ART.
THE ACADEMY.—IV.
PICTURES.
AFTER a lengthy survey of confused ideas we may deal with a few scenes, portraits, and landscapes which are in the picture vein.
Mr. Clausen used to confound the portrait with the scene, dragging up the labourer from his occupation to exhibit in near, tight definition, his features and his boots. But Mr. Clausen is a student with a conscience, and has fallen back on a more reasonable treatment of occupied humanity. His boy- winnower (No. 121) would be a good Millet but for the last trick of the portrait, that makes him catch the painter's eye instead of minding his business. The sentiment of Millet depends on the profound occupation of the labourer. In matters of definition and colour, Mr. Clausen has made great advances, but his knowledge that something was wrong has outrun his eye, and you find him trying to correct his eye by a technique, in- stead of his technique by his eye. Thus in the Harvest (No. 91) there is a great deal of hatching over forms to disguise hard de- finition, and an eagerness to find salvation from blackness by forcing the purple shadow. The action, too, a laudable study in itself, has the same forced look. The result is that the balance of interest in the picture is uncertain. Two aggres- sive claims are made on the attention of about equal force. First, the action. The arms and legs are so violent that we inquire with wonder, Why all this ado about picking up a little corn ? In life those poses would melt into others so easily and rapidly, that the eye would not take this impression. The suspended, momentary act becomes too momentous. Second, the effect. The emphatic statement, Shadows at sunset are purple, competes for our attention. Not quite so purple, surely, to an eye engaged with the whole field, and not so noticeable to a mind engaged to this extent, with the features of the boy. One order of interest or another should rule. Either Evening Effect on harvest-field (with harvesters subordinate) ; or, Harvesters in a field at evening (with effect subordinate). Millet is right, and Monet is right. Mr. Clausen admires too many things at once. His portrait of Mrs. Roberts (No. 57) shows him at his best, modest, patiently securing a charming face. It is not great painting, but it has the root of good portrait.
Mr. Waterhouse has directed his talent not to the fields and open air, but to illustration by way of " decorative painting." Decorative painting, as practised in England, is vitiated by a misunderstanding even more unfortunate than the super- stitions of " open-air " painting in France. There are two ways of arriving at a decorative effect,—if by decorative we understand an effect of simplicity in forms and tones that will tell at a distance, simplicity of colours that will match with surroundings, simplicity in the treatment of depth that will preserve the continuity of the wall. One plan is to throw Nature overboard in the matter of values and match colours out of one's head. The other, the more difficult, convincing, and beautiful plan, the plan of Pavia and Whistler, is to catch Nature in a decorative mood, to take those effects when tempered light and vapour themselves broaden, flatten, and simplify the aspect of things. Our decorators have stumblingly followed the other track, and Mr. Waterhouse falls between two stools. He takes a certain aspect of colour in Nature, strips off the envelope and delicacy that may be found in all natural aspect, and states the local colour in an unmitigated form. Look at the pink in his cheeks, the red of his lips, the yellow of fore- head and neck, the chestnut of the hair. These colours do not match one another pleasantly, they have not that arbitrary justification. Still less have they the inclosing, uniting, modulating medium of natural light and air. So with the green of the sky, the virulent green of the grass, the extreme scarlet of the poppies. Mr. Whistler once said of such a scarlet,—" If you squeeze your colour straight out of the tube upon the canvas, the only thing left for you to do is to squeeze it out of the other end up your sleeve !" Crude colour may be condoned in an artist like Sir Edward Burne- Jones, for the sake of a curious personality in expression. One cannot pretend to find this in Mr. Waterhouse (No. 97). Rossetti has illustrated that verse of Tennyson about Saint Cecilia. Tennyson is an excellent poet to illustrate, because he edges as near to a painter's methods of presentation as a fine poet may. The grammar of his stanza, devoid of move- ment, working by juxtaposition, culminates in an effect of stillness, with its intent line, "An angel looked at her." Rossetti felt the verse in his marrow, and gave the ecstatic sleep of the saint and that immediate angel. Mr. Waterhouse brings on his familiar sullen model three times over ; once as the saint having a nap, again as two angels not looking at her. It is impossible, therefore, to accept either the conven- tion or the illustration. Bat Mr. Waterhouse has unusual patience and intelligence in design, and ability in the use of the brush. His portrait of a little girl (No. 174) shows some- thing more,—a real feeling. The feeling is badly served by an imperfectly trained eye, for the school-cleverness of the painting only disguises uncertainty of vision. It is difficult for a successful man to tarn back, to deny himself school- tricks, and to develop a real sentiment of form and colour from the action of his own eye. Mr. Waterhouse might per- haps do what Mr. Clausen is doing. If Mr. Take and Mr. Waterhouse could pool their qualities, we should have a strong painter. The picture of boys bathing, by the former (No. 812), has considerable truth of aspect in tone and colour. The latter would have given more thought to its arrangement.
