ARTS
EXHIBITIONS OF FOREIGN PICTURES.
Exousu students of Art are so often told to seek abroad the models for their imitation, that it is rather startling to meet with two pictures of note, representing the two great departments of Painting, figure and landscape, executed in the last generation,. and both speaking of a time when the moving spirits of French Art looked for their own inspiration to our side of the Channel. Such pictures are Delacroix's "Death of Sardanapalus," and Dupre's "Environs of Southampton," or "River Pastures," as it. is now more fitly called. They were both bought by a leading French dealer at a late Paris sale for very high prices, and are, on view at the Gallery of the Society of French Artists in Bond Street. The last-named picture created a sensation in the salon in 1835, eleven years after Constable's pictures had appeared in the Louvre, and by opening a new field of art, had laid the foundation of modern French landscape. The thick impost() of this really fine work of Dupre's is still looked upon by the French as characteristic of English landscape-painting, though it is now more distinctive of their own. Both this manner of painting and
the broad method of treatment which tells with good effect in Dupre's picture have since been pushed to excess, by that artist as well as others, to the neglect of the unaffected local portraiture which was the groundwork of Constable's art. But a trace of his better influence remains in the works of artists who imitate his manner least, but continue with most constancy his habit of study from nature. No painter has less of outward resemblance to Constable than the patriarch of French landscape, Corot ; but there is, we are told, no more industrious student of nature. With slight observers he passes for a dreamer, painting a world of his own. But it is only when he imports into the foggy groves and pastures of our earth the dancing nymphs and denizens of Arcadia that there is any- thing in his pictures which might not have been painted directly from nature. No doubt he adheres to a narrow range of effects, eschews bright sun and strong shadow, and reproduces but one quality of silver light ; and whether from choice or defect of vision, he brings no object to the exact focus of the eye. But he makes us feel, if we can feel at all, that the whole thing is there ; tender birch-sprays melting into tender sky ; banks of sweet, soft, unmown hay, with feathery surface, among the wild flowers of spring ; a clear pool nourishing their roots, across which, by the way, a countrywoman drives a rather dislocated cow, as a gleam of coming light begins to break upon the field beyond the cottage, where a rumbling cart labours up over the fern. We have in our mind's eye a picture in this same gallery, painted by him only last year, and there are several more there. The fact is that Corot, though he generalises these things in his studio, does so from a store of observation of detail, acquired by yearly sketches in the country, executed with minute exactness. Yet some of his works here are open to the charge of sketchiness and want of due gradation from foreground to distance, which characterises a large proportion of the French landscapes here exhibited. Certainly, there is not much to be seen in them of the thoroughness of training which we hear so much of as the peculiar property of the foreign schools. There is more regular training in the landscapes from Bavaria, which may be seen in plenty at South Kensington and in the French Gallery in Pall Mall, and we find no fault in their quiet and correct uni- formity; but in point of living interest, or as an introduction to nature's beauty, they are much on a par with the neat black-and- gold borders of their frames.
It is less easy to trace the connection between English art and the big figure-painting of which Delacroix was the champion at the time when Constable reformed French landscape. Delacroix seems to have been one of the first Frenchmen who ever recognised the existence of an English School of Painting, and this acknow- ledgment, after a period of oblivion, appears now to be in a course of revival by French critics. They tell us that he had been led away from the art traditions of his country by seeing the works of Wilkie, Lawrence, Etty, Constable, and Turner. But we are unable to see much of this British influence in his" Sardanapalus."
