ART.
RECENT EXHIBITIONS.
UR. WALTER SICKERT is one of the few painters among those whom the critic has recently been invited to consider, who can be called a student of painting. Masters of that art are rare, but also students. The man is much commoner who, under the sway of a poetic sentiment, has scrambled some kind of expression of that sentiment upon his canvas, and who has never even been aware that it is possible to cherish for the paint he uses sympathy and affection,—to watch its behaviour with a curious and expectant eye, to refuse to bully it into husky declarations beyond its register, to extract from it its natural singing note. The public is more likely to admire the lusty speaker who, like Browning, will, at any violence to his singing medium, say the thing he wishes to assert, or, on the other hand, the choking utterance of the poet who is obviously struggling with an ungrateful and reluctant material. It will welcome ideas that break through language and arrive—as ideas—or break through language and escape. It does not ask of the singer whether he has a voice. The unusual measure of sense and wit that have marked Mr. Sickert's writing on matters of art reappear in his painting, in his curious, fastidious, scrupulous handling of the material. As a draughts- man, he is freakish and uncertain, with brilliant sallies and amazing lapses. His curiosity will often drop, baffled by doubt or diverted by the charm of an accident ; and his best drawing seems to be done at speed, when the spur of character in the object inspires a method of noting it unembarrassed by second thoughts and science. The very remarkable head of Mr. George Moore was of this kind, an e xpressive, even exasperated likeness, not calculated but caught. The sketch of Mr. Beardsley, in the exhibition at the Dutch Gallery, is of the same sort. It does not go so far; the impulse has ebbed sooner; but the essentials are fixed by an eye excited and ready for the surprises of form. With the sense of drawing, the sense of design, too, seems to quicken.
This figure swings well across its space of canvas. And in this case the tone also brightens. The whole exhibition is low-toned to such an extent that a frame brighter than usual about extinguishes the picture inclosed. This excess of modesty is in pleasing contrast to the over-assertiveness in fashion, but it is carried to a pitch that suggests low spirits. There must be for painting, as for the speaking voice, a normal pitch which carries and gives due emphasis and relief at the normal distance. Partly, perhaps, this lowness is the result of constant painting on dark grounds. Some of the older sketches show signs of sinking in.
The majority of the works shown are sketches and studies. If the sketches show occasionally a remarkable gift for characteristic drawing with an edge of malice to it, the studies are most remarkable for a sense of tone, atmospheric colour, and the qualities of atmospheric substance, if the phrase conveys a meaning difficult to express. The illumina- tion of the air of a gaslit 'stage, or of a room with daylight falling down into it, the foggy emergence of objects in such lights, are what fascinate Mr. Sickert's eye. Take the study, frivolously named Despair, which is one of the best bits of painting in the gallery. The sense of design in it has been almost inert. A hand makes an awkward patch on the top of the girl's head. The sofa is clumsily plumped into its place, the shaving-glass sticks up stupidly behind. But all these things are bathed in an extraordinarily true illumination and air. The composition was not considered, the painter was wrapped up in the other affair. So with the music-hall studies. Hardly one is satisfactorily designed. Unlike in this to the work of Degas, they are also unlike in the little attention paid to the drawing of the figures on the stage. These are treated almost like the lamp in the gallery of one excellent study. As that is a source, so are they centres of reflected light, against which the tones and aerial recession of the background take their value.
It is not to be expected that a painter of Mr. Sickert's stamp should be very popular. The points already touched upon, his difficulty with deliberate drawing, his absorption in one or two parts of painting, are against him, and a wider defect in general estimation is that there is little sentiment to be found in his work, except that of the odd intrigue of forms and lights and of atmospheric mystery. He has probably, indeed, a private sentiment for the stage and footlights, such as other men feel for the fields and sunlight; but this does not further him much with a public that resents the stage in pictures almost as much as a play in church. It is somewhat touching, this British feeling that canvas is consecrated ground, but it is not very rational. It is rational that a man should paint beauty where he feels it, and most men, when painting is not in question, are aware of both the beauty and sentiment of stage effect.
The rest of the exhibition at the Dutch Gallery is made ux of small panels by Mr. Bernhard Sickert. They reveal an
observer sensitive to a great deal in nature, but unwilling to commit himself very far. This is shown by the almost uniform procedure by which a certain colour harmony is obtained. The brownish ground of the panel secures this, but the safety is bought at the expense of any very positive harmony of the colours. The same sort of blue and reddish. brown keeps recurring. There is also a want of relief and emphatic choice among the forms. The notation is that of the tentative pochade. Several of them might be sacrificed with advantage to one well-digested picture. All the same, there are numbers, like the sea-piece with a shadow across the nearer part, the house-fronts in one of the harbour scenes, and the effects of flickering sunshine in others, that are well seen and full of promise.
A gallery that all lovers of art and grace should visit just now is Mr. Dunthorne's in Vigo Street. It is hung with dry- points by M. Paul Hellen. Readers of the Spectator have been
urged frequently to see the occasional examples of M. Hellen's art on view at the Painter-Etchers and elsewhere. They will find here many old friends and a number of new plates. M. Hellen is one of the few men of our time who can render the charm and elegance of a woman. In spirit he is akin to men like Watteau, Gabriel St. Aubin, and Gainaborongh. He is no clumsy courtier, dapper tailor, or intolerable bounder, like most of the draughtsmen into whose hands women fall.
And he has invented, to track the wayward poses of his subjects, a line of supple inflection, and eloquent in its own flight and continuity of the life that flows through the figure and connects in one movement head and limbs and hands. Besides the dry-points, there are several portraits in pastel that exhibit the same comprehension in a less abstract medium.
At Messrs. Laurie's, 15 Old Bond Street, several excellent pictures are to be seen. The most remarkable is a Franz Hals. The character of the head, the extraordinary dignity and interest of the silhouette, the fine quality of the black, combine to make it one of the best pictures by this painter to be seen. On the same wall is a Gainsborough, unusually solid in its painting and vigorous in its drawing. The shadows of the face are a trifle black, but the passage of the hands and the large book they hold, is a magnificent piece of painting. Another Gainsborough is a charming portrait of a woman, with great freshness and variety in the colour of the stuffs. Upstairs is a remarkable landscape by the same painter. A very rich and handsome effect is obtained from unusual materials ; for it is painted in oil on sheets of paper pasted side by side. Downstairs is a fine Reynolds in capital con- dition, and a number of other pictures by Dutch and English masters worth seeing.
Other dealers have shows equally remarkable in their way. Messrs. Dowdeswell have organised one of those curious peep- shows associated with what is known in Bond Street as "Sacred Art." The picture is called "The Resurrection Morn," by Mr. Herbert Schmalz. It is described by Arch- deacon Farrar in a style almost equal to its painting, and has incurred a considerable amount of Royal attention.
D. S. M.
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