ART.
ROYAL ACADEMY.
[FIRST NOTICE.]
TuE Academy is this year distinctly less interesting than usual. The " hard times " and the hard weather have affected the artists even more than was to be expected, and the mass of the pictures in this exhibition seem painted against the grain, and with a listless hand. So much is certain, though it is to be noted that besides the air of depression which prevails through. out, there is another cause for the comparatively slight interest of the Gallery in the absence of several of the most popular con- tributors. Sir John Millais, for instance, usually to be relied upon for a landscape or a subject-picture, besides several por- traits, sends this year only one small likeness of Mr. Barlow, R.A. (the engraver), the same gentleman who sat for the principal figure in Sir John's large composition of "The Ruling Passion." The President, too, though represented by two im- portant works, is in neither dealing with his accustomed line of business ; and neither his ceiling decoration nor his bronze statue -show him at his best, though the latter is in many respects a notable work. Mr. Herkomer is an absentee altogether ; Mr. Leslie sends only one comparatively unimportant contribution ; Mr. Alma Tadema, only two very small works ; Mr. Brett, only one very large work, and that one, we are sorry to say, wholly un- worthy, in its glare and gaudiness, of his reputation. Mr. Gregory, perhaps the most brilliantly clever, as he is the most uncertain of the younger Associates, is absent altogether ; and Mr. Alfred Gilbert, who has more genius, and perhaps we might truly say more knowledge, than all the other young sculptors put together, sends only one small portrait-bust. So we might go on throughout the list, but enough has been said to show that there is a very considerable amount of absenteeism, to which we may add the fact that amongst the remaining Academicians and Associates, the average number of works sent is less than three. It is no use dwelling upon this matter, or lamenting it ; painters are men as well as artists, and, like all the rest of us, have their good and bad. seasons. This year the spring sunshine has come too late, and the money sunshine has not come at all ; pictures are not selling, except in rare instances, and are not likely to be selling in the immediate future, and consequently the artists are not attempting large composi- tions, which entail great expenditure both in time and money, and have very great difficulty in finding purchasers. It seems more strange at first, that in the bad times there should be numerically fewer pictures sent by the well-known men ; but in reality the reasons are very simple, for even small pictures need a considerable amount of energy and hope, and necessitate a considerable expense out of pocket in frames, models, &c. So that here again, depression and prudence come hand-in-hand, and the artist limits himself to work of which he will have but little difficulty to dispose.
Let us now look at the collection as a whole, and notice a few of its most salient points ; and first of all, as Mr. Burne Jones's election now bears fruit, and he exhibits in his maturity for the first time at Burlington House, as one of the newest Associates, his handiwork shall have precedence of all others. "The Depths of the Sea " is a high, narrow picture, somewhat the shape and size of a shutter, of a nature to make Mr. Horsley shut his eyes modestly, unless he has recanted his art lecture upon the un- draped model. And yet it is, whatever may be its faults, absolutely without true reproach in this respect. No one who has eyes to see can doubt this picture of the mermaid, who drags down through dim, still, green water, her mortal lover, unconscious that he is dying in her arms, to be absolutely pure in intention and significance,-
" Habes tota quod mente petisti Infelix."
A strange picture in many ways,—strange in its colouring of tender shades of yellow-brown, green, grey, and purple ; strange in its cramped, twisted gestures ; strange in its mixture of human and un-human interest ; strangest of all, perhaps, in its curious mingling of great imaginative power, and an almost childish simplicity of detail. The mermaid's silver tail, for instance, is fitted neatly on to her pale-yellow body as if it had been done at a silversmith's; and the floor of her rock palace is covered with hundreds of little brown pebbles, like the bottom of an aquarium. The picture does not look well in its position on these walls,—the work all round is so entirely opposed in character ; and moreover, while taking this into consideration, it is not, in our opinion, one of the artist's finest works, though it possesses many beauties. No amount of ingenuity could have made a composition of this kind pleasant to the eye, when we consider that the mermaid's head is about the middle of the picture, and her captive's head, as it were, four or five rungs farther up the ladder. In the same way, when we have two bodies very elaborately painted, one feels a considerable de- ficiency in seeing only three fingers and one foot belonging to the characters ; and this occurs in the present case, owing to both the man's arms being bound behind his back by the mermaid's embrace. The true defect of the picture, however, outside its technical merits and deficiencies, is that it is at once an allegory and not an allegory. The artist has meant something very deep, and he has not thought it out sufficiently to make it evident to those who look at the work ; nor has he cared to interest spectators in his story simply as a story. The emotions jar, throughout the work ; the gleeful mermaid and the dying or dead man have nothing in common, any more than the little pebbles and air-bubbles have with her silver tail. An unnatural picture, not because it has a preternatural subject, but because it has two subjects, one of which is preternatural and the other human ; and we do not quite know whether we are to take our mermaid seriously, tail and all, or to struggle about in that grey- green, water amid the air•bubbles, till we discover her to be an impersonation of selfish love, or a tailed embodiment of some abstract proposition.
