ART.
ROYAL ACADEMY. [THIRD NOTICE.)
WE proceed with our notice of the chief works of the Acade- micians and " Associates." No. 219, " Woodland and Moor," by Mr. Peter Graham, A. This picture is sufficiently described by its title, its only interest being in the painting of the sky, which is due of cloudy brightness. Viewed from the opposite side of the room, or, indeed, at any considerable distance, this is a pleasing picture, and full of a sort of rough-and-ready rendering of nature, very attractive at first sight. Viewed closer, and looked at longer, it has the defects which seem to be inseparable from the work of the Scotch school,—it appears coarse and meaningless. In almost all the pictures of the Scotch painters of to-day, there is to be found this facility of rendering landscape up to a certain point, and this utter inability to go any further. In looking at their works, we see not the compositions of men who are struggling intensely hard with infinite beauty, but rather those of artists whose souls have grown so dead to all the finer shades of loveliness, that their hand is able to produce with the greatest ease every- thing which their heart approves. The painting is fresh and bright, and at first sight perhaps even pleasing with the fresh- ness and brightness of a sketch by a master-hand ; but once try and get behind the first vivid impression of sunshine, or shadow, or incident which the work pourtrays, and behold, you find,—
nothing.
Nevertheless, it must be owned that amongst the artists of this school, Mr. Peter Graham stands easily first ; and we think he is this year seen at his best, all his three composi- tions being interesting within the above-mentioned limits. Next to this hangs Mr. Pettie's 1prge picture, " The Death- Warrant,"—a young king being pressed to sign a death-warrant by his privy councillors. This is, we believe, considered to be one of this artist's best compositions, and will, no doubt, be a great favourite with his many admirers. We confess that to us it seems one of little importance or interest, but that may well be from the fact, that these semi-costumier, semi-historical works are beyond our comprehension. We see the stage pro- perties in the dresses, and discover the model in the actors, and the whole composition becomes stale and artificial. The genius which, in painting history of the past, can make it live again, is as rare in the artist as the author, and for one Carlyle or Fronde, we have a thousand Robertsons and Mrs. Markhams. Nor does the colour in any way atone for the poverty of feeling which is shown in these and similar works; it is rich and full, with the richness of treacle rather than clearness of pure colour ; nor is there, as a rule, an attempt at dealing with the primary tints. Any of our readers who may be interested in seeing the utmost contrast in scheme of colouring to this, would do well to look at two small pictures by Mr. Fairfax Murray in the Grosvenor Gallery, in which they will find, amongst many errors, a scheme of colouring approaching to that of the early Italian Masters. It is not only that the masses of bituminous brown and little bits of scarlet we see in Mr. Pettie's pictures are poor and tricky, but that any one who once becomes accus- tomed to this kind of luscious colouring, becomes incapable of appreciating real beauty of hue, and so it is quite impossible to estimate the harm which is thereby done to modern Art.
