THE FINE ARTS QUARTERLY, No. UL

THE commencement of a second volume marks a step in the course of the Fine Arts Quarterly Review, and furnishes a con- venient opportunity for making some remarks on its contents. The present number is an average sample of the work, and the observations which occur to us upon it are applicable, with little variation, to its predecessors. The number contains 224 pages, of which a large proportion, no less than 97, are devoted to descriptive catalogues, leaving only 127 pages to be distributed between art criticism, biography (a memoir of H. Vernet), and review of books relating to the Fine Arts. The actual ratio, indeed, between one species of matter and another is not accurately represented by these numbers, for the type in which the catalogue portion is printed is, for the most part, much smaller than that used in the remainder, so that the two portions are in truth nearly equal in magnitude. Now, whatever the value of a descriptive catalogue, as affording a record of the history or pedigree of works of Art, we are surely entitled to look for a greater proportion of bread to sack in a work which comes before the world with such a title, with such pretensions, and so sumptuously arrayed as the Fine Arts Quarterly, and unless some other benefit is derived from the numerous authors who are advertised as contributors than the privilege of parading a list of their names and distinctions (with few exceptions the only benefit yet gained), we fear the publi- cation, which promised to satisfy a real want, will have but a short career. Under the term "descriptive catalogue" are here included the periodical Fine Arts Record, which is little else ; and a paper on the "Loan Collection lately Exhibited at Sauth Ken- sington." Both these papers contain a good deal of so-called Art gossip, and the latter in form and type pretends to the dig- nity of an essay ; but for any effectual information or criticism about the arts of pottery, working in bronze and other metals, and similar arts, its contents are about as useful as the account which the lady proposed to have made out as a record of her own beauty. CI will give out divers schedules of my beauty, it shall be inventoried and every particle and utensil labelled to my will ; as, item, two lips in different red ; item, two grey eyes with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin; and so forth." It were hardly more difficult to paint the lady's portrait from her inventory than to learn a lesson in art from Mr. D. Wyatt's paper on the Kensington show of rarities. Mr. S. Red- grave in this number completes his review of " Sandby's History of the Royal Academy." His paper is mainly occupied with the in- quiry into the management of the Academy by a Committee of the House of Commons in 1835-6. But the interest of this cer- tainly very one-sided inquiry has been entirely superseded by the labours of last year's commission, and there is little practical utility in refuting or discrediting an obsolete report which nobody now dreams of adopting or enforcing.

We have found fault all the more freely because we think that now, when so much money is spent by private persons upon works of Fine Art, and so powerful and immediate an influence is thus brought to bear on the advancement of the class of Art which may for the time being be most in favour ; when so many of these so-called patrons of Art want guidance in their outlay, and readily adopt the suggestions of their newspapers— for every newspaper has its Art critic, who, with little of the qualifications needed for the office, save perhaps a ready flow of slang phrases, undertakes to teach the public what they shall like and what dislike—it is most important that there should be some current literature fit to take part with the public galleries and museums in cultivating an intelligent taste for Art, based upon some definite principles, and recognizing some other merit in its professors than fashion and the wealth of their customers. - There remains the more agreeable duty of noticing two excellent articles, one a detailed description or rather inter- pretation and criticism, of Raphael's "School of Athens," by Mr. W. W. Lloyd ; the other by Mr. Hamerton, on modern French etchings. The general composition in Raphael's great work hi well known, and is further brought to mind by an outline copy in this review. The numerous figures contained in it. are distributed about a low flight of steps, some below, some upon, and others on the terrace above them. Mr. Lloyd's description commences in the foreground with the solitary, / deeply-absorbed sage in the left centre, whom he is "the first and alone in identifying as Democritus of Abdera," and then passes by Pythagoras, who sits surrounded by his disciples, and Anaxagoras, who stands between him and Democritus, up to the group of which Socrates is the principal figure.

"From Socrates we pass to the central Group,—the central subject of the picture,—his pupil Plato debating with Aristotle, again a pupil of his own. They stand relieved against bright sky beyond, and between files of their respective adherents, who listen with sympathetic atten- tion, with affection and admiration." (p. 55.)

Space forbids us to extract more at length from this in-

teresting essay, which rests, it will be observed, on no authen- tic record left by the artist himself or transmitted from his

time, but which scholarly lore and philosophic study, coupled with a keen appreciation for beauty of form and colour, have assisted its writer to produce. From the central point the com- position returns in a gradually descending line from in3taphy- sicians, whom Mr. Lloyd identifies severally as Zeno, Diogenes the Cynic (lounging apart on the steps in the right centre), and the Sceptics, to the later physical investigators, Ptolemy, Hipparchus, Euclid.

