ART.
OLD MASTERS AND AMATEURS.
THERE is a sharp dividing line in the present exhibition at the Academy between the painters who had mastered their art and a group of English artists, all with poetic feeling, but all with such glaring gaps in their equipment that they are rather to be ranked as amateurs than as masters. The exhibition of their work is justified, for there is not one of the four who is not interesting, and who has not some quality of pictorial design as well as poetic feeling. Embarrassed poetry is always better than accomplished stupidity. Lady Waterford is the least interesting of the four just for that reason. She is, in a way, the most accomplished. Within what she attempts she does not make bad mistakes. But the accomplishment is very negative, and is the result of a large evasion. The lady has never observed anything for herself. She has fancy, which is often pretty enough ; she has a dis- tinct turn for picture-making, in the sense that she can throw together groups of figures picturesquely. But it is all ex- pressed at second-hand, in terms of somebody else's eyes. She has looked at pictures, and at them just enough to carry away a receipt for drawing that will serve, and a receipt for colour that will serve. It is the kind of facile notation to be found in Sir John Gilbert's work, the compromise of an illustrator
with no time to look at things. In Lady Waterford there is even less observation of form and invention of colour than in Sir John; but the source is the same at a further remove, and both, it is clear, have been in good Venetian company. All this means, of course, a good deal of talent ; it is not every- one who can make a colourable imitation of a sonnet by Shakespeare, or an essay by Bacon. To do it means literary sense and aptitude. But either in literature or in painting, the cheapening of another's observation into. a trick to save the trouble of observing, marks a very second-rate talent.
Edward Calvert's is a different case. He is more original, but less determined. He has a wavering, floating picture- sense born of Arcadian poetry. He has dreams when he looks up from his book. And if his observation had kept anything like pace with his dreaming, the result might have been excel- lent. As it is, his suggestions are pretty ; but when he goes a step beyond, and tries to be precise, he breaks down. He sets out on lines that, produced, might be Millet or Monticelli ; he hints at a Mason or a Leighton. He conveys his fancies in a non-committing green twilight, like a glaze on crockery. He is like a lazy dreamer who loves to talk of projects for pictures. Think, he says, of an Arcadian night, the dawn striking up behind the hill, silhouetting the flock and the temple on the ridge, and stealing over the bodies of the sleepers down below ; or, A long drawn-out chain of men and beasts, a tribe shifting, in ambiguous light, about the young earth. The fancy, born of poetry, trembles a moment on the edge of painting, falters, and disappears.
Samuel Palmer, also, has a poetic sense, also has a faculty for pictorial design. He goes to Nature with verses in his head, the flocks going to fold of Virgil, or the ploughman going a-field of Gray ; and the illustrations he finds have a great deal of dignity and feeling. But his defect is a very fatal one. When he attempts colour, he is like a deaf man trying to sing. It is a serenade on the hooter and steam- whistle. When he keeps to black-and-white, he is on safer ground ; and some of his sepia-drawings show a curious turn for the simplification and abstraction of natural forms. The model was those remarkable woodcuts of Blake's for Thorn- ton's Pastorals, and the disciple shows the same power of rendering the striking essentials of a scene in such a drawing as the landscape with the cumulus-cloud.
Blake himself, the master of Calvert and Palmer, is ex- hibited at his weakest. The Dante drawings were the work practically of his death-bed. They show a tired invention using up old motives, and fitting them together with very little effect. The colour, too, is poor and dirty. Blake occasionally pro- duced rich effects of colour of a more or less accidental kind by his process of colour-printing. His tintings are apt to be harsh and thin. In design he showed, at hie best, a remark- able inspiration, as many pages of the Jerusalem prove ; but the conceit of the inspired prophet made india-rulibber impos- sible, and an impressive conception is often lumbered up with trivialities. The same conceit that made him trust to im- provisation made him particularise what was really a vague imagination. His impressions of human form and movement were composed mainly of the stark effigies on Gothic tombs and the tormented figures of Michael Angelo ; and the material was enough, if used discreetly, to decorate his dreams. But the conceit that his " imagination " was as precise and particular as the vision of a painter from Nature, tempted him from beyond his observation and memory, and led to those grotesque figures whose muscles look like the caricature of an ecorche by Michael Angelo.
"Rubens," said Blake, "is a most outrageous demon," and Rembrandt, to his thinking, was no better—one who blotted and blurred all form instead of depicting it in a precise, flayed, prophetic manner. Rubens certainly had a vulgar taste when he was let loose to romp at his ease, when he was free to choose his company ; he had seen the splendid banquetings of Veronese, and reproduces them in the taste of the Commercial Room and Servants' Hall. But put him or his pupil Vandyck before a dignified and elegant figure, he is all discrimination and appreciation like a well-bred servant, and he has an eye for that natural magic of effect to which the visionary's lids are resolutely closed. Take the portraits by the pupil in the present exhibition, not the lamentable family group, but the men's portraits, and, in particular, the Viscount Grandison. A good deal of the painting in these portraits is only skilful, the work of a master so accomplished that he cannot do it badly, but so busy that he cannot stop to do it very well. But, now and then, you come on a bit of painting like the left hand of the Grandison, where accomplishment 'leaves off and magic begins.
But Rembrandt is the signal instance of this magic attained through mastery of Nature. The student of Nature, as Blake fancies him, is put off by the study ; the poetic vision with which he sat down is hustled away by the gross images thrust upon him. It is so with the weak-eyed dreamer who must distort Nature to the terms of his fancy to feel her poetical. It is another and a stronger vision that studies and contemplates the real thing till the chaos. becomes coherent, and from the refinements of visible fact the vision detaches itself, a natural mystery. To have served that apprenticeship to the severe study of character, of human structure and aspect, was the preparation and condi- tion of Rembrandt's triumph, when the powers of the air and of darkness were given into his hands. Hence, when he paints a masterpiece like the Man in Armour, by dignity of arrangement and solemnity of tones, he makes his subject, appeal to the eye in the language the eye understands, and the poetry natural to the subject follows of itself. It is the picture, surely, that Mr. Watts would paint if he could ; with Mr. Watts the poetic title and association would be ready enough, and admiration of the proper effect, and approxima- tions towards it. But here is the master who can render the beautiful image itself, which by its magic is the fountain of poetry.
Of English portrait-masters, the most surprising this time is Romney. His group of a mother and child has unusual fullness and charm of colour, besides its happy invention of arrangement. There are fine Gainsboronghs, two pretty pinkish Hoppners, a portrait of a widow by Sir William Boxall, that is nearly good. Besides the portrait work, there is a good De Wint, and a vigorous study by Constable in the first room, and miraculously minute drawing by Lewis. He strains at some gnat of tiny fact, and swallows huge camels of bad colour ; but colour apart, it is a wonderful performance.
There is no space to deal at length with the Venetians or earlier Italians. Of the first, there is a beautiful Moroni ; in the disputed Giorgione, the Woman taken in Adultery, the upper part of the woman's dress is fine in colour. Among the earlier painters, there is a fine drawing of a child's head,. ascribed to John Bellini.
D. S. M.
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