Let us look at a very different kind of art, Sir Frederick
Leighton's statue of "The Sluggard," of which so much has been said. Tersely told, the subject is a young man stretching himself, the arms raised in a horizontal position and bent double at the elbow, with the hands towards the neck, the fingers of one closed and the other partially open. The body stands on one foot, and is slightly twisted, in the act of yawning. The work has neither great merits nor very atrocious defects, though both its good and bad points are clearly marked. And first we will take the good ones. The attitude carries the intention of the painter,—the man is in the act of stretching, and stands only for a moment, as it were, as we see him. Again, there is great knowledge shown,—not only anatomical knowledge, but that much rarer knowledge of what we are accustomed to call ideal form. Certainly this is not a servile copy of any living model. Again, it has a merit which is very hard to characterise shortly, but which may be called the merit of style. It takes us back to great works of antiquity, and claims a sort of kinship with them. There are many other merits, but these may perhaps stand as the chief. What is there on the other side ? If the truth must be told, all the objections to this statue may be summed up in one, which is, in truth, fatal,—it is not a sculptor's work. By this we mean simply that its merits are such us might be possessed by the work in clay or bronze of any genuine painter who possessed the knowledge of form which distinguishes Sir Frederick Leighton ; but, on the other hand, its shortcomings are such as no sculptor would tolerate or condone. It is almost impossible to define the great difference between the " handling " of a master in sculpture and of one who is practically only a tyro in that art,— it is akin to the touch of a great painter, that is nearly all one can say, though the result is to give the impres- sion of life, of the various substances of bone, muscle, and skin of which the body is made, and especially of the congruity and uniformity of the whole. Look at Hamo Thornycroft's " Sower " in this Gallery, in the plaster-cast ; and note that, blundering in some respects as the conception is, yet the vitality of the body therein is felt in an entirely different manner to that which Sir Frederick shows. Turn, again, to the small, unpre- tentious statuette by Onelow Ford, which stands near "The Sluggard," and the same thing, though manifested in a different form, is again visible. The body, throughout all its diversity, has a suavity of contour, and a continuity as of one organism, which the sculptor grows gradually to feel; whereas, when we look at such work as "The Sluggard," despite its great artistic qualities, and despite its anatomical knowledge and qualities of style, we find that we think of parts—of legs, arms, ribs, and so on. Again, dismissing this point, we see the painter's, not the sculptor's, instinct in the position itself. And why Because it is essentially a position good only from one point of view. Looked at from the right or left, the general form is unpleasant, in one or two places acutely displeasing, resembling that of an irregularly planted cross, of which the long, upright leg has been split into two portions. The head doubled up, and arms apparently joining it and the trunk, give a clumsy and over-toppling air to the whole figure ; and it is not till we get immediately in front or behind the statue that this is removed. This is evident, indeed, in some measure, even when either a back or front view is chosen. A defect of this kind is almost always visible in the statues of those who are not professional sculptors, and arises simply from the habit of thinking of a figure from the pictorial, that is, one point of view, rather than on every side. These are, we think, the most notable points both in praise and dispraise of this work, which is rather a painter's graceful exercise in another art than a notable piece of sculpture. Sir Frederick Leighton's .` Ceiling Decoration" (some classically draped figures of the Muses on a gold ground), which is, we hear, to adorn the house of one of the greatest (that is, richest) of American millionaires, hangs exactly opposite to the statue of " The Sluggard," and forms an effective background to it. We cannot spare space here to do more than mention this, and say that though it is in several respects effective and beautiful in its detail, it is singularly awkward and scattered in its composi- tion. Thus, the large central panel, which is one of oblong shape, is distributed as follows. In the centre is a seated figure with a tripod on each side, and above each tripod a winged flying figure; while the sides of this panel are occupied with two standing figures. The whole composition might be delineated by taking any octavo volume and five lucifer-matches, and after placing one match in the middle and one at some distance on either side, breaking the remaining matches into halves and placing them one above the other between the centre and side ones. In fact, the panel is not filled at all. The space is dotted in a semi-mechanical way with various objects, and the result is not decoration, properly speaking, but distraction.
