ART.
THE ROYAL ACADEMY.
THE line taken in these columns about the exhibitions of the Academy must now be familiar to most readers of the Spectator, but to prevent misconception, it may be clearly stated once more. In the case of each exhibition those pictures are singled out for notice which would be so singled out if they were not in the Academy, and in this matter of good or bad painting no distinction is made between Acade- mician and outsider, but only between artist and not-artist. But besides this question of individual performances, there arises in the case of the Academy a question of policy, which does not arise with the same force in the case of more private bodies. If the Academy had no pretensions beyond providing an entertainment of a popular kind on a basis of commercial enterprise and a standard of uneducated taste, the critic would be beyond his province in attacking its managers. He would say : The entertainment is of such- and-such a type, not a type that amuses me, but that possibly
amuses the people it is meant to attract.' But the Academy has very different pretensions. It has the pretension to be a national institution chartered by Royalty and endowed with public property to teach and to foster the fine arts, to uphold a standard of excellence in their practice, and by its exhibi- tions to discriminate, to publish, and to reward examples of such excellence. That is why it is not only allowable but necessary to call attention to the deplorable laxity of the standard that prevails at the Academy, instead of accepting it with an ignorant good-nature. The Academy enjoys an official prestige ; it has not altogether lost the prestige of a his- tory that includes names like Reynolds and Turner and Constable ; and we have a right to resent the action of the trustees for those privileges and those memories when we find them carrying on, under cover of their position, the trade of universal provider so indiscriminately that excellent work admitted is elbowed out of sight, and self-respecting artists are tempted or driven to abstain from so sorry a competition with vulgarity. A place that accepts eighteen hundred and twenty- nine objects as the works of art of a year cannot be an Academy in any reputable sense of the word ; an exhibition whose walls are covered to such a height is not an exhibition, but a furniture-store ; and an institution that cannot keep Mr. Burne-Jones, that cannot attract Mr. Whistler, that leaves it to the Grafton to exhibit the younger painters from Scotland, and to the New English Art Club to do the same for England, is not, even in an accidental and miscellaneous way, representative of the country's art.
This understood, let me try to glean from the present ex- tremely poor exhibition the works that deserve some notice from any one who will be at the pains to find them. There is no picture this year that deserves superlatives, but Mr. Clausen's chief picture comes near his excellent Mowers of a year ago. A little girl lies in the warm light of a harvest- field, holds a poppy in her outstretched hand. To this note the rest of the picture is attuned, though the painter's deter- mination seems to have gone a little beyond his feeling in some passages of its colour, with the result that the unity of effect is not quite convincing, nor the concord of colour. But the picture is one of the very few in the galleries that can be seriously criticised, either as a study of effect or a colour- design. Mr. C, W. Wyllie's Summer Flowers (267) is another picture with colour and sunlight in it. Mr. La Thangue, a capable though mannered draughtsman, who for a time seemed to be steadily getting blacker in his work, shows a certain recovery in his lamplight study of three ladies ; and Mr. Brangwyn, also a clever draughtsman, is at various exhi- bitions dealing out strong colours with too much of the zeal of a proselyte. One will watch the development of both with interest, seeing what strides Mr. Clausen has recently made in the direction of colour and in shaking off the photographic ideal of drawing. Mr. William Strang is another artist whose painting takes a sudden step out of black-and-white into colour. His Girls Bathing (831) is ingeniously designed, with its bit of blue-and-white reflection in the water. The cloud is rather thoughtlessly placed in the composition, but there is character and feeling in the picture. Another etcher, Mr. Charles Holroyd, may be mentioned here for a promising essay in painting, The Brass Tray (714). The Academicians have not yet discovered that Mr. Buxton Knight is one of the best landscape-painters who exhibit