ART.
THE GRAFTON GALLERY.
OUR native decorators have no reason to be alarmed, and a good. deal of reason to be disappointed, by the exhibition of French decorative art opened at the Grafton Gallery. Little of it is decorative, little of it is art, and it very poorly represents what the French nation can do in this line. It is a collection composed largely of a number of objects exhibited already at the Champ de Mars, with some of the best of them left out ; and the amateurish furniture, the eccentric pottery, the abominable stained glass that are the main features of the decorative aide of the exhibi- tion agree excellently with the plushy and garish setting that the Grafton Gallery supplies. In the matter of pots, it is not a brilliant departure in a new style to lose all the character of a pot and twist the thing into the likeness of a face ; it is the moat easy and blundering form of originality. In the matter of furniture, it is as stupid to sprawl over a grand piano with the kind of wreath of flowers native to the antimacassar. And in the matter of stained-glass, the American secret process for producing a texture like tripe is aggravated by the application to it of cheap design and gaudy colour. It is conceivable that some of those technical processes might, in capable hands, result in a pleasing effect ; but while in glass, pottery, and porcelain, there may be a good deal in the show that would appeal to the technical expert in those materials, the use made of these by the designer is almost throughout ineffective or irritating.
But there is one artist who stands out from the crowd, both by his sense of beauty and his special gift for applying it to decoration. The reliefs of Charpentier should be studied by all sculptors who attempt to apply their art to the adornment of simple things. Sculpture in relief always finds out the sculptor who is not an artist more immediately and obviously than sculpture in the round ; for a stricter artistic limit is imposed upon him, and it is proclaimed to him at the outset that his task is not merely to pro- duce an imitative cast of his subject. The subduing of the round to something that partakes of representation in the flat, and the humouring of the subject so that its contours play the game of the contours of the space decorated, and its bosses take the fit place and projection in the general arrangement of the solid, are conditions that make work in relief a crucial task. Most sculptors, indeed, rest satisfied with a solid half-buried in the bed of the material, or with a tight explanation of the thing represented, unaffected by its setting. Charpentier's reliefs are very different. Small in scale, they are large in treatment, and are bound up with, and flow out of, their framing and background. The pewter in which they are cast is a beautiful colour, combined with wood, and this door-handle and lock are little masterpieces in the application of sculpture to furniture. It appears, also, that they can be reproduced at very moderate cost, from thirty shillings to two pounds. Here is a field our sculptors would do well to attempt and to extend. One or two of Charpentier's applications are not so happy as his handles, locks, and cups. The woodwork of his cabinet is rather trifling in design, though pleasant in colour ; and the bronze-relief, sunk in a paper- binding, is a little incongruous. Beside these reliefs are placed two bookbindings by Messrs. Wiener and Victor Prouve. The effect of colour obtained by a mosaic of differently dyed moroccos is splendid, but wants more unity and restraint of design. Mademoiselle Gautier's fans are also worth looking at. Her mice and flies are drawn and arranged very prettily.
The decorative art of the Exhibition, in the ordinary sense, is, as has been said, for the most part very poor ; but there is another branch of art represented in the numerous etchings, lithographs, woodcuts hung on the walls, and these no one interested in graphic reproduction should miss. It is the first opportunity given to Londoners of seeing the work of a number of French artists in these lines, many of whose names will be unfamiliar. Nothing, perhaps, is exercising artists more at present than the effort to hit upon a personally satis- factory way of multiplying their work, without the inter- vention of the mechanical engraver. As far as black-and- white is concerned, the methods of etching, of lithography, and of wood-engraving as practised by Lepers, give a sufficient choice ; but the problem remains of reproducing colour by some form of printing. Just as relief is a crux to the sculptor, so is colour a crux to the printer, for short of an infinite process of printing, the colour-effect must be simplified and rendered even more abstract when com- pared with the gradations of a painting, than the etched line is when compared with a study in full tone. Now, the visitor to the Grafton -Gallery may admire first the abstraction effected by some of those artists in black-and- white, the effort to give the quintessential lines of a drawing with an economy of means and consequent emphasis of effect. The works of Anquetin and Lautrec are cases in point. But further, we may see the same principle applied to colour, and admire in Lautrec, or Besnard, or Lepere how one or two tints printed flat over the black-and-white may suggest great rich- ness and variety of colour. The striking of a kind of mean colour and tone over a whole surface, the breaking of the colour at its edges, and the printing of it with stronger or weaker out- lines and accents of black, or different qualities of grey under- neath, and the choice of the ground-tone of the paper, are the secrets of the art. Lepere's experiments in printing from the wood are most interesting, both in the bold and simple character of his boundary-lines and the quality of oolour he gets, with a certain gradation and accident like that of Japanese prints. The experiments in colour-Printing from an etched plate, shown by Delatre and Lepere, are not so happy, but are a more difficult feat. How much can be done in illustrative work by even one printing of a tint on black-and-white has been shown for some time past by Steinlen's drawings is the Gil Bias, where red only is used, but by its different combinations with the black-and- white contrives to suggest a great variety of tints. It would take too long to go through these prints in detail, but it is interesting to see hew personal and different a use is made of a medium like lithography by artists like Pavia de Chavannes, Fantin-Latour, Lunois, and others. Lepere's wood-engravings and etchings, Renonard's drawings, Florian's wood-engravings after Botticelli, the woodcuts of the Pis- BarrOS, and Grasset's posters, will be found in other parts of the building from the particular group that has just been considered. This group is published by the .Theerned des Artistes in periodical albums, ender the title of L'Estannpe Originate. When shall we have as artistic a periodical in.
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