ART.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS AT BURLINGTON HOUSE. IT is best to speak out the disagreeable truth at once, without fear or favour,—and in the present instance very disagreeable that truth is. We have witnessed many an exhibition of the Royal Academy, but never one in which there was so little talent as that of this year. It is far beyond the usual medio- crity of dullness and repetition to which we have perforce grown accustomed during the last few years. It is difficult to shut our eyes to the fact that Academy and Academicians, in so far as they are supposed to exhibit and encourage the best Art of the country, are failures, and little more than a gigantically over- grown institution for encouraging the public bad-taste. It is not only, as of late years, that the exhibition shows us nothing new, that it consists but of variations on the well-known artistic themes of earlier years ; but there is also perceptible an absence of some of the most rudimentary elements of good Art. For we take it that one of these rudimentary conceptions is that Art should be beautiful. Look round these walls, from vestibule to lecture-room, and then answer the question for your- selves,—whether the men whose pictures cover the walls can possibly subscribe to this simple truth. Again, to some of us, it is no less a rudimentary truth of Art that it should be earnest. Look, again, and see what trace of earnestness we can find here. And again, should not Art be thoughtful, imaginative, faithful, and enthusiastic P Surely none of our readers doubt it, but they will assuredly find here few traces of thought, imagination, fidelity, or enthusiasm. And the worst of the matter is that it is in qualities like these, qualities which it is the province of an Academy especially to encour- age, and for the practice of which the assured position of its members gives them peculiar facilities,—it is in such qualities that the Academicians fail most completely. It is undoubtedly the case that a young English artist could have few worse guides to artistic merit than the examples set before his eyes by the majority of those whose works occupy the chief position in these galleries, and whose names are proudly distinguished by the Ace,- demic initials. It was with feelings of bitterness and shame that we walked on Wednesday from room to room, and marked in each work the same slavish adherence to tradition, the same mawkish sentimentality or maudlin pathos, the same repetition of worn- out stories and feeble witticisms. Neither gladdening the eye,. delighting the imagination, rousing the intellect, nor nerving the heart, the dreary series of pictures passed in long review before us, exciting neither pleasure nor surprise. It is not only the almost incredible dullness of the work that we have to complain of, nor even the want of high aim amongst the Academicians, though both the above are pain- fully evident; but it is the want of comprehension of what is beautiful in nature and man which leaves us with such a hopeless feeling as to the artist's work in the future, as well as the present. We possess a literature in England more rich and varied, on the whole, than that of any country of the world, yet,. for our artists, there exist but a dozen or so stories and a score of scenes from English literature. We have the most tender harmonies and subtlest variations of landscape, sylvan and agricultural, in the world; but you will scarcely find a green field or carefully-drawn grey sky on these walls, and every variation of interest and passion which sways our nation's: policy, or urges our individual action, remains an unknown land to these painters. The chief attempts at the reproduction of contemporary history are two pictures relating to " Imperial India," the principal object in one being a gigantic locomotive, and in the other a libellous portrait of the Prince of Wales, watching a cavalcade of seven hundred elephants crossing the Sarda, a work which is meritorious, perhaps, but hardly successful. But the " Gordon Riots " are of course represented, and Marat is once more killed by Charlotte Corday, in a work by Mr. Eyre Crowe, A., of which we can only say that it is the most ugly and unpleasant version of the story which we have yet seen. There are plenty of " tramps" and " phantom ships" and "old stone-breakers," and "returns of penitents," and " foolish virgins,"—indeed, all these subjects, and many more as common-place, are illustrated in the first room. Well, it is no use, we suppose, dwelling on the painful subject; we cannot write our painters out of dullness; if they prefer to "daub their way to emolument and oblivion," as Ruskin once put it, they must " dree their weird," and we must ours ; but it is time that the fact were fully recognised that as far as an Academy goes,. we have none that is deserving of the name. And now let us glance swiftly through the gallery, in search of what crumbs of interest we may chance to find. There is hardly one work by an Academician to which the epithet " beautiful" can be applied- There are some thoughtful portraits by Watts and a very inadequate one of Gladstone by Millais ; there are several exquisitely-finished heads by Leighton, though far in- ferior in power to earlier work, but their loveliness is that, of wax or porcelain, and too fragile to be truthful as representations of flesh and blood. Edwin Long has two very large companion pictures, representing Vashti refusing to. go in to the King, and Esther determining to go. We shall mention these works more minutely in our succeeding notice; at present, it is sufficient to say that they have all Mr. Long's usual merits of execution, and also his peculiar weakness, that of imparting life to his conception of a scene. They are like many very well-taught young ladies' performances on the piano —a species of highly-trained artistic gymnastics. Millais sends only four contributions, of which three are portraits, and the fourth a singularly common-place, poorly-painted picture of a castle, apparently on a Scotch loch, the water in front re- sembling a hayfield. Pettie and Orchardson are less interesting than usual, each in his accustomed manner ; and Poole's work is rapidly approaching that stage when compassionate silence is the truest kindness. There is one large landscape which is beau- tiful in the exhibition, and as far as our present knowledge goes, only one,—that is, No. 643, " The Stronghold of the Seison and the Camp of the Kittywake," by John Brett, an artist whom the Academy have hitherto refused to enrol in their ranks, little to the credit of their discernment or their impartiality. Two pictures, by Albert Goodwin, illustrative of the " Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor," supply almost exactly the place which_
Sir Noel Paton used to fill here. They can only be regarded as (beam., but dreams of so exquisite a texture, the fabric so precious in itself, as to be very satisfying. Mr. Goodwin, as we have known ever since he exhibited, if we remember rightly, at the Dudley his picture of the " Siren Sea," has the peculiar faculty of painting a natural scene with an under-current of supernatural feeling, which leads naturally up to the introduction of his legendary or super- natural characters. In this he somewhat excels Noel Paton, the surroundings of whose fairy characters, were prone to be a little too substantial. Mr. Goodwin is one of those artists, as yet unknown to the general public, who do good work of a wholly original kind, and there is hardly any other truly imaginative painting in this exhibition than these two voyages of Sinbad.
