesse, and of refraining from over-definition, Mr. Church should, on the left of the berg, have fallen into the opposite extreme, and by heavy tracing and shading brought that part of it so far for- ward out of its place as to impair the size and unity of the mass. I recommend this point to the attention of the chromolithographer who is to make a" facsimile-" (?) of the picture. As he can scarcely hope to reproduce its various colours in all their delicacy, let him steal a march on Mr. Church by correcting in the copy this most obvious and indisputable flaw in the original.
In the distance are seen other icebergs silently sailing in the evening light, very beautiful in feeling, though the sun-light on them is less heavenly and pure than on the principal mass. I should have been content to let the distance on this side run out of the picture unimpeded by the fragment of ice-wall in the foreground, tenderly painted though it be, with its blue veins and luminous hollows. The distant sea is of a heavy purple not easy to account for, the surface not being sufficiently smooth to catch the reflection of the bank of cloud which hangs over the horizon. Nearer the foreground the water shallows, and over the unequal floor of ice be- neath glows with the purest tints of the emerald and the beryl, drawing fresh beauty from the destruction and dissolution of the solid mass which it perpetually saps and undermines, and lighting up the caves and arches it has worn with trembling glances of re- flected light. The opaque and dirty-coloured sky is the least suc- cessful part of this very beautiful picture.
Mr. Hamerton is a no less resolute and courageous student of nature than Mr. Church. He has invented and navigated a new order of craft, incurred the accusation of piracy at the hands of an enraged patentee, camped on the moors of Lancashire, lived for years the life of a hermit on a solitary isle in the Scottish High- lands, risen up early and gone to bed late, or not at all, all for the love of his art. These things we know from his own pen; for he has written two very pleasant volumes full of his own adventures in search of the picturesque. But he tells us more than this. He narrates how his soul revolted from the false and indolent conven- tionalism of bygone times and embraced the tenets of the pre- Raphaelite brethren ; how, burning with a desire to represent "the
truth," he steadily and severely strove after the accurate imitation! of natural objects without flinching and without compromise; how, beaten and overcome in the unequal and untenable struggle, he well nigh despaired, and gave up his bark to be swept at random over the wild waters of unachieved longings, but finally reached a haven where, accepting certain limitations to the capabilities of his art, "no question relating to it could thenceforth cost him any further practical hesitation or embarrassment, because he had weighed them all one by one, and arrived at [provisional] conclusions on each of them." Probably no artist ever so closely analyzed the duties of his calling, so dissected its capabilities, or laid down such stringent rules for its practice. Herein he exhibits much more of a critical than a creative or poetical genius ; and it may well be doubted whether he will ever succeed in raising his fame as a painter to the level he has reached as a writer on art. He possesses considerable power of obser- vation (" active observation," as he calls it), but appears to prefer using it for the purpose of astonishing rather than pleasing. For instance, in No. 1 of the four pictures now ex- hibited by him at 196 Piccadilly, which is called "Ben Cruachan, with clouds rising : morning," "the relation between the illumi- nated mountain and the intense depth of the lake is the natural fact he most ardently desires to convey." (See the catalogue.) This depth he indicates by exceedingly dark blue paint, and seems quite pleased to think that it will not be understood by the public, and longs for an opportunity of convicting them of ignorance by con- fronting them with the actual lake (Loch Awe). I suspect, how- ever, that the experiment would result rather in a verdict against himself, not for excessive depth or intensity, but for a want of lumin- osity in his colour. It is the want of light, not the depth of colour, (which really does not exist in the picture), that makes the water look dark. The same fault (viz., want of luminosity), is perceptible in the other pictures, though some allowance is to be made for the villanous light in which they are hung. Other instances of the same hankering after strange effects might be multiplied from the catalogue. These, however, are minor shortcomings. Mr. Hamer- ton's fundamental error lies in his supposing that the artist's office is only (as he himself expresses it, 'Painter's Camp," vol. p. 293,) "to give an idea of beautiful natural scenes to people living at a distance from them." Notwithstanding the laborious processes which he recommends at the end of his book, and which it is to be assumed he adopted in painting his exhibited pictures, he can hardly be said to have succeeded even in the object he has chosen. His sense both of form and colour needs to be much cultivated and further ripened. But I venture to say that the object an artist should have in view is something very different. His true object is to pro- duce an impression on the mind of the spectator corresponding to the impression which he has himself received from the sight of the scene depicted. The pleasure derived from looking at a beautiful picture is quite distinct from that which arises in the presence of an actual scene. It is the human element in every work of art, the feeling impressed upon it by the artist in translating it from the original object into his own language, which interests the spectator. If not, then art is merely illusive, and the cleverly painted fly on the window or the grapes that the birds came to peck at (if the story could be believed) are its ne plus ultra. V.
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