ART.
WINTER EXHIBITIONS.
THE exhibitions in London to which the picture-lover would be wise to turn first, at the present moment, are those of two dealers, the French Gallery in Pali Mall, and Messrs. Lawrie's at 15 Old Bond Street. It is a hopeful sign that there is now a certain number of shops where popular modern rubbish is eschewed, and a standard maintained higher than any that prevails at the painters' exhibitions. • The collection at the French Gallery is of old English pictures. Such a collection would serve a good purpose if it cleared people's heads of the bewildered slang about "advanced painting," " impression- ism," "new criticism," and all the rest of it that confuses the simple distinction between good painting and bad, whether new or old. When will it be understood that the accredited and popular painting of this country for the last fifty years is the meanest aberration in the history of art, and that to speak of it as orthodox is to treat a bloated Little Bethel as the Church Universal? To the real Catholic body of painters belongs equally a master of the present, Whistler, or a master of a century ago, Old Crome. The great painter of to-day is at home with the Old Master, and a stranger to the Academies ; the Old Master is as fresh as the new, as incompatible with the herd, and no " advance" will ever get beyond him. He is never likely to be popular, because the popularity of good painters, as of bad, depends upon an address to a variety of sentiments. His landscapes are not illustrations to a guide- book or a sentimental history. Their poetry is purely pic- torial; they appeal singly to the passion for visible beauty and dignity. But The Shepherd at the French Gallery is worth a pilgrimage to see. Taking on, as Crome did, the Dutch tradition in its several lines, he anticipated, on one side and another, the logical development that school received in modern France. At one time, like Diaz, he finds the charm, in oak•trees that Hobbema was in search of. In The Shepherd it is the path of Oorot that he strikes. Would one barter the result for any Corot P In other pictures you see him, like- Turner, bettering an inheritance from Vandevelde and the sea-- painters ; or, again, as in a picture here, visiting the estate of De Hoogh. And wherever he goes, it is on equal terms, a master among masters. Round him in the same gallery may- be found other English masters,—Wilson of the Italian tradi... tion, G-ainsborough with a souvenir of Watteau, and other men of less account.
In the other exhibition at Messrs. Lawrie's, besides a splendid Cotman and some others of the ancients, there are- modern English works by Cecil Lawson, and Albert Moore, and a Borne-Jones. Most of the pictures are French Romantic,. and among them are some extraordinary Monticellis and an admirable Daumier. Montieelli's is a twice-filtered art. It is- compounded of Veronese and Rembrandt, of Rubens and Watteau, dreamed over again in a mind that was a perpetual. assembly-room for revels of graceful form and gorgeous- colour. Like Corot, he is a refiner upon the robust masters. Daumier's picture has the charm of form amply and gently designed and withdrawn into the sin Oorots there are as- well, and other painters, that there is no space to speak of.
Among the collections of current painting now to be seen,. the one that can be entered with least shook after these two is the New English Art Club. It has few strong works this. winter, but among the smaller pictures and sketches there is. a good deal of fresh promise. The moat satisfactory pictures are Mr. Steer's portrait, Mr. Strang's Bathers, Mr. Conder's. two landscapes, and a portrait by M. Jacques Blanche. It is now pretty generally recognised that in Mr. Steer we have- that rare freak of nature, a, colourist, and the critic mumbles. now rather than hoots about certain roughnesses of tech- nique. The present portrait hits again that excellent fresh- ness and brightness in the flesh which is Mr. Steer's secret, and combines it with a harmony of dark-blue and primrom- yellow. M. Blanche has a quite different talent : it is more by virtue of personal distinction and prettiness that his por- trait tells ; but it is better also in colour than a good deal of his recent work. Mr. Strang's Bathers, like his Academy picture, shows a developing sense of colour, and the queer collocation of characters from other pictures and from nature that he loves to assemble. The back of the person out of Millet is excellently painted. Mr. Conder's work is artistic in the sense that it is composed and subdued to accord with a scheme and sentiment. There are no loose ends, no gossip about things; it is an attempt upon the music of nature.
