ART.
THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF PAINTERS IN WATER- COLOURS.
DECOND NOTICE.] MR. ALBERT GOODWIN'S work in the present exhibition is at once attractive and irritating. He sends five or six examples of very various subjects, from a canal at Lucerne, to an imaginative picture of Sodom waiting under a stormy sunset for its doom. In this latter picture, the artist's imaginative quality has found full scope, and the drawing is in many ways very attractive. The colour is deep and rich; the composition pleasant; and the little incidents of the picture, such as the fantastic shadows of the clouds, and the introduction of the scarlet poppies in the fore- ground, are full of suggestiveness and imaginative propriety. But, on the whole, this moat talented and original artist is losing his hold on Nature, and becoming apt to substitute a certain fantasticality for genuine imagination. For true imagination does not falsify the facts of Nature, though it selects and arranges them; and of Mr. Goodwin's later work, falsification is, in many cases, the basis. Take one tiny instance, where many might be given in example,—subjects do not appear in Nature outlined with carmine ; nor are the shadows cast by sunlight, of a scarlet hue. We cannot accept landscape-picket-es as faithful representations of Nature which adopt such conven- tionalities as these needlessly. And the less possible is it for us to do so, when we find that these conventionalities only obtain in a certain portion of the picture. It is the undeniable truth that the foregrounds of many of these later pictures are the flimsiest and least substantial part of the composition. If ever an artist built his house upon a foundation of sand, meta- phorically speaking, with the appropriate Scriptural result, this painter is the man. Nevertheless, it seems unkind to dwell upon his shortcomings, when we consider how pleasantly far from the beaten track are the roads along which he leads us, and how delicately strong is hie imaginative faculty.
It is with great reluctance that we have once more to remark upon the declining value of Miss Clara Montalba 's contributions. The skill and ability which threatened some years ago to grow into a trick, have at last fulfilled their promise. The black boats, and the brown sails, and the green sea, and the white sky, are all here as before, with just something wanting in each of them which deprives the results of charm. The work is not only imperfect, but inaoleut—done upon recipe, without heart or enthusiasm. The fact of it is, that Miss Montalba seems to lack not the power but the will to do better work ; and we warn her that if it be not done quickly, many of those who have believed most firmly in her genius will have grown so accustomed to the trivial use which she has made of her powers, as to become prepossessed against her future efforts.
Mr. Henry Moore does not send any elaborate work to this Gallery ; but he has a dashing sketch of blue sea and grey sky, full of light, air, and movement, which is in its way one of the most masterly pieces of work in the exhibition.
We mentioned one of Mr. Phillip'e (the new Associate) landscapes in our first notice of this exhibition, and expressed a very high opinion of its merits. We wish again to call atten- tion to this gentleman's pictures, as we find therein a combined strength and delicacy, and an absence of what Mr. Ruskin would call the "sentimental fallacy" which are very rare and very pleasant. Look, for instance, at his drawing of " Torridon Sandstone," and note its firm, solid work, its sense of bigness and open-air, and its peculiarly rich and unforced colour.
To turn to work of an utterly different description, those who are interested in watching the intellectual and emotional development of an artist will find that Mr. Wilmott Pilebury has sent to this exhibition, if we remember rightly, three drawings of two haystacks, one drawing of three haystacks, and three drawings of one haystack. We trust this very painstaking artist will forgive us if we have counted them incorrectly. And let us confess that if any gentleman must devote his whole genius to the eternal repetition of such uninteresting matters, he could scarcely do it with more minuteness and patience than the gentleman in question. Mr. Herbert Marshall is one of those artists who cling with an almost pathetic devotion to the subjects which they have once found attractive. We have in this exhibition what we should think must be nearly his fiftieth representation of " Westminster," with its misty afternoon light, its dull-orange sunset, its wet streets, and hurrying hansoms. And very good it is of its kind, though perhaps the kind be a little conventional if it be curiously examined. The tinge of propriety is like the trail of the serpent " over it all,"—there is an absence of flurry or prepossession, no favour of one thing rather than another. The streets, the cabs, the Abbey, and the sunset,—Mr. Marshall loves them all alike; and perhaps, in other words, this means that he does not love them at all. But this is an intellectual and emotional question into which we probably have no right to inquire.
