ART.
THE NEW ENGLISH ART CLUB.
THE New English Art Club has opened this week its first -winter exhibition with the announcement that it is to be an annual event. The announcement will be received with pleasure by all who are interested in modern painting, and the present exhibition with the hope that it is the forerunner of many as good. A Club of this kind is necessarily a fluctuating body ; in the politics of painting, groups and combinations form and dissolve and recombine more freely even than in the politics of State ; and this Club, which at first included several groups of what in France would be called the " Left," seems -now to depend chiefly on the work of the painters who have labelled themselves, for the convenience of those who dislike them, " London Impressionists." Their ideals are emphasised this year by the presence of two guests whose names are a kind of centre of gravity for the floating theories, the undefined enthusiasm, the very defined distaste, that the word " impressionism " excites. These two are Messrs. Claude Monet and E. G. Degas ; and the opportunity of seeing a work of the latter in London, or, -indeed, anywhere, is itself an event of first-rate artistic im- portance. Monet, it is hardly necessary to say, stands for the effort to push further the analysis of visual effect, to render the force and vibrating colour of sunlight. He is often more experimentalist than successful artist, and one of the pictures here would be more in place in some museum of painting research than in a gallery of pictures. The other is in a -different case, being harmonious in colour, a rendering of the purples and greens that tremble about in a half-lit spring grove, seen everywhere, except just where one is looking ; for the facts of atmospheric colour can only be expressed in a kind of paradox ; you must look away from a thing to see what its rreal colour is.
The picture by Degas is of no questionable kind : it is a masterpiece. There might be a question, indeed, to those who can only feel on sure terms with things baptised beautiful by antiquity, or safe-conducted by an accepted subject ; but for those who take beauty wherever it is to be found, and with a keener pleasure when it is neighboured by the common, or dissembled in the seeming trivial, here is a pleasure indeed. For composition, the repeated, varied theme of the glancing skirts and limbs, accented by black coats and dark double- basses, and culminating in the lovely bouquet of dancers in front ; for character and expression, the part intense, part weary, figures of rehearsal, from the strained face and arms of the director, with a yawning figurante's head behind it, to the relaxed forms of the onlookers ; for incredible fineness of drawing and sense of relation, here a bit finished to the finger- nails, there a form lost and surmised in the dusty air and light of the stage ; for keenness of vision and strength of memory to note actions the most momentary and elusive,—for all these qualities, the picture is a triumph. This is the impressionism popularly supposed to be unable to draw, and it is well once in a way that an earlier work like this should be seen to show what stringency of discipline permitted the freer handling of 'the later. It is a secondary point, but worthy of notice, that the picture is a demonstration against all pedantry of -technique ; begun in black-and-white for an illustrated paper, tit has somehow been transformed into colour by what may, for aught one can tell, be a mixture of body-colour, pastel, and oils ; the effect is obtained, and that is the only law.
Another example of drawing that beats the academic on his own ground, is that of Mr. Sargent. His nude figure has little in colour or quality to recommend it ; but as a study •of form and action, it is study indeed. The drawing of the twisted body, of the legs and ankles, is enough to close a drawing-school in despair. His Javanese dancer, again, is unholy enough in colour, but it is action drawn. But there is more than study on the walls ; and it is time to single out one or two works by mem- bers of the Club that are conspicuously successful as pictures. Mr. Steei is the author of two. He has learned or discovered for himself the secret of Monet, as a look at the play of colour in the beach or in the black dresses of White Wings will show. The sunset colours here, of course, are the subject, and in the drawing of the figures there is that curious spice of caricature that so often touches the work of this painter. There is very little of that in the other picture, The Ermine Sea, another evening effect. It is a very delicate rendering of breaking waves, with three little imps of children paddling about in the water. The rosy sand and the sea-blue are taken up and emphasised in their dress, and the whole thing is not only a bit of the dazzle of Nature, but a charming design as well, " which," as Euclid, in his chuckling way, says of his own problems when he has solved them, " was to be done."
A landscape treating a somewhat like subject is Mr. Moffat Lindner's North Sea. It is in a scheme of colour that recalls previous works by the same artist, but none in which it has been so successfully handled. The flushed cumulus cloud and the whole effect of water and sky and sand make a noble design.
There is one portrait in the gallery of singular merit, the Portrait of Mr. George Moore, by Mr. Walter Sickert. It is a work that gives three several satisfactions. From a due distance it attracts first by its design and colour, and then arrests by its extraordinary expressiveness. Whether or not it is like its original, it is a notable piece of character-painting, and suggests how powerful a weapon lies in the hand of the painter if he chooses. in paint, to criticise the critic. But there is a third pleasure as well to be got from the picture, and that is when one gets, so to speak, inside the fence, and examines the handling,—how the drawing is built up, the deliberate skill and subtlety of the touches. Or re- solve it into colour patchwork ; no Turkey carpet coald be finer.
Another extremely pleasant " arrangement " of a figure is Mr. C. W. Furse's lady in a blue Chinese gown. The figure is posed with simplicity and distinction, and the note of colour of the head and hair against a blue background, going off into grey and brown behind the blue of the dress, is well thought of. Perhaps the enrichment of the dress comes forward too much, in an otherwise nicely balanced whole.
And now, because of their modest scale and delicate character, particular attention should be drawn to two water- colours by Mr. H. B. Brabazon. Another reason is that the name of the artist is unknown to exhibitions, and be reveals what is nothing less than mastery over effect and medium. Turner is evidently the starting-point, Turner when he made free use of body as well as transparent colour on a tinted ground. It is a method that gives delicious results, and both sketches here are delightful in the tender atmospheric greys that lead up to the brighter notes, and the Venetian subject in its effect of composition as well. One will look with interest for this name in future exhibitions.
Besides the pictures to which attention has been called for novelty or outstanding interest, there is plenty of sound work which need not be referred to in detail ; but mention should be made of Mr. Roche's lovely group of trees, of Mr. Mark Fisher's Hampshire Dairy-Farm, Mr. Fred Brown's vivid sketch of clouds clearing away after rain, a subject of quite historical interest in the season that is past, of a sketch of waves and coast by Mr. Henry, and of Mr. J. E. Christie's ice- floes and evening light on the Thames. To make up for some of the losses or absences that threaten to make the Club a narrower body than it was—the absence, for instance, of some of the Glasgow men—there is an unwonted and welcome con- tribution from the ranks of the Arts and Crafts—two beautiful coloured reliefs by Messrs. Frampton and Bell—among them.
D. S. M.
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