ART.
THE ROYAL ACADEMY.
[FIRST NOTICE.1 Tile great picture-show of the year—greater by five hundred pictures than it has formerly been—has had its "private view," and will open to the public on Monday. Various changes have been made in the arrangement of the gallery, of which the building of a new room for the water-colours, and the removal of all pictures from the lecture-room, are the chief. No sculpture is now to be seen in the vestibule ; it is all placed in the lecture-room and the central hall. The etchings, engravings, and black-and-white drawings, have now a small room to themselves, apart from the architectural and decorative designs ; and the old water-colour room is now added to those which are given up to oil-paintings. So that there are now eleven rooms devoted to oils as against nine in the former exhibition, three instead of two for water-colours and engravings of various sorts, and two for sculpture exclusively. The changes are, without doubt, in the right direction, and the new water-colour gallery is especially suitable for its purpose, besides being pleasantly proportioned and decorated.
As we have said, there are five hundred more pictures than of old ; and one is tempted to a.sk whether this is altogether a gain. Well, in the main, yes, it is a gain to those principally concerned. It will make a difference, roughly speaking, to five hundred of those mediocre artists whose work would otherwise have been left out in the cold. And it will make the exhibition more representative, especially in affording an increased number of places on the line. For ourselves, we have, however, little inclination to go into ecstasies over this or any minor changes in the constitution of the exhihitions at the Royal Academy. It is not this or that alteration which is required here, but a thorough reconstitution of the entire body, a new view of their duties and their privileges. At the present time the Society of Royal Academicians and Associates represents a monstrous anomaly—a private body which has gradually usurped public privileges, and which uses them almost exclusively for its own advantage—wholly irresponsible in its power, and wholly selfish in that power's exercise. There is not a single reform in the practice or encouragement of Art with which the Academicians as such have ever been associated ; there is not a single instance of their having shown any comprehension of the obligations of that enormous influence whereby they profit so immensely. All of which, of course, is "no new thing," and at the present time our business is to write a first notice of this hundred-andseventeenth exhibition.
It is not a good show, that is certain ; and though hidden beauties may reveal themselves to us in the future, we must boldly say that, "taking one consideration with another," it is theweakest Academy we have ever seen. One cause of this, no doubt, is the new "baby" disease which has infected all our great artists. An inspired painter discovered a few years since—(from obvious motives we do not mention his name)—that babies, having little individuality and many fine clothes, and all being in their parents' eyes of supreme beauty, consequently afforded easy and remunerative subjects for art. To paint their eyes large and bright, their cheeks fat and pink, their satin hats and nice little socks as clean and fresh as possible, all this was a day's holiday to our great painters,. and many received the new gospel with, enthusiasm. Hampstead lit the beacon, and from the Wood of St. John to liclaida Vale, and thence to Bayswater, the signalfires flew quickly, till they flamed on Campden Hill, and even in the sacred recesses of Melbtuy Road and classic Kensington. In after-years, no doubt, 1882 to 1890 (say) will be spoken of as the New Renaissance of English Art, the years when our painters made the discovery that the fittest subject for painting was costume from the Lilliputian warehouse, that the dramas of this life, and the legends of another, were not half so interesting or so beautiful as this latest production of nature and art,— infancy plus the milliner !
How many there are in this Academy of these babies we confess we are at a loss to guess ; but in two of the smaller rooms we counted twenty-four separate pictures devoted to their presentment, so that we should not be far wrong in assumingthat about a tenth of the whole number of the pictures is made up of this material. But, of course, there are several varieties of these, and the humorous or domestic baby must by no means be confounded with the fashionable or milliner baby. It will be noticed by careful investigators that the Academicians, such as Millais, Leighton, Sant, &c., incline to the milliner variety, while comparative outsiders prefer the narrative or sentimental species.. We have dwelt a little on this because it is a great feature in the Art of to-day. Leaving the infants, however, fora moment, what is there in the Academy noticeable above all the rest ? Last year there were two things,--.-a picture by Orcbardson and a statuette by Alfred Gilbert; this year we do not see anything of the same rank. True, there is a large and very fine Orchardson this year of Madame Recamier's salon,. containing many portraits of contemporary celebrities, Fouche, Bernadotte, Canova, Talleyrand, &c., which is hung in the centre of one end of the great third gallery; but it is inferior to his "Mariage de Convenance," if only because it is so evidently a made-up picture. By this we mean that the artist has not had, nor endeavoured to have, any special motive in the work. It is a large, rather lengthy composition, and looks like the five minutes behind the curtain when the actors are posing themselves beforethe play begins. Now, Mr. Orchardson's pictures are always something in the nature of plays, and where the drama fails, the pictures, too, fail inevitably. From many artists we neither expect nor want the glare of the footlights, but from an artist whose pictures are conceived as Orchardson's, from the point of view of the theatre, if the play's not the thing, neither is the picture. On the next wall is a large Millais, equivalent in size and not very dissimilar in character from the "Idyll" of last year. It represents a sick ornithologist (surrounded, of course, by babies of various ages), who is discoursing to his children and an anxious wife upon a parrogneet skin, which he holds up beforethem. This is called "The Ruling Passion." It is full of good painting, and the story, such as it is, is clearly enough told, but as -a picture it is neither interesting nor pathetic. The grouping of tie children is too obviously for pictorial purposes ; none of the expressions strike us as being otherwise than mechanically correct; the work has no concentration of meaning, and is nothing but an effort to make a great picture. In this it fails, though it is beautiful here and there; as, for instance, in the ease of pose and expression of the elder child, who sits in the front of the composition, and who is, if we mistake not, the same model as Mr. Millais has painted so frequently of late years. One peculiarity about -it, which we also noticed about