There seems to us to be an overpowering French element in the reform which he attempted. Like all art-reformers, he preached a return to nature ; but it was Frene, not English nature; the recog- nised name of his school was not Naturalism, but Romanticism ; and the subjects he chose to paint are not unfrequently repug- nant to English taste. In this very picture he of his own accord varies the story dealt with by Byron, and paints the Persian voluptuary presiding over a general butchery of his favourites while the funeral pile is being lighted. What the French estimate of the English element in this picture really amounts to may perhaps be best inferred from the following rather amusing ex- tract from the critique upon it by M. Theophile Silvestre, which was published in the sale catalogue of the Hotel Drouot
"Les femmes de Sardanapale sent tine jonchee de flours humaines. Riles rappellent a la fois l'eclat at la fralcheur de Rubens, la finesse de Lawrence, l'effet parfois excessif de Reynolds et la couleur mince, claire, et trop mythologique d'Etty. Delacroix, an moment de les peindre, revenait d'Angleterre, charme de la beaute du sang des ladys, dont Van Dyck, Reynolds, et Lawrence ont immortalise lea types, et dont il pouvait seul eviter la frigidite."
The picture was exhibited in 1827, at the same time with the smaller "Execution of Marino Faliero," now in Sir Richard Wal- lace's collection. Ingres, the leader of the Classic school, opposed it with his "Apotheosis of Homer," which now hangs at the Luxembourg opposite to Delacroix's "Massacre of Scio," exhibited three years before the " Sardanapalus." On looking at the two together, one can understand how thoroughly distasteful each must have been to the admirers of the other, when party feeling ran so high that strangers had to be wary lest they should be enticed to take sides while looking at them, and then made to fight for one or the other. Without this force of contrast, it is not so easy to see how the many technical imperfections of the present picture could have been forgiven, and probably defended, as a necessary protest against the rigid severity of the Classicists. But we must admit the boldness and vigour of an intention which is in a great degree carried into effect. It betrays the study of Rubens in his large allegorical works, but there is also a peculiar snakelike writhing in its line which is more French than Flemish, and characteristic of the fancy and perhaps too of the restless spirit of Delacroix ; and it has a marked resemblance to some of the ambitious pictures of poor Haydon.
We should not leave the subject of the exhibition of foreign. pictures now open without pointing out the admirable opportunity now offered of studying the works of the really great painter Meissonier. There are far more of them now in London than can be seen in Paris. Two specimens only are in the Luxembourg, while we have sixteen of his finest works at our International Exhibition. (all but one from Sir Richard Wallace's collection), and another at the French Gallery, together with seventeen marvellous sketches or studies belonging to M. Petit. At the same gallery is also a strong gathering of this class of minute pictures, which shows an increase of Meissonier's followers in France, and their extension. to other countries, especially Italy.
Among foreign pictures, of which the motives are distinct from those that usually inspire our artists, should be included those of M. Gabriel Loppe, a French artist, long resident at Geneva, and a great mountaineer, and honorary member of the Alpine Club. Our own artihts as a rule are very shy of attempt- ing to paint the high Alps, but M. Loppe takes his canvas to the top of Mont Blanc, where he has been at least a dozen times, and makes us who abide at lower levels acquainted with its peaks and ice-fields, the lodging on the Grands Maids, and the course and confluence of the glaciers round about it. Forty of his pictures. are now on view in the rooms of the Alpine Club, No. 8. St. Martin's Place. A few represent effects of sunrise on distaut mountain- tops, some of which have considerable beauty ; but his chief labour and his best success are in depicting the nearer form and character of the seracs and glaciers, their blue depths, and the torn and writhing look of their crevasses. No artist-work that we know of has yet given a due idea of the vast size and scale of the Alps, and it seems as if the ordinary devices learnt from other kinds of scenery would not suffice for the purpose. You cannot make the Matterhorn look big by shrouding it in a Scotch mist,. nor trace a glacier up into the snow by spots of chamois or strings of members of the Alpine Club. How the thing is to be done we will not take upon ourselves to say, but we believe that a diligent acquaintance with the ground, as something to be walked and climbed over, such as Al. Loppe has made, is a sine- qua non to its accomplishment. Members of the Club who know these scenes best, speak in testimony to the truth of his pictures, and they are by no means without the element of beauty.
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