In our last week's notice we spoke of Mr. Long's inability to breathe any sort of artistic life into his productions, clever and industrious as they are; much more is that the case with the school of figure-painters who follow in the footsteps of Mr. Pettie. Action enough and to spare, there generally is; the personages have, if not the true heroic straddle, at all events the very best stage imitation of it, but they are like the mass of actors who play Hamlet and Falstaff for our edification ; they come down to the footlights, and roll out the blank-verse in sonorous declamation, and we say," How fine! how eloquent!" but never, " How natural !" So it is with these artists. The spirit of the scene is beyond them, or rather, they hardly know that there should be a spirit at all, for they belong really to the old- fashioned school of players, and think that dexterity of manipula- tion, profuseness of sentiment, will atone for their lack of percep- tion. Close to this there are two good landscapes, both hung where they cannot be well seen, " A Suffolk Marsh," by Aumonier, and " The Land of Argyle," by James Macbeth ; but we can- not stay to mention these more particularly. " Down to the
River," by M. Alma Tadema, No. 238, is a large, oblong picture, the greater part of which is occupied by a gilt bridge, presumably across the Tiber, and right in the foreground, seem- ing to be pressed against the frame, the head and shoulders of a woman and child and a Roman boatman, who are supposed to be descending the steps to the river. M. Alma Tadema has several other works here, which seem to us to increase in beauty as they diminish in size. No. 165, " A Hearty Welcome " (exhibited in the French Exhibition, under the name of " Un Jardin Romaine "), 351, " The Pomona Festival," 627, in the time of Constantine. It has long been evident to all those who have studied the works of this master with any care, that he is most successful where he is least natural, or, at all events, where he is least human. 'Where the subject is one of simple sensuousness, as, for instance, the tired Bacchante of a few years ago, or in the " Roman Ladies in the Tepidarium " of last year's Grosvenor, or when the interest of the picture is wholly concentrated upon his beautiful painting of stuffs and coloured marbles and softly-lighted interiors,—in all such in- stances, his work is really matchless in our time. But let him. once try to interest us in any scene which has for its chief element thought and expression, and the artist fails signally.. This was really the reason why those large, exquisitely painted pictures of the Sculpture and the Picture Gallery, were so little interesting, and, indeed, the artist's works might be gone through from beginning to end in support of this theory.
The landscapes of Vicat Cole, the portraits of Sant, the O'Neils, Hooks, E. W. Cookes, and Calderons, call for no re- mark,—they are simple repetitions of the old works which we have described so often, and which most of our readers know so well.. No. 272 is a round picture of a deserted church, which certainly should not have been admitted into the Academy, nor should Nos. 294, 295, 301, and many others, but it is needless to do more than draw our readers' attention to them. No. 287, by W. Q. Orchard- son, R.A., called " Hard Hit," is the best work of this artist's that we ever remember to have seen. It represents a young man leaving a room in which he has been gambling all night. At a table in the background sit the three swindlers who have been winning his money. The floor is strewn with hundreds of cards, and the whole room is in a state of luxurious disorder, and has a reckless, dissipated look, which coincides well with the expression of the young man. The faces of all the three gamblers at the table are powerful studies of bullying bragga- docio and cunning. The oldest especially, who sits still, mechanically shuffling the cards, while he looks furtively at the youth leaving the room, is a wonderful picture of meanly suc- cessful villainy. The painting is, as usual, very clever in the peculiar, ragged style of this artist, and the colouring very deli- cate. Altogether, if one wished to live with a picture of three scoundrels and a fool, he could do no better than to buy this work . Such a subject could hardly be more skilfully treated, and it just escapes the staginess into which this artist so_ frequently falls. The brush-work is, as usual, clever to a high degree, but as coarse as clever. Look, for instance, at the corner of the mouth of the seated figure on the left of the picture. From a short distance the man appears to have the end of a cigar be- tween his teeth, but on close examination it will be seen that nothing of the kind was intended, and the effect is due to the introduction of a coarse black line beneath the under-lip, which. causes the month to appear distorted.
