ART
UNTIL the end of September the Tate Gallery is showing the Hogarth, Constable and Turner pictures which have recently been exhibited in Canada and the United. States, and the Blake exhibition sent to the Continent by the British Council. The latter has been reinforced by the addition of some forty more works from the collections of Mr. W. Graham Robertson and the Tate itself, so that it now offers an impressive opportunity for study not likely to be repeated for many years. The exhibition as a whole—a fifth room is devoted to early Rossetti watercolours—provides a concentra- tion of British paintings of exceptional richness. Marriage a la Mode, Calais Gate, the monumental Dr. Hoadley and the ever-miraculous Shrimp Girl are among the Hogarths ; the Constables include Salisbury Cathedral, The Hay-Wain and The Valley Farm among the large pictures, but also, fortunately, the smaller works like Boat- building near Flatford and the tranquil and truly lovely Malvern Hall ; Turner is represented mainly by middle and late period examples, culminating in the Snow Storm and Petworth, while nearly all the best-known Blakes may be found here.
No other country could possibly have produced these four painters. Yet the common factor which unites them is elusive. How, for instance, can one link the accumulation of detail, the efficient stage- management of finite symbols in Hogarth's " moral subjects " with Turner's grappling with the cosmos and the infinite? Or Constable's view of the fragmentary and transitory effects of light about his beloved Flatford Mill with the world which Blake found in a grain of sand? Or again, alternate-wise, how can one reduce to a common formula Blake's passion for the bounding line (" fine tints without fine forms are the Subterfuge of the Blockhead ") with Turner's ex- plosive mixture of stumbling and smearing, scratching and scraping? We may perhaps allow ourselves the tentative generalisation that the national genius has ever been romantic, that our painting has tended to be literary, linear, poetic and eccentric, but beyond that we may leave the pointless chase to those timid souls who feel the need to tidy up even that which can never be tidied up. Suffice it that these four achieved in their diverse ways a breadth and unity of vision, an intensity in their particular conventions, that is altogether unusual in this country. Paintings remain great paintings to successive genera- tions when they are valid at many different levels. Blake and Turner both sought to express the inexpressible, and the very magnitude of their striving kindled a multiplicity of truths which we are still discovering today. Appreciation of the former has never been more widespread than now ; before the prodigious genius of Turner, whom I thought in my youth to be inexpressibly vulgar, I stand ever more astonished.
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Among the summer exhibitions I failed to mention the small show at the Arcade Gallery. There are several works here which will repay a visit—most of them by artists as yet but little known. M. H. MIDDLETON.
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