ART.
THE GROSVENOR GALLERY.
[SECOND NOTICE.]
IT is almost a truism that the second look at any picture gallery is pleasanter than the first; the pictures are our acquaintances at least, if not friends; we unconsciously make our selection between them ; we need not look at all at some, and at others only glance hastily to confirm or alter our first impression. The attempt, in fact, to take in on the occasion of a first visit the meaning and the merit of several hundred works of art, is a piece of intellectual acrobatism necessarily bound to failure ; and the result thereof is almost inevitably that sense of weariness and almost disgust which results from the overstrain of any faculty. It is thus that we would introduce our intention that our second article on the Grosvenor Gallery should devote itself entirely to the pleasanter side of that exhibition ; and the pleasanter side is, no doubt, the landscape.
Whatever may be said as to Mr. Watts's large "Love and Life," and his portrait of Miss Gurney, there is no doubt about the beauty-of the blue rocky hills, rising into a bluer sky, which he has called "Ararat." It is one of those pictures of which Mr. Watts alone has the secret, which is at once severe and beautiful, full of high thought and intense dignity. No one but a great figure-painter could paint landscape of this kind; the scene appears like the revelation of a landscape's personality, a conception of the spirit of the place more than an actual record of its details. As a contrast to this, take Mr. North's " Morning in Early Spring," an English woodland scene, bright with cold sunshine, and misty with halfrevealed branch and budding foliage. What is to be said of this, but that it shows great powers,—imperfect as they are great P A delightful mess, that is the truest description of this work ; it is all muzzy with delicate colour and mysterious forms. There is no solidity to be found anywhere in the landscape ; the trees, boughs, and undergrowth are as ethereal as the air which surrounds them ; an air of bright unreality envelops the whole composition. Much of Mr. North's water-colour work is very exquisite ; but when he paints on a large scale he is rarely so successful, and of late years his idiosyncrasies, which are many, have been growing upon him. If he would only condescend to be simple now and then, how glad we should all be. We feel before his picture in accord with Byron :—
" A green field is a sight which makes us pardon
The absence of that more sublime construction," &c.
But between North's " Woodland" and Watts's "Ararat"
hangs a work which makes a demand upon our imagination in a far higher strain than either,—a gigantic allegorical design by Mr. Walter Crane, of "Freedom," in pinkish wings, freeing a slave from his bonds, to which it is worth while to give a moment, if only to wonder how it is that an artist, with a delicate fancy and considerable powers of graceful, imaginative design, can produce such an intolerably bad picture. The truth seems to be that Mr. Crane is an artist whose work has in the
main been of very small scale, and only painted so far as was necessary for reproduction in illustrated books; and so the habit has grown upon him of trusting to his powers of design, and dispensing almost entirely with models. This "Freedom," and the other works of this artist (there are many in this exhibition), is not really a picture at all, but a kind of tinted cartoon ; and even as such it suffers from the drawing being inadequate to the conception. The simple truth is, that Mr. Crane's drawings of the nude figure are of such a kind that they will not bear magnifying. Faults which are tolerable in figures only six inches in height, become unbearable in figures of six feet; and in the same way the sort of dry tinting, which with this artist doe.; duty for painting betrays its thin incompetence when its scale and the ambitious aim of the composition in which it is employed, puts it into serious competition with real painting, either in oil or watercolour. Why will not artists recognise their own powers moreclearly ? Here is a man with a special gift of playful ingenious fancy and delicate graceful arrangement, and ho will go and waste his time and spoil our temper with producing great abominable parodies of allegorical painting, in which all his special merits are concealed, and all the limitations of his power are made conspicuously manifest.