The most ambitious picture is Mr. Walter Sickert's Hotel Royal, .Dieppe. Its merit is a well-digested design that tells. and carries in virtue of simplicity in the ohoice of material and effect. The simple façade of the hotel makes a capital reflecting surface for the light. The bands of sky and lawn are well proportioned, and the crinolines, about which so ' much has been said, are a useful device for giving importance to the figures. Those pawn-figures are well played in the general arrangement. But in the main business of colour effect, for which all this was designed, the picture cannot at present be called successful. At that moment of the mia- ture of sallow and rosy colours a trifling modulation will make the difference between something extremely beautiful and something very unpleasant. The notes so firmly- struck itn the grass, the house, and the sky, refuse to combine into the magical effect aimed at.
Two of the new men deserve to be singled out. One is Ma. Henry Tonks, whose water-colours are beautifully sensitive in drawing and colour. Mr. Rothenstein's sketch of Mr. Beardsley is a delightfully malicious portrait, with a skill of simplified and expressive line. His painting shows an intelligence that goes beyond his actual power. The inten- tion of design and colour shows both scholarship and origin- ality, and the Souvenir of Scarborough is the work of an appreciative student of Manet.
Mr. Holloway's water-colours look well in very good com- pany, that of Mr. Brabazon's ; Mr. Bernard Sickert has feel- ing, and is gaining in strength of expression. There is deli- cate colour in the sky of Mr. Alfred Thornton's picture;. and Mr. Macgregor's pastels are bright and vigorous. The noticeable black-and-white works besides three by Felicien Rops, are two etchings of cans in Paris by Mr. Pennell, two pen.and-ink drawings by Mr. E. J. Sullivan, and a wood engraving after Mr. Raven Hill, by Florian. Mr. Beardsley's design of a bookstall is well arranged, but the lady is too caligraphic. The colour-printed wood-block by Lepbre, also shown at the Grafton, is a wonderfully strong and ingenious combination of simple line and simple colour. At the Old Water-Colour Society, besides some delicate drawings by Mr. Alfred Hunt and Mr. Matthew Hale, and some interesting black-and-white studies by the late J. D. Watson, there is an excellent picture by Mr. Lionel Smythe, entitled, Rick-building, Pas de Calais. The elements are familiar—the hayfield and the blue patches of the hay. makers' dress, the pigeons fluttering about, the poppies in the stubble, the distant tower. It is a fresh variation on a theme that Mr. Smythe handles with singular feeling for the action and grouping of figures and freshness of colour. Mr. Robert Little has a truer sense of values than most of his fellow-exhibitors.
At the British Artists', Mr. Alexander Mann's Tower of London deserves notice, and Mr. Oayley Robinson's Susanne. Like Mr. Brangwyn at the Institute of Painters in Oil- Colours, Mr. Robinson deals with colour more boldly than his sense of its subtleties warrants, but both have vigour and decorative ideas. At the British Artists' there is a skilful water-colour by Mr. Hans Hansen somewhat in the manner of Mr. Arthur Melville. The work of Mr. Walter Bayes is bright and sunny, and here and at the Institute the pictures of Mr. John and Miss Flora Reid are, as usual, well out of the run of mediocrity. The most remarkable pictures at the Institute are by a Mr. Wells, whose name is new. He bears the marks to some extent of the Glasgow school, but evidently has an individual talent as well.
Two other exhibitions may be recorded. Mr. Arthur Tomson has held an exhibition at Van Wisselingh's in Brook Street, unfortunately closed before this notice appears. The pictures were chiefly of cats, and apart from closeness of rendering of the animal's form and habit, which must be left for the discussion of the specialist, some of these pictures gave a very vivid effect of life and a very pleasant arrangement of colour. The best, perhaps, was a pastel in which two kittens chase one another over a red chair.
At Dunthorne's, in Vigo Street, is a collection of etchings by Mr. Charles Watson and Colonel Goff. Mr. Watson has not only an architect's knowledge of structure and an apprecia- tion of dignity and picturesqueness in buildings, but at times also a fine pictorial conceptibn of light and shade, and an apt method of rendering effect with the needle. Colonel Goff also has a fine sense for the picturesque, and is a student of good Models. Mr. Charles Sainton's Silverpoints are an example of those photographic qualities which every artist and connoisseur detests, which the critics of our leading journals applaud as fine drawing, and the public naturally delights in. D. S. M.
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