No. 307, " Nausicaa and her Maidens playing at Ball," by E.. J. Poynter, R.A. This is a picture executed by Mr. Poynter in order to show the art students at Kensington what to avoid in the painting of classical subjects. The artist has here shown with great skill how it is possible to combine great anatomical knowledge and power of draughtsmanship, in a picture which. shall yet be absolutely repellent in ugliness. The lesson could scarcely have been taught more forcibly, if it is intended to make the students understand of how excessively little use mere mechanical skill and knowledge are for the production of a pic- ture, unless they are supplemented by other qualities. We can give no adequate idea of the scheme of colouring here employed, but may note a few of its more prominent features,—the grass is a sickly emerald-green, the figures in the background are in robes of pale mauve and white, and the main figure in the foreground is in a violent orange garment, with a cap of bright pink ; by her side stands. another figure in very bright green, to the extreme left a figure in lilac leans against a tree; the painting of the flesh is chiefly yellow and yellowish-brown. The arrangement of the picture is. as follows On the right, a maiden, with her back to the spectator, in the act of striking the ball, two others sitting upon the ground watching her. In the centre of the picture, towards the middle-distance, stand two very tall females, one of whom is about to strike the ball in front of her. In the immediate foreground is a little nude figure leaping up into the air, with its arms raised above its head. On the left are the orange-robed damsel above alluded to, and two or three other figures. We have read in some of the daily papers that this work of art is intended for an aristocratic billiard-room, and that it contains portraits of the chief London beauties. Both these facts may be so, though we only quote the statements for what they are worth ; but if, indeed, it be true that the picture was painted for a billiard-room, it may be possible that Mr. Poynter has painted up to what he thought would be the intellectual level of the pool and pyramid-players. In sober earnest, it is difficult to say anything adequately severe of a work like this, proceeding as it does from a gifted and famous artist. These lanky damsels, with their very scanty clothing and their hideous colouring, are as ugly as it is possible to make them, and the whole work is one of those debased Academic productions showing nothing but misdirected ability. It is especially necessary to speak of the utter conventionality and absurdity of the draperies. There is not one of the robes that is not falling off its wearer, and Grecian or no Grecian, a woman cannot play ball in a garment which will not keep on. Nor is there any gain in beauty of arrangement by these means ; the drapery is as poor in conception as it is useless in its purpose. However, we know well enough what Mr. Poynter can do and has done, and perhaps it is some little gleam of comfort to see that when he lowers his genius to paint contemporary lionises, in fancy-dress Grecian costume, his work loses its beauty and power. No. 336, "Naughty Kitty," by G. D. Leslie, R.A. This is a comparatively small and unimportant picture of Mr. Leslie's, but it is, notwithstanding, a very pleasant one. A younger sister, with a kitten in her arms, is standing before her mother or elder sister, who is seated on a terrace in an old- fashioned garden ; the sort of picture that would go well with Miss Thackeray's novels, and reminds us of quiet life in days before the electric light. Simple, old-fashioned, and intensely homely, it forms a notable contrast to the general work on these walls ; it might well be contrasted with another treatment of a somewhat similar subject called, "In the Shade," by Marcus Stone. This is a young lady sitting in the shade, in the atmo- sphere of greyish mist with which Mr. Stone has lately enveloped all his personages. The picture is well painted, but utterly devoid of the sentiment which Mr. Leslie has caught so clearly, though here also the costume is of long ago.
No. 387, " A Highland Solitude, Glencoe," by Mr. J. MacWhirter, a recently elected Associate of the Academy. To appreciate this landscape fully, it should be compared with No. 643, called " The Stronghold of the Seison and the Camp of the Kittywake," by John Brett. To those who are more acquainted with nature than the details of painting, it will probably seem at first as if the brilliancy of sunshine in Mr. Brett's work, the magnificence of its cumulus sky, the transparency of its water, and in fact, all the main facts of the composition, are delineated with a skill of touch and feeling for beauty, which throw into dreary insignificance this work of MacWhirter's, which represent the side of a bleak Scotch hill, with a mist at the bottom, and a formless grey sky at the top of the picture, and which is, we cannot say painted, but executed with a coarseness which is really wonderful for a picture on so small a scale and of so simple a subject. Such, we say, would probably be the first impression of any unprejudiced spectator, and he would be surprised to hear that, though MacWhirter has painted pictures of this kind for years, and Brett also has painted pictures of his kind, yet the Academy, —existing, let us always remember, for the promotion of Art— endorses the style of the first painter with its official approval, and neglects the style of the second. What is the explanation of this apparent inconsistency ? We find it in the words, which Sir Frederick Leighton has prefixed to the Catalogue, though by some unfortunate mischance a portion of what he intended to say has been omitted. We will complete the imperfect quota- tion ; here it is :—" Art is noble in itself. The artist, therefore, is not:afraid of the common-place, for his very touch ennobles it," —" but the Academy is afraid of anything bat the common- place, since it is to the perpetuation of hackneyed themes and ancient traditions, that it dedicates its talents and instructs its members."
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