By the side of this work, if only to point the moral more clearly, look at the little picture of the "Ponta Molle, Rome," by Mr. Corbett, a young Englishman who has been studying in Rome for some years, and fallen greatly under the influence of Signor Costa. Here, at all events, is a modest pleasant picture of the Tiber and its low hills, and a large almond-tree fretting the grey-blue sky. We do not know where we have seen so quiet, and, in many ways, so complete a work. The place is known to us, and its character has been rendered with the most absolute fidelity ; there is literally nothing in the picture executed for show or in artifice ; nothing which betrays itself as an attempt to do more than make a portrait of the place. And yet, somehow, out of the gentle, steady enthusiasm of the painter, there has spread over his work qualities of design and subtle beauties of colour such as are rare even in great pictures. One feels irresistibly that the man who did this was gentle and faithful ; that every touch he laid on the canvas was inspired by love for his art, and determination to give it his best endeavour. We wish those of our readers who care at all for understanding pictures and painters would compare this work with the large landscape of Mr. Herkomer's, which hangs also in this east gallery. One is a wild picturesque scene of rock and mountain, the other tho simplest rendering of a winding river and sloping hill ; and, great as is the contrast between their subjects and their size, the contrast between their method and their merit is greater still, for the Royal Academician tells us plainly in every stroke of his work : See what I can do, without taking any trouble,— this landscape just knocked off in the breathing-space between portrait and portrait' ; and the other seems to say : I cannot paint as I should wish, and I dare not attempt a large picture; but look ! here is a little bit of loveliness I saw one day, and have tried to fix for you upon a canvas' And thus the Academician's work, despite its skill and the power of its painter, is useless, insolent, and, in the right sense of the word, poor; and the humbler effort is a pleasant, true piece of art.
What shall be said about the great Nettleship lion standing in a whirl of smoke and flame on the crest of a rock to which he has fled as " Refuge " from the burning prairie P Of course, it is not a Velasquez or a Bellini as far as its painting goes, and its drawing is rather vigorous and suggestive, than subtle or finished; but yet it is a " big thing " in many senses of the term. One point is especially noticeable : it justifies its enormous size. For size, properly used, is a real element of grandeur, and Mr. Nettleship has used it with great skill. It is hardly too much to say that we should be conscious of a distinct reluctance to. have the work reduced in scale. Another point in the picture is that the animals therein are not beasts of the Zoological-Gardens type ; they are alive and free. On the whole, this is the best picture the artist has done, and is, indeed, one of which many great artists might be proud. Contrast again with this, if our readers are not weary of contrasts, the little women's heads, by Mr. Rooke, called " Morning " and "Evening." They are patiently, if somewhat poorly, drawn, and are painted with great minuteness and considerable elaboration. They have perhaps somewhat of the feebleness of the echo, and are but reverberations from the "mountains of delight" wherein Burne-Jones'and Stanhope still hold their sway ; but they are pleasant, loveable little
pictures, showing us what a true, if rather limited, artist imagines as beautiful, and they have that sincerity of utterance which makes a picture vital as a work of art. Very different, indeed, is Mr. Bartlett's " Swimming-match," some fisher-boys bathing from two boats, somewhere on the English coast. This is accomplished painting, and one of the best pictures in the whole Gallery ; but we have already spoken a good deal of Mr. Bartlett's work in our notice of his Academy picture, and we shall here do no more than call attention to the merit of this composition in the detail of atmospheric effect. There is—we may say it confidently—no English painter of the present day who places his figures so rightly in outdoor air and sunshine as this artist.
Mr. Richmond's portrait of Andrew Lang is, perhaps, the best of his many contributions to this Gallery ; and though it suffers from that air of affectation which is the bane of this artist's work, it has several fine qualities, and is, we should imagine, an excellent likeness. But surely the strange yellowbrown complexion which Mr. Richmond has given to his sitter is an exaggeration. We should have liked to say a few words about the little tiny modifications of Mr. Whistler which Mr. Menpes sends here; but our apace grows short, and we can only call attention to their eccentricity, and their ability gone mad. Mr. Afenpes is a clever young man, chiefly known as an etcher; and he has apparently taken up this line of painting for purposes of notoriety. The pictures in question are a few inches square, have merely a misty or greyish-white background, and a little blot of a figure or figures somewhere in the centre of the composition. In our next article on this Gallery we shall notice the remaining pictures.
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