For small landscapes there must be noticed the works of Mr. Cecil, who promises at present to become the greatest of -our landscape painters, and whose pictures we propose to mention minutely in our notice of the Grosvenor Gallery next week. It is, we believe, notorious that for years the Academy have rejected or " skied " this artist. There is also a small winter landscape by a foreign artist named Munthe, which is excessively true to the season it represents.
The most thoughtful of the subject-pictures here is also-the work of a young painter, and one already known to the public by his picture of " Harmony," which was such a favourite in the exhibition of two years ago. The present work is an illus- tration of Evangeline, showing the expelled villagers clus- tering together on the beach in the twilight, waiting for the boats to take them off to the ships. Very quiet in colour, and very carefully painted and thought-out, this work deserves a closer study than we have as yet been able to give it ; in any case, it is a notable one for a young painter, and wholly devoid of any clap-trap sentiment. Mr. Rooke, whose " Story of Ruth " we praised so highly in the same exhibition as Mr. Dicksee's -4` Harmony," has here six small pictures, in an elaborately de- signed frame, entitled, "King Ahab's Coveting." We hope this sincere and very conscientious painter will forgive us for saying that these works appear to us to be somewhat inferior to those of two years since. An artist who bestows such severe and un- sparing labour upon all his work, is peculiarly liable to the error of frittering away in minutiae the main interest of his subject, and though, as an artist once said to us, of Mr. Rooke's work, that " he knew how to make a small piece of canvas precious with colour," he has in the present instance over-laboured his compositions, and the effect of the series is not to tell the story in any way clearly, but rather to leave us with an impression of a beautifully designed piece of mosaic, in which scarlet draperies, green vine-leaves, and gold frame, all take a part. With a little less slavish adherence to the manner of the artist on whom Mr. Rooke has evidently founded his style, and a little more of that artist's spirit, this young painter may do great things yet. The last picture which struck us as a favourable example of the more ordinary style of subject-painting was the work of Mr. Briton Riviere, entitled " The Poacher's Widow." It is an illustration of the poem in Charles Kingsley's ." Yeast." This is work which stands midway between that of Mr. Dicksee and the ordinary run of Academy subject-pic- tures. It can scarcely be called thoughtful, as it does not seem to penetrate into the real spirit of Kingsley's ballad ; there is sor- row in the widow's face, but none of the brooding spirit of revenge which is shadowed forth in the poem, nor, indeed, does she look otherwise than a decent country maiden oppressed with grief. But the painting is, nevertheless, sympathetic ; landscape and figure operate together to tell the story—" the merry brown hares are leaping "—with as vivid a contrast to the human feeling as in the poem itself, and the whole work is one of true feeling. With the exceptions of the pictures we have mentioned, and one rough landscape of moor and purple moun- tain, by Mr. James Macbeth, hung where it is impossible to see it properly, we discovered no work in the Academy of other than the slightest interest. One other picture there is which we should perhaps mention here, as though in some respects belonging to the school of dress and upholstery paintings, it has qualities of a higher order. This is called, "Until Death do us part," and is a subject hackneyed enough, in all conscience. A white-haired old gentleman, trim and upright nevertheless, is leading his young bride down the aisle of a modern Ritualistic church. At the corner of one of the low open pews stands a young man, looking earnestly at the bride,—the bride's face is turned slightly towards him, but bent downwards. The scene is powerful and
remarkable, no less for the intensity of its rendering than its moderation, the feeling suggested being just what it might be in real life, sufficiently noticeable to a careful observer, but by no means prominent. This picture is by Mr. Blair Leigh- ton, and is carefully and well painted throughout. We hope Mr. Leighton may use his talent in future in a more hopeful school than that of Mr. Frith. It is noticeable that of the works we have noticed,—the only ones which seemed to us at all out of the common-place order of subjects and execution,— only one is the work of an artist connected with the Academy, and that the least original of the number.
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