the "Idyll" of last year, is its ,enrious failure in colour. It is strange, but certainly true, that this artist, who was one of our finest colourists, who still produces occasionally work of exquisite quality in this respect, has of late frequently seemed to lose his colour-faculty, and, as in his portrait of Henry Irving, gets a dull brownish hue overspreading his pictures. On the other side of this room, however, is a beautiful baby, by the same painter, of "The Lady Peggy Primrose," a dainty little child in pink, holding up a muslin apron full of flowers. This is as pretty a child-picture as any mother's heart could desire, and it has all Mr. Millais's happy knack of rendering the delicacy and innocence of childhood ; and the painting, too, has an ease and brightness which is rather French. On the other side of the central picture on this wall hangs a companion child's portrait, by Sir Frederick Leighton, of "The Lady Sibyll Primrose," which is not nearly so interesting. This is one of the very much dressed-pp children's pictures, of which we spoke above, and it is really unworthy of the President in every way. It is neither childlike, nor lifelike ; neither admirable as a work of art, nor interesting as a bit of nature, but only a smoothly varnished record of infantile millinery. Let us look at something else,— the large Tadema which hangs between these Primroses. "A Reading from Homer" it is called, and is very similar in cornposition and character to the "Sappho" of two years ago—a semi-circular marble seat, several classical figures, and a bit of blue sea behind. The painting seems to us to be more exquisite than ever, the motive to be almost more unimportant. The picture is beautiful in its truth ; never perhaps in the world has warm, reflected light been painted more perfectly than in this and the little "Expectations" in the Grosvenor. It is not only that the light and warmth are so truly rendered, and that the marble and the draperies are so like the reality, for other painters have teen as realistic, before Tadema—but that this artist has penetrated the secret of beauty in these substances to the uttermost. His marble has all the beauty of which it is capable; its strength, its solidity, its opacity in shadow, and its translucency in:light, are all there ; and combined wifh these, too, is that appearance of endurance and immovability, that sense of defying time or change, which is, perhaps, of all the other pictorial characteristics of marble, the one which is most delightful. In these pictures of Tadema, though we miss the soul of humanity so often, we always gain the soul of lifelessness, if such a phrase is permissible. His drapery has not the abstract perfection of fold and combination of line that we find, for instance, in Albert
Moore's best work ; but it is always such stuff as would, and does, perfectly clothe a 'limb or hang in a curtain,'—it is abso lutely serviceable and fitting for its purpose ; it takes its right place in that perfect rendering of a scene, which is this painter's substitute, and in some sense not an unworthy substitute, for the 'higher qualities of the imagination.
The portraiture of this year, as regards the honours of it, must be divided between Frank loll and Herbert Herkomer, of whom the first-named has declined, the second risen in the best qualities of his work. Mr. Roll was an artist to whom portraiture came as a. revelation. He turned his electric. light on bis sitter, and painted him in a flash of insight. Metaphorically speaking, as well as literally, both the light and shadows were somewhat false ; but they revealed some things that truth would have missed. Since he has taken altogether to portrait-painting, this faculty, this strange dramatic pene: tmtion, has gradually failed him—he will end by painting portraits which are absolutely faithful and—inefficient. This year he has three in this great third gallery, where all the choicest works of the Academy are placed ; and two, those of the Viscount Hampden and Weir Mitchell, Esq., are thoroughly seviceable, fine paintings ; and the third, that of Wilson Barrett as Hamlet, is imperfect, shadowy, and—almost great. The truth is, that this painter is by nature a tragedian; the politically commonplace and the commercially respectable are alike alien to him. He never should have been a portraitpainter at all, for of all men living he alone might have painted the sin and sorrow of London life so as to have brought it home to all of us. He might have done in a great series of pictures for the pathos of poverty and the results of sin, what Holnaan Hunt once did for one incident of faithless love, " wakened into mercy the cruel thoughtlessness of youth, and subdued the severities of judgment into the sanctity of cornpashion." Herkomer is an artist of different rauk. Intensely commonplace in all his perceptive faculties, but gifted with an artistic faculty which is as wide in its scope as it is shallow in its feeling and imperfect in its exercise, he has hitherto done nothing badly, and nothing altogether well. His is, if not a catchpenny art, at all events a catch-many-pounds art ; and no mau has produced so much work on which the impress of the marketprice was stamped so clearly. From figure-painting to modelling, from etching to mezzotinting, from miniature-painting to water-colour, from portrait to domestic drama, from landscape to bill-designing, he has passed with a facility as fatal as its results were, in one sense, desirable; and in all, the work has been above the average, and beneath the best. Strong but coarse, ambitious yet slovenly, penetrating yet shallow, pleasant yet irritating, he has brawled through the domaiu of art as a mountain-stream brawls through the pleasant meadowlands that lie under the shadow of the great hills. This year, however, there are signs that at last his efforts have been to some extent concentrated, for the two portraits he sends to the Grosvenor and the Academy are far above his usual mark. On the Grosvenor portrait of Stanford, the composer, which is the best of the two, we will speak in another notice, and content ourselves here with saying of the picture of Miss Grant, which is in the Academy, that it is, upon the whole, the finest female portrait of the year. It represents a splendidly-made woman in the prime of early life, in a white dress against a white background. There is no bright colour whatever in the picture, the pose is perfectly natural and unaffected, the dress simple, the surroundings harmonious; but it has dignity, nature, and truth, and conveys, too, a sense of power which can afford to restrain its exercike without fear of misconstruction. This is a good portrait and a good picture, not possessing any gorgeousness of colour, or penetrated with any very great insight, but a record of a fine face and a graceful form, by a capable workman. We should have liked to speak in this notice of Wyllie's winter landscape, with its rooks and other birds squabbling noisily by the side of a frozen river ; but this notice grows over-long, and we must reserve further comment till another week.
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