Portraits in the exhibition must be briefly dismissed. Mr. Seymour Lucas has a surprisingly good portrait of a lady in the first room (No. 14). It is expressively drawn, and has less red soup than will be found in a portrait later on. How seldom the qualities of good portraiture are found conjoined ! You find in work by a painter otherwise somewhat common- place, Mr. Otto Scholderer, the personal regard, the haunting eyes (Nos. 89, 108). There is little enough of this personal charm in men of greater power, but we find strength either on the side of vital drawing, or of decorative picture- making. Mr. Sargent is easily first in vitality ; but an eye looking round a gallery for pictures may frequently pass him over. It is on the second or third review that his knowledge tells. Mr. Greiffenhagen, on the other hand, attracts the eye by the decorative intention of his pose and colour, but fails somewhat on the side of life and insight. So with Mr. Lavery. He has done nothing so good for a long time as the Lady in Black; the pale note of the arm is exquisite. But the content of the portrait leans to a kind of wooden smartness,—an empty statement of dress and pose. A portrait by a new- comer, Mr. D. Muirhead, is promising every way (No. 83). The intention is obvious enough ; rather spoilel by imitating the titles that the directors of galleries have painted across certain old pictures. Bat there is more than reminiscence of ashy-blonde infantas. There is delicacy and intimacy of drawing. Miss Agnes Walker's work also deserves a good word.
In landscape Mr. David Murray has displayed every ability except the ability to fix upon and follow out a single feeling. His work this year more nearly approaches that essential of fine art, and more widely departs than has been common with him from the region of the expert catalogue. He has given us before evidence of his fluency in Corot's tree-lan- guage, but has frequently appeared to have no guess why Corot was at the pains to elaborate that noble speech—as if one were to use a language moulded on the impulses of a mysterious poetry, for guide-book gossip. It is impossible to
be effectively chirpy in the Hebrew tongue; that organ was framed for the awful intercourse of man with God. It is incon- venient to be a rattle in Latin, hard to be familiar in English, absurd to be solemn in American. So to dress a dull and placid observation in the dream-implicated foliage of Corot is a misuse of terms. It is strange how seldom a painter will rely on the expression of a tree itself to furnish his picture with poetry, but must hurry in some other entertainment to cover and dull that sentiment. You would think there was enough in each of these characters to fill a canvas. Somnolent elms that go nodding up the sky ; foreign beeches that rake or clamber against the clouds like creepers ; chestnut avenues lit for spring ; the watchman poplar by French rivers; the mourning obelisk of the cypress ; cedars that build floor above floor of night ; the chancel of the ilex ; the fountain of the willow; weedy festoons of pear-trees; the tormented fir,— these and fifty more. Constable's homely, cheerful eye never was weighed upon by trees ; Corot did feel the oppression and mystery, though even he would force the hint of an incantation upon those woodland glades whose essence is expectation and disappearance. Now Mr. Murray has made a very beautiful thing out of the willow seen through Corot's eyes, but he will have his Constable in too, and all manner of games. His bathing scene, followed out on one sentiment or the other, would be a capital picture; it is a little like a gymnasium started in a church. I perhaps press the point too far ; and in No. 373 I gladly recognise a picture of trees and clouds that a little more exclusion, a little more nursing and refinement, would make beautiful. The criticism of Mr. Murray must cover thinner talents like Mr. East and Mr. Waterlow ; and Messrs. Aumonier, Corbet, Wm. Stott, Wetherbee, and Mark Fisher, remain for the present un- discussed. Mr. Wither's Muhrman-like landscape (276), Messrs. Arnesby Brown (158), Buxton Knight (156), Tit- combe (198), Belgrave (336), should all be seen.
Mr. Swan's rare knowledge of structure and other gifts seem to be at the mercy always, in the last stage of his pictures, of a never-satisfied technical craving. There swims up on the top of all a surface of enamelled blue, and every- thing is subdued and smothered to submit to it.
M. Fantin's roses would be beautiful if we were not dis- turbed by the grapes and peaches. So rare, even among the good painters, is simplicity ! Mr. Tom Gresham, in his Beranger (277), and Mr. Macbeth Raeburn. (283), show them- selves painters marred by the over-emphasis of illustration.
D. S. M.
Previous page