The nearest approach to the picture of the year is probably Mr. Orcbardson's second edition of hie " Mariage de Convenance," entitled "After." As with the first work of this series-, the picture tells its story perfectly ; though in this latter instance there is but little story to tell. "The rest is silence" would describe the motive of this composition ; the haggard man, sitting alone before the fire-place, his neglected and deserted dinner-table behind him, and the portrait of the vanished wife looking darkly down upon the room and its occupant, from the shadowed wall. Well, this is a continuation, and continuations, we generally feel, take advantage of us, winning our applause or sympathy with as little pains as possible. But that being granted, the picture is as fine as its predecessor. Two things in it are perfect, both of the essence of the matter, and a third is admirable. The dramatic and pictorial treatment of the subject, and the colour of the work, are perfect. The wreck of a life never admirable for effort or self-restraint, and too far gone to attempt either in the future, is hardly, perhaps, the subject one would want to have painted frequently ; but if done at all, it could scarcely be more perfectly expressed; the man's very dress, in its habitual perfection, and yet in its indescribable appearance of having been put on without care or thought, helps most admirably to tell the story, and the power with which the painter has grasped both the savagery, breaking through the conventional mask of " appear- ances," and the desolation, of the man who never quite knew, till he lost his wife, how much he oared for her, is very great.. And of the picture's artistic treatment, it would be difficult to speak too highly, for the work is pre-Raphaelite in its frank- ness, consistency, and intenseness, with none of the pre- Raphaelite foibles. It is, above all things, from the pictorial point of view, " easy ;" the spectator is entirely unreminded of the difficulties which the artist has overcome ; and though there is a singular perception and rendering of the details of the scene, they are kept in exquisite subordination to the main effect, and the main motive. We say deliberately exquisite subordination, for this is really the ease, where, as here, we have all details rendered with full and clear expression, and yet where not one of them for a moment arrests our attention, or is, indeed, noticed, till the matter in hand—the man's solitude, anger, and regret—has been fully reckoned with. Amongst much work that is affected and unreal, and more that is trivial or simply and feebly pretty, Air. Orchardson's picture hangs like a grim memento mori, telling its painful story, unmistakeably true to life_ Weshould like to contrast with this, Mr. John Sargent's life- size portrait group of " The Misses Vickers," in its way probably the cleverest thing in the exhibition. It is the me plus ultra or French painting, or, rather, of the French method as learned by a clever foreigner, in which everything is sacrificed to technical considerations. The effect of a white dress or arm against a purple chair, the " value," in short, of one object against another ;- the effective disposition of masses ; the concentration of the atten- tion upon the main point, to the comparative neglect of all the rest of the picture ; the losing sight of the object of all painting —that is, the production of pleasure to the beholder—in the- pursuit of " painting " itself, that is, of smart, clean brushwork, undisturbed from the moment when the paint was taken from the palette and transferred dexterously to the canvas,—all these are the marks of modern French painting, as taught by, say, Carolus- Duran ; and all of these Mr. Sargent has mastered, or is in a way to master. And yet, when it is all done, what good is it ? Could we fancy any one a hundred years hence caring to possess such a picture as this, where colour and imagination have really no place, which calls aloud for us to admire its artistic dexterity, but seems never to have felt at all that there was anything more in its subject than a good opportunity of dis- playing the painter's power ? This would be condemnation. enough, even were the picture to be as true as it pretends to- be ; but, as a matter of fact, this composition, like so many of its school, is essentially as false to the facts of the case, as the most artificially conceived work of the English school of sentimental painters. The effect is an impossible one. In no conceivable light that ever was on sea or land, could human beings stare like this against an unseen. background. The whole picture has a glare as of cold gaslight, or, rather, as of some ghastly moonlight unknown to Nature, expressly invented by the artist for purposes of his own. In many particulars, too, the attempt at giving the- " values " has overreached itself, and produced an absolute- falsity of impression, as, for instance, in the vermilion lips of the young lady in white, who is probably in Nature an extremely pretty girl, but whom Mr. Sargent has made almost a caricature,. in his endeavour to get the utmost possible effect out of the contrast of her red mouth and clear, brilliant flesh-tints. Welt drawn, cleverly grouped, smartly painted, clearly and keenly seen, with a great grasp of the superficial aspect of the scene, and of one side of its artistic requirements, this picture
is a good example of the kind of art we may expect if we ever adopt the theory that painting exists only for itself alone, and not for purposes of expressing the beauty and interest of the world, and of giving heart and pleasure to those who would otherwise pass it by. For—and this is the whole point of our criticism—no human being except a painter can take any pleasure in such work as this. People may admire and wonder at its skill and audacity, and even be gratified by them, much in the same way as we are gratified when the Japanese juggler spins fifteen plates at the same time; but genuine, lasting pleasure can no man take in what is essentially shallow, pretentious, and untrue.
[Since writing the above we have discovered, too late to criticise, that Mr. Gilbert has sent a large figure-subject, which we shall speak of in our next article.]
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