ART.

THE SEA.*

ONE good result seems likely to follow from the mutiplication of picture galleries throughout London, the habit, that is, of forming collections of works which have some relation to each other ; some unity either of subject, style, or authorship. Amongst those who have been most assiduous in opening exhi- bitions of this kind, let us give all the honour that is due for enlightened public service to the directors of the Fine-Art Society, and their very hard-working manager, Mr. Marcus finish. It is to this last-named gentleman's enterprise that we have already had exhibitions of Mr. Ruskin's Turner drawings, of Mr. Sey- mour Haden's etchings, of the drawings of Prout and Hunt, of the pictures by Mr. Millais, RA., and (quite lately) of the compositions of the late Mr. Samuel Palmer recently re- viewed in these columns. On Monday last, another exhi- bition of a special character was opened at the Fine-Art Society's Rooms, which is likely to prove as attractive as any of its predecessors. It is called simply "The Sea," and is almost exclusively devoted to marine pictures. The exceptions, which are few in number, and comparatively unimportant, are of Venetian lagoons and river scenery. Mr. finish has struck the right note, though, perhaps, with a little too much insistant energy, in the preface to the collection which is -attached to the catalogue. Therein he says, plainly enough, though with frequent lapses into rather trite poetical quotations, that English artists have no rivals at the present time in the delinea- tion of the sea, and that marine painters of all previous periods have been manifestly inferior. The assertion is a bold one, aad would need certain qualifications, before it could be thoroughly accepted ; but it contains a considerable amount of truth, and may be allowed to pass unquestioned here. It must be allowed, however, that the sea, as an Englishman understands it, undoubtedly means to a foreign mind the rough sea, and that the habitual avoidance and dislike of the watery ways by Frenchmen, Germans, and Italians, may have a good deal to do with the subject of rough sea being so seldom chosen.

The great mistake which has been made in making this collection of pictures has been in choosing so many examples of a few artists, and so showing but one or two phases of marine art. The oils in the exhibition practically resolve them- selves into large examples of Hook, Brett, and Henry Moore ; while the water-colours are of comparatively small importance, and do not seem to us to be especially good examples of the artists selected. There are several large examples amongst the oil pictures which are somewhat out of place in such an exhibi- tion, as, for instance, the works by Mr. Colin Hunter, entitled "The Sawpit, Port St. Mary, Isle of Man," "The Island Har- vest," and" Silver of the Sea." Two (if not all three) of these works have already been exhibited at the Academy, and might well have been omitted from an exhibition like the present, not only because they are of little relative importance, but because they do not form by any means good examples of their artist, who is far better represented by two of the smaller workkin the gallery.

The pictures by Mr. Hamilton Macallum also can hardly rank as serious sea-paintings; they are rather clever studies of effects of light upon rippling water, in which form is entirely subordinated to vividness of effect. We are not at all intending to deny the ability of these tours de force, but only to assert that they are not to be considered from the point of view of sea- painting, which, we hold, must, as a first essential, show an

* Fine-Art Society, Bond Street.

extended knowledge of wave-forms, and a power of painting. waves in actual motion.

Both the foreign and older masters, upon whose inferiority Mr. Huish insists so strongly, have little difficulty in at least holding their own in the delineation of calm or sunny water,

and many even of the "villainous Van Somethings and Bach Somethings who have libelled the sea," show a considerable- knowledge of the quieter forms of waves and ripples. Nor are- there many English painters, for instance, who can touch the work of the Belgian artist, Clays, where it is a question of thc effect of light upon calm water.

The majority of the finest pictures here little need any description, for they are already familiar to the public through the medium of the Royal Academy exhibition ; and we prefer rather to note a few characteristics of the three artists—Mr..

Brett, Mr. Hook, and Mr. Henry Moore—whose pictures form the chief attraction of the collection.

The pictures of Mr. John Brett, A.R.A., have been suffi- ciently long before the public to render their more superficial, qualities thoroughly well known ; and we need not dwell upon their minute faithfulness to detail, their wonderful clearness of atmosphere, their sharp, unfaltering execution, their brilliancy of light, and their general strength of effect. Of all these we have heard enough. We know the artist can paint a boulder sticking in the sand, till one longs to pluck it out therefrom, or sweep the sand away from its base. We know he can make a sea blaze in sunlight upon his canvas, till the picture almost seems to radiate light, rather than absorb it. We know he can paint a stretch of sea that has something of the grand extent of the ocean itself. But what, perhaps, has scarcely been sufficiently dwelt upon—and our brief space here will allow us to do little more than glance at the subject—is what may be called the intellectual and moral sides of this artist's paintings. We note very briefly two or three points in this connection, as the- present exhibition, owing to its large number of examples of Mr. Brett's work, gives a better opportunity than has yet beea afforded for noting his deficiencies, no less than his excellencies.