with them, and have skied his Runnymede. They have treated Miss Flora Reid better; and one is divided, as in the case of her brother, between admira- tion for the talent her painting displays, and a fear that mannerism will be the death of it. The faces are already a very conventional brown, pure white is too readily laid on, and a particular blue.green spreads itself too freely over the palette ; but the sense of light and air and freshness is some- thing to be gratkful for amid so much that is stuffy. Mr. Macbeth is another painter with a feeling for colour and fresh- ness, but who has satisfied himself too easily with a lay-figure type of humanity. Mr. George Harcourt sends a picture of a girl standing in a listening attitude by a window. There is something strong and fresh about the head, and expressive in its action ; the colour of the flowers, too, is well conceived. The blue of the window is not very good, the reflection not happy, and the drawing of the arms a little clumsy. The colour might easily go over into the pink lights on mahogany and yellow of Professor Herkomer's flesh-painting; but it wavers between this and
something very much better. Mr. Nettleship's tiger shows an advance in colour ; the natural properties, however, put round the study tend to cheapen it. Mr. Mackie's Winnower (581) and Mr. Tom Graham's Last Words (446) are both artistic work. Blommers, the well-known Dutch painter, sends a good specimen of his favourite subject, children paddling ; and in the same room are some clever sketches of Spanish streets in sunlight, by Mr. F. Hind. The names of Messrs. J. H. V. Fisher, Arthur Lemon, Corbet, R. C.
Crawford, Harold Speed, and La Haye may be added to a list which is necessarily somewhat hap-hazard in order ; and it may be added that Mr. Albert Moore sends a design to the character of whose figures and draperies and so forth, all sorts of exceptions must be taken, but which has the dis- tinction of inventive colour. In the black-and-white room will be found a poetic mezzotint by Mr. George Aikman, Across the Moor (1,356), and a stirring composition by Mr. Overend called Rounding the Lightship (1,450).
In portraits there is not a great deal to speak of. Mr.
Orchardson and Mr. Sargent are not at their best, but both painters are of course on a very different level from the average exhibitor. Mr. Sargent's Lady Agnew is, in painting and expression, the best portrait in the exhibition. Mr. Greif- fenhagen is skied, and Mr. Lavery disappointing. Sir George Reid sends a portrait of Lord Trayner which shows grasp of character. Mr. Pettie's merits as a draughtsman are exem- plified for the last time,-- merits which his strained colour a good deal obscured. Mr. M'Lure Hamilton's portrait of Mr. Onslow Ford is good in drawing and character, but purple- whitish in colour. Mr. Jacomb Hood and Mr. Olivier show a considerable talent for likeness.
Among the makers of great exhibition " machines " Mr. Dicksee and Mr. Hacker are easily first. The talent for staging is obvious in the Vilcing's Funeral, and a thoroughness in the consideration, the disposition, the execution of the properties of the scene. As poetry or colour it does not exist; it is merely what will pass for these things with a public that is grati- fied by the same order of contrivance in literature or on the stage. One hesitates to reckon Sir Frederick Leighton among the machinists, because his painting is not merely done to serve, it betrays the painter's passion, the love of visible beauty. But it is difficult to qualify otherwise the spirit
in which he and others, like Mr. Waterhouse, illustrate,—
that posing of incongruous models for poetic parts, that turning of literary poetry into unpoetic painting which is the offence of the machinist. The lover of the poetry of the Bible, or of Keats, must shudder at such incongruous handling of a theme as that of Rizpah, or La Belle Dame sans Merci. The same is true of Mr. Greiffenhagen's Bee. Mr. David Murray is the accomplished machinist of landscape. Mr. Moore sends his blue seas with little variation, Mr. Hook is not so good as usual, Mr. Tadema and Mr. Brett maintain their extraordinary level of skill with no ruffie of feeling.
In sculpture there is little of note. Mr. Gilbert does not exhibit. Mr. Frampton's group of last year has been cast in bronze, and he shows a relief, called A Vision, of great deli• easy in modelling, There is a boy's head, by Mr. J. H. Fume, with character and feeling in it, and some promising attempts by Miss Rose Le Quesne to follow in the steps of Mr. R. A.
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