ART.
THE WHISTLER LOAN COLLECTION.
ALTHOUGH the cause was just and the plan of the assault was well chosen and brilliantly carried out, the frontal attack on the Chantrey Trust failed. Reformation is, apparently, as far off as ever, and the Royal Academy still succeeds in seeing the " works of fine art of the highest merit that can be obtained" only in its own exhibition, and seeing nothing of " the highest merit" in the exhibitions of the New English Art Club, the International Society, and the Royal Scottish Academy. Things are, in short, almost as they were. But through the sheer pressure of informed opinion and the enlightened management of our National Gallery of British Art, the case against the administration of the Chantrey Fund has, all unconsciously, been presented in its strength in a way that it is impossible for the public to overlook. In the small, but extremely fine, loan collection of Whistler's pictures which is now on view there, the Legros Memorial Exhibition that occupies the two near galleries, and the models, painting, and drawings by Alfred Stevens that remain in another room as a memorial of the Stevens Exhibition recently held there, are gathered a glorious cloud of witnesses testifying against the Royal Academy far more eloquently than the written or spokes word can do. Not a penny of Sir Francis Chantrey's money could be spared for a work by any of these three artists, nor- did the Royal Academy shine its countenance upon them,. either by making them associates or supporting them in any enterprise. And the combination of the three makes more damning testimony; for the Academy apologists who say that an old official body should rightly be concerned more to pre- serve the approved standards of the past in modern work than in opening its arms and purse to the pioneers and skirmishers working in advance of the main body are silenced, for Stevens was emphatically a " genius of the centre," and Legros has well been described as the most academic influence working in England in his time. If it is right for a body formed for the encouragement of art to think more of its own corporate comfort than its responsibility as the fountain of honour in English art, then the Academy had reason in keeping Whistler out. His election would have meant, not peace, but a sword. But as time wears on, and the world forgets the fret and sting of the personality that was Whistler and knows only his exquisite art, it will not hold the Academy guiltless of its long neglect and of the slights it thrust upon him.
The Whistler Collection is made especially interesting by the inclusion of pictures belonging to Mr. Arthur Studd and Miss Rosalind Birnie Philip, who did not contribute to the
Whistler Memorial Exhibition at the New Gallery in 1895. Mr. W. C. Alexander has lent the famous Harmony in Grey and Green, Portrait of Miss Cicely Henrietta Alexander, and Nocturne, Chelsea, Blue and Green; Mr. Edmund Davis, a fine, series, including At the Piano, and his Symphony in Whitt', No. 3; Mr. Graham Robertson, The Valparaiso, Crepuscule ti» Flesh Colour and Green (curious that Whistler's only use of the term " flesh. colour " is when he was painting twilight on the ocean) ; and Mr. J. P. Heseltine and Sir William Eden are among the other exhibitors. The kind of bitter-sweet joy that one gets from Whistler is of a different quality from other essences of art, and to look on Miss Alexander or Valparaiso again is to find the old magic working as potently and inexplicably as ever. With Rossetti, with Millais some- times, and with Burne-Jones, where the trance steals upon us, we see the Method of the incantations in the summoning up of poems and symbols residing in our memories ; but here there is onlya little girl posing in an empty room and ships crocking in a shadowy harbour. Whistler had no confederates among the poets : he wrought his magic out of the common things before him ; found his tricks, as it were, under his own hat. He sought no aid from what we vaguely call human emotion, and in the portrait of Miss Alexander one would say that he rather disliked her being human (and probably express- ing her humanity by restlessness) ; he seemed to care infinitely more for the face of the river swooning in the first embrace of evening than for the face of the people in his por- traits. One of the very few portraits in all his work where we feel that that luminous veil of abstraction that hung between Whistler and mankind had fallen is Mr. Studd's The Little White Girl. In- the tender sincerity of the painting of the face in the mirror we see that he perceived and felt intensely, not the fleeting reality of life manifest before him, but this particular life with its own pathos and message, In the pure flower-like loveliness of the paint and in the stress of emotion in the whole vision, with its tincture of Rossetti in it, this is one of the most desirable of all Whistler's paintings. What a splendid act of reparation it would be if the Chantrey Trustees were willing and able to acquire this gem from Mr. Arthur Studd and retain it in the
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