Mr. Thorne Waite sends a large number of contributions, of which his " Trundling the Cheese "—a landscape on the Sussex Downs, with small, very prettily put in rustic figures—is the most important. The work is extremely skilful and pleasant, and there is a soft brightness which overspreads the whole com. poeition,—a sense of warmth and sun and summer days, very pleasing of aspect after our six months' winter. The sources of Mr. Thorne Waite's art are evidently the works of David Cox and Copley Fielding ; but he brings to the study of these great masters a considerable number of individual qualities which prevent his painting from savouring too much of imitation, and one feels inclined to say, after looking at these sunny drawings, —" Well, if England is not like this,—why, it ought to be."
This Society is not strong in figure-painters ; at all events, of figure-painters who contribute to the Gallery ; but of these, Mr. Henschel is one of the best. He has a large picture here called " Light and Shade," somewhat conventional in its subject, of a young girl who turns towards the light as she site on a stool at her grandmother's feet knitting, while the old woman, her hands in her lap, looks rather wearily towards the fire. It is a well-drawn and carefully studied picture; and despite its apparent conventionality, is treated in a sympathetic and original manner. The colour is, in our opinion, a little too uni- formly dirty ; there is no reason why shade should not be as transparent as light, if it be properly rendered. Bat still, Mr. Henschel's work deserves careful notice, if only because of its serious endeavour, and the absence of the pretty-prettiness which is too frequent in the figure-painting of this Society. Look, for example, at Mr. Ernest Radford's classical figures of young women in thin, crudely coloured draperies, tied round them in the most unnatural, if not impossible manner, while they stand with one foot on a step, or the base of a statue, or any other object which affords them opportunity of standing on one leg and exaggerating the curve of their hips. We wish Mr. Horsley would take np a crusade against these sham classical pictures, which are, to our thinking, infinitely more objection- able from a point of view of true decency than any work from the nude,—not to speak of the utter absence of in- tellectual motive, or any real feeling for the character of the ancient life which they profess to depict. Mr. Ernest Radford is an old offender in this respect, and we do not know that his work is not even more unpleasant to us because it is finished with such extreme care. In the common phrase, " he is old enough to know better." Mr. Clarence Whaite is an artist who, we think, but rarely does himself justice by his choice of subjects. He has a liking for strange and brilliant effects of light, which, if they are not impossible of being rendered by art, are at all events of the most supreme difficulty, and afford occasion for frequent failure. We do not say that he is wrong in choosing such subjects ; but we do say that he must not be surprised if he has to pay for his choice, by frequently finding his work incompletely expressing the subject he has chosen, and being comparatively unpopular. For the majority of people who go to picture- galleries, broadly speaking, are dwellers in towns, and but little acquainted with the out-of-the-way effects of Nature. Nor do such folk like being surprised, and, so to speak, humiliated, by being shown aspects of Nature which they do not understand. Hence it is that Mr. Clarence Whaite's golden sunlight., and gorgeous rainbows, and general attempts at rendering the iridescence of natural objects under strong light, are not more generally attractive ; to which must be added that they are not completely successful from an artistic point of view. But his most important work in the present Gallery is one of the beet which we have ever seen, and deserves careful examination and considerable praise. It is a mountain-torrent flashing over the rocks, in bright sunlight, down a precipitous gorge, the declivities. of which are covered with trees and foliage of many hues ; while above everything, the peaks of blue mountains rise sharp and clear against the sunny sky.
There is one member of this Society who is perhaps even more partial to bright light than Mr. Whaite, though he wears his "rue with a difference ;" and be is Mr. Francis Powell, whose pictures of calm summer seas have long been objects of attraction to the visitors to this gallery. He has an unusually large drawing in the present exhibition of the usual calla golden and silver sea, on the brightest of summer days, with small fishing-vessels dotted here and there on its gleaming surface. On the whole, we think that we prefer Mr. Powell's work when it is on his usual small scale ; the studio-quality—if we may use such a term—seems to become more evident in the increase of size, and the present work suffers considerably in this respect. With the mention of Mr. Powell's drawing we must close our notices of the exhibition of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours for 1887.
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