THE ARTS.
ROYAL ACADEMY EXHIBITION: STORY PICTURES.
THE class of pictures telling a story falls short this year, some of the best hands failing to come up to themselves; and we think that the reason is apparent in the tendency, so common in all arts, towards mannerism. Leslie has nothing equal to his Reading the Will; Frith, nothing to match his passage from the Spectator, his Witchcraft, or his scenes ftom Moliere; Redgrave, (except his landscape,) Elmore, Rankley, and others, do not tell stories as they have told them before. Mannerism is the dry rot of art— the insidious disease that undermines the living strength while seeming to aid it.
It originates in a sort of success. The painter proposes to himself some object more or less difficult; he attains it by some happy method—some turn of hand, or almost casual casting together of colours; the effect is applauded by others, or by himself; when the task has to be repeated, he resorts to the same device, and is again applauded; the method acquires a value of itself, and as an opportunity for its exercise a design is vamped up, the mode being now the object, the design a mere pretext; and thus " man- ner " is established. The same vice is observed in all artists— in musicians, poets, the writers of essay or fiction, especially among us at this day in the last: but the extreme mechanical difficulties which haunt the painter are, even to those who are not the weakest, a never-failing source of tempta- tion; manner is a short cut Out of the difficulty, and hence its vast pre- valence among painters.
Frith affords a very striking example, because of his great powers. Last year, one of his pictures was excessively admired—the Witchcraft; and was indeed more noticed than the more modest but still more beautiful scene from the Spectator: he was praised for the comely refinement of his patrician magistrate, the homely truth of his rustics old and young, the animation of the scene. This year, he seeks a subject which shall enable him to display the same manner. It is the festival given by the parents of a young country gentleman who has just come of age; and, no doubt, it possesses many beauties. It is full of variety and animation; life moves the whole scene, but not as it has sometimes done in Frith's pictures. In several figures removed from the principal group we notice the set look, which denotes that the painter's imagination slept while he was plodding at the manner of arranging his pigments,—working, without a living model present in his mind, to give a particular turn to his brush, or produce a particular effect, like that of the ruddy-faced old woman repeated from the picture of last year. The heir is a comely and graceful youth, with a na- tural mixture of diffidence and pride; but he looks too much like a jeune premier—too theatrical. The parents are nobodies,—a hard word for an artist like Frith. The old clerk spelling out the address, and several figures in the group around him, are excellent. But on the whole, the manner takes the foremost place in the picture, and the cardinal point in the story is overlaid.
Leslie has two pictures: a scene from Henry the Eighth, the King un- masking to Wolseye—taken from the stage, with its property dresses and prearranged attitudes, rather than nature; and a scene from Don Quixote, —the Chaplain leaving the Duke's table in a rage, after failing to convict the Knight of absurdity. The Duke, who is shading his face with his hand and enjoying the fun with a gentlemanly reserve, is among Leslie's good works; the rest of the picture is indifferent: Don Quixote is not exalted and refined enough; the Machetes expresses nothing particular; the Chaplain is a choleric fat man, and is next to the Duke the most life- some some of the people; but in the book the Chaplain is a nobody, and is not worth being the most notable figure of a picture. Here is a carefully com- piled and elaborate picture calculated to display Mr. Leslie's manner Of treating figures and still life; but the design fails. So Goodall selects a scene of "Hunting the Slipper" to set figures in hoydenish and smiling guise, which would be natural if they were moving. gaekley takes a scene in a church-untempting charity girls contrasted with a naughty woman in a pew-to display his manner of sermonizing on " innocence and guilt "; Mr. Rankley having been praised for his peni- tent scoffers in church. Poole, who has a faculty of imagination and thought, contends ineffectu- ally against mechanical doubts and difficulties, from which he escapes into
peculiar but unsettled manner of throwing the figure about. His colour is only tentative. " The Blackberry-gatherers" is a graceful picture, but too much imbued with the manner of Mulready; whose forms are too generalized for homely subjects, and whose pigments are too harsh and un- concocted. Mr. Poole's triple scene from the Tempest ought not to have been exhibited; not because it is without marks of promise, but because he has not taken enough pains either with the design or the execution.
Mr. Millais first comes into notice with a settled manner: he has beauti- fully caught the feeling of the Ere of St. Agnes; but with the costume of the middle ages he adopts the manner peculiar to the imperfect artists of that period: a confusion of ideas not less than that of a painter who, in taking the portrait of a New Zealand chief, should feel bound to execute the work in the style peculiar to the wood-carving of the New Zealand artists. The picture has another serious defect-the most central and prominent place is given to the figure of a malevolent fellow engaged in the two trivial occupations of cracking a nut and kicking a dog: a sort of tragic mountebank, equally disagreeable and ludicrous, occupies the central point of Mr. Millais's design.
Among regular contributors to this class of pictures, one who has per- haps escaped doe notice is Mr. Sintzenich. Iu no quality can we say that lie is highly distinguished, except one. His drawing is fair, his colour is passable, his composition is not offensive, Ids style is not often unpleasantly homely, nor is it exalted; but it possesses a considerable amount of mate- rial truth. In his present design, " The scene at the Mermaiden's Foun- tain, in The Bride of Lammermuir," the principal figures are beneath the subject; the Master of Ravenswood is too much of a hard-featured " middle-agish" man; Lucy is not enough distinguished from a Scottish lass of lowly birth: but the figures are real living people, of our own land; the feelings set down by the author are in their countenances. If Mr. Sintzenich has anything to be called manner, it is probably in the recur- rence of faults common to most English painters of the day-like the opaque pewter greys with which it is the fashion to border shadows on flesh: but his design is not manner; prosaic it may be, but it is direct to the feeling, and the process of imagining is completely worked out.
E. M. Ward is a vigorous and substantial designer, who is contending against manner. His principal picture is Daniel Defoe at the book- seller's,,--a reminiscence of the period that vies with Hogarth in character. The colouring is rather harsh; but Ward is grappling with that part of his art, and avoiding tricks and subterfuges; and the consequence is a marked improvement: a solid and forcible reality pervades the whole scene; it is like the historical memoirs of the French for vividness and animation-me- moirs made visible to the eye. We are pleased to see Mr. Ward multiply works of this class; but he ought also to paint others, of a different time, or else, e will be bound hand and foot in the perriwigged manner of the period.
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