ART.
THE NEW GALLERY.
[SECOND NOTICE.]
THE most important landscape in size; and, with one excep- tion, in quality, in the present exhibition, is The First Smile of Morn," by Signor Costa: painter but little known (out of artistic circles) in England, but highly esteemed both by his
own countrymen and by the more intelligent of English con- noisseurs. His work, indeed, possesses few elements likely to attract the populace, for there is no striking effect, no "pathetic fallacy," no bizarre point of view to be found therein. The paint- ing, moreover, is somewhat dry and dusty, akin to the effect of fresco, and the colouring subtle, faint, and palely iridescent, as of a sea-shell long absent from the waters. The present picture is a fair but not a great example of the master, beautiful in colour and in its quiet, tender feeling for natural beauty, defec- tive in its lack of definite aim and subject, and losing much of its power from the artist drawing the attention to a mass of details which fritter away the meaning of the picture. For the rest, it is an Italian scene, with blue mountains and sand-hills overgrown with brushwood and tall grass ;and small olive- bushes, and in the corner a very brown nude mgn stretching out his arms towards the heaven. Somehow the picture strikes us as deficient in manliness, as rather of the " Martha " order, cumbered with attention to trivial matters. On the other hand, it is unhurried, delicate, and, to the best of the painter's power, faithful in its rendering of Nature ; and for a last merit, no one can look upon it without recognising that the painter has not only studied but appreciated the work of the Old Masters.
In the New Gallery, the same defect obtains that marked the earlier days of the Grosvenor, and that is that bad and good work, the professional and the amateur, the master and his pupil, hang here side by side. This gives to the collection a somewhat heterogeneous appearance. What, for instance, is such a picture as young Mr. Burne-Jones's "Vision of Ezekiel" doing on the line in an important exhibition,—a work which is not only more than indifferent in itself, but which is not even original, being but the faintest echo of his father's work ? What good word, either, can be said for the " Cleopatra " of Mrs. Hastings, a large picture of two badly painted commonplace women, one offering a basket .of figs to the other ? Why are Mr. Peppercorn's flagrant imitations of Corot admitted, or the great bare canvas by Sir Arthur Clay, Bart., of a badly painted child? But it is useless and ungracious to particularise the work which never should have been admitted here, if the Gallery is to acquire a reputa- tion for first-rate work, and we have only touched on the subject, since it is another sign of that respect of persons which pervades " Society " picture galleries.
Let us look rather at the good work. And first of all at
Mr. Alma-Tadema's sketch for the "Roses of Heliogabalus," which possesses all the painter's best qualities, and which is curious as showing that in the original idea all the deficiencies which we noted (in another place) as evident in the completed picture, did not exist. There is in this sketch the very aspect of life and tumult—of orgie—that the picture lacks ; there is, too, the light, scattered aspect of falling leaves,—they flutter down, nof fall "as solid as a gob of mud," as Mark Twain once put it ; and the colour is far finer, fresher, more vivid, and more varied. On the whole, a delightful sketch, bearing much the same relation to the com- pleted work that an article in the Figaro does to one in the Berliner Tageblatt. And here is another piece of first-rate work worth anybody's attention, "A Little Bit of Somerset," by Mr. J. W. North, a man who is not only a painter but an artist, and who dares to paint a green field green, not browny. yellow nor dusty-grey. This landscape of wooded hills and fields brings us the very breath of the country, the peace, the still air, the quietude, the calm, unhurried pace of life therein, and brings England, too, for Englishmen to admire ; dares to paint the most beautiful country in the world, "the fairyest of fairylands the land of home." After that, one can find no more appropriate picture to consider than Mr. Herkomer's "F. C. Burnand, Esq.," a brilliant, slight picture, marvellously like its original, and perhaps the best bit of work Mr. Herkorner has done this year. There is also a smaller portrait of Mr. Burnand by Mr. Leslie Ward, the well-known caricaturist of Vanity Fair, and this, too, is a faithful likeness and a good bit of work. Mr. Napier Remy has struggled hard, but has not been successful, in his difficult subject of the landing of a fishing-boat in a heavy surf. The picture has apparently been long on hand, for three years ago, when the present writer was staying at a little Cornish village with this painter, he was engaged upon studies for it, and it used to be a great sight to see him, his spare figure clad in a long mackintosh, his pale, Don Quixote-like face dripping with spray and foam, his great easel strapped firmly to a hundredweight or two of rock, sitting painting on a narrow reef of rock which ran far out into the waves, struggling to get that most difficult of all wave-actions, the action of mingled retreating and on-coming waves on a rocky coast. Honour to the artist who dares fight hard with such difficulties. Look at Mr. Weguelin's "Bacchus and his Choir of Nymphs" for a specimen of another style of work,—the neo-Greek, or, as it should more properly be called, "Greece a la Grundy," for Mrs. Grundy is at the bottom of all its ideals. Mr. Weguelin is a sound, skilful painter, and a fairly good draughtsman, who is wasting his artistic talent in the endeavour to paint a civilisation (or a lack of civilisation) of which he knows little, and for which he cares less.
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