"Science, therefore, which at its very earliest rise aspired to heaven, has taken its flight round the universe, and comes back at last to minister to the wants and ways of man so condescendingly that its function is aptly symbolized by Geometry by the solution of a problem scored on the very surface of the ground." (p. 62.) "The result and its processes are wonderful enough when, setting significant expression aside, we are content to dwell upon the charm and mystery of balanced lines and equivalent yet varied masses ; but the true miracle lies in the accordance of these essential contrasts with contrasts of character, in the harmony of moral and material fitness." (p. 46-7.)

Turning from the effect produced to the means of its production, Mr. Lloyd draws attention to certain licences of perspective which have been taken by the painter, especially in the heights of some of the figures placed on either side of the central pair of philosophers.

"This deviation from accuracy is too gross not to have been conscious; but the painter, who bestowed the most refined art upon the composition of contrasting and relieving heads in the two groups, mani- festly did not care to lose the effect of these combinations for the sake of technical exactness. So it is in art as in morals, that a crisis will from time to time come round when exactest justice would be extremest wrong; and genius by arbitrary prerogative wrests a grace beyond the literal law of academic rule, and relies upon and receives indemnity on the all-sufficient ground of satisfactory and beautiful effect." (p. 67.)

This is perilous ground. Genius, indeed, will not be said nay, and silences the critic without quite obliterating regret for the lapse. So Andrea del Sarto is made by the poet to say of the great " Urbinate,"

"That arm is wrongly put—and there again— A fault to pardon in the drawing's lines, Its body, so to speak; its soul is right; He means right—that a child may understand. Still, what an arm ! and I could alter it. But all the play, the insight, and the stretch, Out of me! out of me ! "

Mr. Hamerton is never dull, and in spite of an unmistakeable imitation of Mr. Ruskin's style is often original. But it is a trite remark to say that a good sketch is better than a badly finished picture (which is the upshot of his introductory remarks), and he

was probably led to it only by the desire of saying something very much in favour of his immediate subject. Good wine, how- ever, needs no bush, and no apology was necessary for writing an article about modern French etching. It seems that there is an etching club in France, as we believe there has long been in England, and that it has acquired sufficient stability to pallets its etchings without pecuniary loss, in which latter particular it differs from its English cousin, whose productions, so far as we know, are not published. The more's the pity ;

though Mr. Hamerton, who is always inclined to be severe on the "public," has discovered a sufficient reason for not making the venture in the indifference of the aforesaid public, who, he is assured by the art publishers, prefer "hart "—explained by the same obliging informants to mean " Birket Foster's water-colour drawings." Many years' close study of nature, if it has not made our author all that could be desired as an artist, has given an

edge and a temper to his naturally keen powers of observation which make him trenchant and trustworthy as a critic, and in- fuse into his criticism internal evidence that it is written with knowledge—at least, wherever the question is one about draw- ing, or about light and shade. Upon certain large questions, especially the prime one—how is Nature a guide to Art, his mind is apparently not yet made up. Elsewhere he has said that the office of a landscape is to let people know what sort of a place it is which has provided the subject of the picture,— merely topographical office and here he declines to criticize

a Persian sketch by J. Laurens (p. 108), because, " as he has never been in the East, nor ever drawn a camel, his opinion is not of the least value."—implying that a picture ought in the narrowest sense to be a copy from nature. On the other hand, his admiration for Corot's etchings depends entirely on their being a revelation of the artist's own nature; and he sums up his admiration for Wry= in the sentence, "He is gifted with the tvfo grand gifts—eyes keen to see, and imagination mighty to transform;" and adopts Victor Hug,o's dictum in praise of that artist's etchings, "They are visions." Blake could not have gone further than this ; indeed, it is his very expression, and implies a doctrine much more to our mind than the former. Meantime we express our satisfaction that Mr. Hamerton throws his weight into the scale against merely patient labour, if it be coupled with insensibility to beauty, and records his conviction that one who has no sense of beauty is excluded from the highest rank of artists.

The number contains good impressions of two French etchings, and a large coloured print (executed apparently in Paris) of the design which decorates a vase lately found in Rhodes. The subject of this last is the surprise of Thetis by Peleus.