First, it is evident that there is a total want of one element that nearly all great painters have shown in their pictures,—

the element of mystery. We all know the trite reason given for disliking Lord Macaulay's writings,—" he was so con- foundedly cocksure of everything." A sympathetic person finds something of the same quality in Mr. Brett's pictures ; he is, in the fullest meaning of the term, "cocksure of every- thing." There is nothing in Nature he does not understand,. there is little he cannot do ; there are no depths beyond his perception, no heights beyond his reach. He enjoys Nature heartily but, somewhat in the same way that a schoolmaster witnesses his pupils' performances in a Greek play ; there is no mystery in the plot to him, the most difficult chorus is "plait- sailing." Even so, one may fancy, with little stretch of imagi- nation, does our artist sit down, with easel and paint-box, before Dame Na'Aire's grandest effects, saying to her, with calm con- viction, "Do your best, you can't surprise me."

There is a quotation appended to the catalogue of this exhibi- tion, from the well-worn "Ode on Intimations of Immortality," which tells us that,— "The inland far we be,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither."

Perhaps Wordsworth was right, perhaps he was wrong ; but if he was right, we must surely look to great Art for something- more than a too jubilant realism, must find it in some hint of the "dream," as well as of the "glory," and add a little of fancy's tremulous light to the sunshine that glorifies sea and shore. Painting, after all, is of a different quality to mathe- matics; a picture of the sea cannot be judged by the strict rules that apply to quaternions. However elaborately you paint the shadows on the wall of the cave, to use Plato's old simile, you will only depart further and further from the truth, unless you remember that they are but shadows, after all. And the "pleasant visions" that haunt us "as we gaze upon the sea" would soon depart, if we lost all underlying perception of its dangers and its mystery. There is in this exhibition a work, by a young and comparatively little-known artist, of the entrance to Yarmouth Harbour, which contains a good deal of the elements of poetry that we miss from Mr. Brett's work ;.

and this is the more noticeable as the "dirty" water washing up against an ugly wooden pier gives comparatively little scope for such treatment. We have not touched the root of this matter, but must be content for the present to leave it here,. and speak a little of Mr. Moore's painting. Now, we must confess that few things have given us more hope of the public appreciation of Art than the fact that this artist's paintings have become popular, for they have only one quality of great merit, and that is one for which we should hardly expect the public to have much favour. To go from Brett to Moore, is like going from a treatise by Todhunter to a poem by Coleridge,—an exchange of definite and accurate form and brilliant certainty of reasoning, for a shifting panorama of half-defined forms and half-suggested thoughts. It may be doubted. what that extraordinary poet means, but not that he means something ; his feelings may, perchance, be morbid and undefined, but, at least, he feels. Well, so it is with Moore. We hardly know whether the terror or the mystery of the sea appeals to him most strongly, but certainly his habitual mood in painting symbolises one or the other. His poetry is like that of the old English alliterative poets, not to be explained by rule or confined with the bonds of metre, but, nevertheless, genuine poetry. We use this illustration because the defectiveness of Mr. Moore's work is as apparent as the defectiveness of the alliterative verse.

" linkingly, unhappy, he went his ways homeward!'

bears much the same relation to perfect poetry as Mr. Moore's works do to perfect painting. Beautiful, but formless—feeling, grafted upon imperfect knowledge, and met at every turn by the barrier of imperfect technical skill,—such are Mr. Moore's paintings of the sea. But, at least, they always confess their imperfection ; they confess a beyond to which they cannot attain. In all Brett's pictures put together there is nothing that gives the character of the sea so well as the two works of Moore in this exhibition called "Salmon Poachers" and "Outside the Har- bour." The first is a very calm sea at sunset, seen from the shore, at the mouth of a river. The second is a wrecked ship, grounded "outside the harbour," in a fierce gale. Both are deficient in purity of colour, both have hardly any pretence to definite drawing of wave or ripple ; but both are genuine works of art, and carry us with them into a further region than any realism pure and simple.

Our readers will have thought us captious and wrong-headed in leaving the works of Hook to the last, but his paintings have so long received their just meed of applause, that it is little necessary to add to it here, or give any long account of its merits. Mr. Hook's mind is apparently as simple as could well be desired. He has neither the dogmatic realism of Brett, nor the half-melancholy poetry of Moore. One phase of sea-life and fisher-life pleased him many years ago ; he has done nothing good since, that has not been a variation upon the same theme. The Kingsley of artists, he insists that English fishermen are bluff of aspect, kindly, brave, and happy. The seas he paints are what the traditional seas of England should be, fresh with tumbling waves and fretted foam, rough enough to be boisterous, and calm enough to be safe, and overspread with broken skies of cloud and sunlight. Even as Kingsley had little more than one special theme, and shouted "God and a good digestion !" in his disciples' ear, so Hook seems to find his only panacea for human ills, and his only answer to human questions, in fresh breezes and green water,—and perhaps he is right, after all. One thing must be noticed, that he has only just escaped being a very great colourist. His pictures are bright and good in colour even now, but compare his latest work (now seen for the first time, and painted for the Fine-Art Society), "ill Blows the Wind that Profits Nobody," with the early picture that hangs next it, called "The Trawlers," and the contrast is almost pitiful. If a further example were wanted, the little original sketch for " Luff, Boy," would furnish an equally striking one.