ART.
THE LEYLAND SALE AND GUILDHALL EXHIBITION.
LAST week something was said of the remarkable collection of modern French and Dutch pictures got together by Mr. Cottier, and presently to be sold in Paris : this week another remarkable collection has been on view at Christie's, and will be dispersed to-day. The two together form something like an epitome of modern painting,—illustrate, indeed, the poles of natural effect and symbolism between which the pendulum of painting always swings, for the collection here is as strongly Pre-Raphaelite as the collection there is Post-Constablesque. Mr. Leyland's lordly pleasure-house has been dismantled ; the Rosaetti's and Burne Jones's have left the hall and staircase, and chapel-like drawing-rooms ; the Old Masters have to take their turn once more in the auction-room ; and the Princesse du Pays de Porcelaine has left her station in the Peacock Room, and come to act critic on her symbolist companions, and to see her blue-china kingdom broken up. There she hangs, wickedly showing how a Rossetti type can be better painted than by himself; though as a Whistler the picture is. not of the first rank. There are critics equally dangerous in the room given to the Old Masters ; pictures of the school of Giorgione in particular, with their glowing unity of colour ; only two of the Rossettis and a Millais, the St. Agnes's Eve, could be transported among them without cruelty.
But if the achievement of Rossetti is deeply imperfect beside that of Whistler, it goes far enough to demonstrate that this way a great success was possible. The drift of criticism is now so strong against the suspicion of a meaning in a painting, cheap anecdote-mongering and cheap sentiment have brought such discredit on poetry when expressed in paint, that it is opportune and wholesome to be reminded that, the puckered face of pedantry notwithstanding, poetry is as good an excuse for the assembling of images as any other. A breeze or a sunbeam are good collectors in their way ; a fog or a moon- light have an abstracting and selecting power ; the accident of light and air will dignify with a unity of effect the most mis- cellaneous collection of images, but a thought will gather them also to pictorial purpose. A like proceeding is obvious enough in the poetry of literature, where there is always an idea in the field assembling images that shall play to the eye and mind, while a colleague sense sees to it that the word shall also tickle the ear. No one pretends that the partnership here is illicit, nor objects to the yet more complex appeal of musical drama, where all the faculties are stormed at once; how ab- surd, then, the purism that would limit a painter to the shape and colour of his image, if he sees his way to doubling its appeal by using it as a symbol too. One painter may rest satisfied with effects, say, of people going in and out of doors ;
another, with effects of morning or of night ; but a third has a right, as Mr. Mune Jones has done, to use the image of the door with a figure passing in or out, to impress on the imagi- nation the coming in of Day, or going out of Night. A writer
does the same, and the imagination consents to be stirred if the sense is tickled by music inthe verse ; so must the painter appeal to the eye by the proportions of his drawing, the pattern of his figure, the colour-scheme of his design. Further, there is no
law to prevent his affixing a sonnet to the picture if he pleases ; and his doing so does not prove the picture superfluous and
inadequate, any more than the legend below a drawing in Punch is a confession of a mistaken art. It is the recognition of a mixed art.
This poetic and symbolic motive of Rossetti's art was curiously confused in the theoretical programme of Pre- Raphaelitism with the motive of Truth to Nature understood as the exact copying of natural detail. The thing was im- possible in the Pre-Raphaelite convention, because no allow- ance was made for the most important truth of atmosphere, and for the subordination in vision of details to broader effect. But, possible or not, Rossetti had no concern with such a programme. Truth to Nature meant to him fidelity to an idea. He did not care about accuracy of fact, but about coherence of imagination ; that details should be like, was much less important than that they should be significant and impassioned. To make them sig- nificant, he instinctively cast away the subordinating and obscuring effects of distance and air; he arranged them, not in their relative values, but as if they were all equally near and visible ; to make them impassioned, to rouse the sense that keeps the doors of the imagination, he trusted to colour ; the colour was like enough to be explanatory, but thereafter went its way into flame. The result is a web or mosaic of bright colour, with an admirable effect of strangeness, and at times on the way to success as decoration.
This was Rossetti's instinct and opportunity. But he was not quite clear about it, and missed his way. One example, a design of lovers kissing, is the most satisfactory in con- vention, because all pretence of values and natural effect in colour is thrown overboard. The drawing is nail, but expres- sive, the colour is an arbitrary mosaic. In the others, he palters and compromises with natural effect. This is seen most clearly in his flesh-painting. Instead of striking a bold convention, Rossetti attempts a timid realism. He torments his paint with modelling of forms imperfectly understood, and modulates his tones into a slaty-grey. This would be ineffective within the limits of the flesh itself, but is doubly so when the surroundings make no attempt to be in natural relation to the flesh or to one another. The paint, too, is unpleasantly affected by this tentative handling, and becomes greasy in texture. There are great differences, it must be added, between the earlier and later work ; the Lady Lilith of 1868, is very different from the Blessed Dantozel or the Salutation; in the Lilith there is a hand in which the note of flesh-colour is very happily struck against the scarlet band round the wrist, and the quality of freshness in the paint is retained; the face and neck are not nearly so good, but the picture has very beautiful passages of colour in the whites of the dress and roses, the scarlet of the poppies, and the green of the wall behind the flowers. Perhaps the Monna Rosa is, with this, the nearest to success in those experiments of Rossetti.
One of the most interesting pictures in the collection, from the scarcity of its author's works and its excellence, is the Too Late of W. L. Windus, one of the outer circle of the Pre- Raphaelites. It is like the best Millais's in manner and in the extraordinary expressiveness of its drawing.
There is another good opportunity of seeing Pre-Raphaelite work in an exhibition that has been open some time at the Guildhall, and will remain open till the end of June. The Ophelia is there, perhaps the finest picture the school pro- duced, and the Huguenot hangs instructively beside Mr.
Greiffenhagen's Idyl of last year,—a picture that, to the credit of Liverpool, has been bought for the Corporation Gallery there. Another provincial that pays a welcome visit to London again is Cecil Lawson's Minister's Garden, from Manchester. There are many other good things by old as well as late masters, and among them one comes with a shock on afflictions of childhood like the Christian. Martyr of Paul Delaroche, and on dead pictures that were once the sensation of a season. But there are enough good things to make the exhibition an excellent one, and the City Fathers deserve every thanks for this, the third of the kind. In one small matter, the scale of the catalogue, they are too generous. A few biographical facts about painters, or an explanation of the subject of a difficult picture is not amiss, but picturesque descriptions add uselessly to the bulk. It is true they are amusing at times, as when we learn of Mr. Swinburne that D. S. M.
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