ART.
VENETIAN ART AT THE NEW GALLERY.
No visitor who is frank with himself will pretend in one or even several visits to have seen all the pictures now hung at the New Gallery, nor to have been really interested in more than one or two. I do not speak of the historical student, by whom most of those pictures have been already marked down and labelled, and who may calmly pursue problems of identifi- cation in a material whose emotional element was long ago discounted, if it ever strongly existed; I speak of the visitor to whom a masterpiece conveys a thrill, and blurs for the moment the presence and the claims of the pictures around it. It is surprising enough at times to discover, on a third or fourth visit, how far and how effectively the halo of the masterpiece has extended, and what notable work its brilliancy has obscured. If after scores of visits to the National Gallery, I still find myself time after time before the same masterpieces to the neglect of many respectable pictures, so on a first and a second visit to the Venetian exhibition, I find I have little stomach for Catena or Cariani, do not care to discriminate very nicely between Palma Vecchio and Bonifazio, and regard with but a feeble attention the par- tridge that assures the authorship of one kind of reputable picture, the finger-nails that betray the parentage of a second, and the particular bash in the head that signs a third. It is pleasant to have the second-rate picture labelled with a second-rate name, and the researches that so result are therefore useful, but they would seem to befit the mind either of equable scientific youth or of chill artistic age. The director, the collector, the dealer, the Kunatforscher, produce over the Old Masters an atmosphere of sad and anxious diffidence ; and they have every right to tax our spirits heavily, because but for them we might never see the pictures at all ; but it is well to remember that the picture exists first and foremost not as a link or a specimen, a document, or a problem in names and dates, but as a delight for the man in whose mind it stirs an emotion of beauty, the passion of contemplation, or the desire of production.
Those who share this frame of mind in going to the exhi- bition, will come away each with his own selection ; here is one first impression,—Giorgione, Tintoretto, Moroni. By Giorgione I mean the picture of a shepherd with a pipe, from Hampton Court, now commonly ascribed to him, and a portrait in the first room that more doubtfully bears his name. Each of them is certainly inspired with his poetry. By Tintoretto mean in particular two pictures, one above the other in the middle gallery. One is the por- trait of a youth, to whom a Fortune bends in from above, presenting a cornucopia ; the other an Eve. There is also a remarkable portrait of an old man. There are several pic- tures fine in conception that bear the name of Titian, like the portrait of Cornaro, or the full-length of the Duke of Urbino and his son, which looks like the copy of a masterpiece ; there are several other pictures with fine painting in them that must be from his hand; but there is nothing that, both in idea and execution, can be called first-rate for him. One of the finest is the Reynolds-like Mother and Child. It is silly to exhibit, however high on the wall, so bad a copy of the Madrid Dana as is shown here. But on an occasion where the greater man is at his second best, a lesser man has his tarn, and the portrait by Moroni is startlingly fine in character and design. The black silhouette of the cloak cuts in a simple but beautifully shaped mass against a grey-green background, and passes through the dark tone of the beard into a splen- didly modelled head, poised in the very act of thoughtful observation.
Giorgione is the focus of a wonderful moment in the history of painting. In his mind, a passionate and tender image of life sprang to be dressed in the new means of dreamy and voluptuous expression that the developed technique of oil. painting, with its idea of the fusion of colours, supplied. Painting, with him, is painting; before him, it was drawing. The Tuscan to the end, like the early Venetian, conceives a picture as the extreme limit of a bas-relief, with separate tints passed over its drawing and modelling, or as a piece of cloisanne enamel. The drawing of vigorous outlines repre- sents the doisans, and between those c/o-isms carefully isolated bits of red and blue and green and yellow are shut. A Raphael even, or a Leonardo, never really shakes off this idea. They attenuate the deism and develop a fine draughts- man's modelling within its limits, but the patch of tint or enamel is unresolved, and is filled in without much taste in colour. The logic of vision and the act of painting become very different when the two processes of drawing and tinting are married in the more advanced apprehension of colour. touch growing out of colour-touch. The hard definition of form is resolved as well as the trivial assertion of colour,—" I am the brightest blue, and have nothing to do with the brightest red on the other side of the line."
The images that Giorgione expressed in this voluptuous medium were of its golden temper. Subject, temper, colours, all cohere. Rembrandt, in a brown temper, painted brown ; the modern, in a brown temper, too often insists on using Titian's palette of blue and gold, like a man singing love- songs at a funeral. That is why, before pictures of severe British matrons or merchants painted in a gay, voluptuous scheme, one feels vaguely uncomfortable. Giorg ione, further kept to the kind of subject that is characteristic for painting, and that is the pausing, stationary subject. Painters can do wonderful things in the representation of action or the sug- gestion of movement, but dramatic action is the characteristic matter of the stage, not of painting ; and restlessness is the worst vice in composition. People resting is the painter's subject ; and the exalted rest of faces attuned to music is Giorgione's. He found the picture-people ready to his hand in the grave pose of the church paintings, with little angels playing to give them a countenance; he set a different tune upon the viol d'amore that brought a warm enchantment over everything, but different, only like a hymn to another god, leaving the faces serious and still. Beside it, Wattean's minuet has a thin and flirting sound.
Tintoretto has much less of the effusion of poetry. His portraits are not, like Giorgione's, withdrawn and steeped in a common affection towards life ; they stand rather each upon his dignity. But he develops, in an extraordinary way, the science of pictorial effect. He is master of the emotions proper to form and shadow and breaking light, in a superb counterpoint of painting. He appears to be violently engaged in drama, because his figures extend their arms or are foreshortened, or strongly relieved one against another. But in the middle of the hurly-burly, as in the magnificent sea-fight at the Prado, you find the principal figure as quiet as if she were on a sofa, and in a portrait like the Ottavio di Strada at the New Gallery, the Fortune reclines very easily in the air, taking care to cut the most exquisite design against it, and the youth never forgets for a moment that he is posing for his portrait in spite of her appearance. The main effect is of intense composure. In the picture below, Eve is a lovely figure dappled by the shadows of an apple-tree, and there is no straining on the part of the property-Adam to express feelings over the apple, not readily to be expressed in paint. The pictorial science of Tintoretto not only passed over to Rubens, to Velasquez, and to Rembrandt, but is found to the last at Venice, whether in the easy swagger with which Tiepolo wears it, or in the big sense of arabesque and relief that Longhi shows in his conversation pieces. How inferior pictorially is our Hogarth with all his dramatic intention and anxiety ! It is curious how little following Longhi's admirable pictorial ideas have had ; they are so readily diverted into drama and anecdote. But he must have affected Goya strongly, and from Goya proceed Danmier, and in part Delacroix and Millet. The modern searcher for style, like Anquetin, is to be found on the same trail.
It is curious that the organisers of these exhibitions do not hang them more sensibly with a view to that study of paint- ing which they have in mind. The pictures of each painter ought to be as far as possible brought together. There is, no doubt, the difficulty of glaringly false attributions to which certain owners cling ; but an approach to such an arrange- ' ment would be an immense improvement on the system by which it is necessary to run about from wall to wall and gallery to gallery. No attempt can be made here to deal with the collections of lace, embroideries, glass, and bookbindings that supplement the pictorial exhibition; but attention may be drawn to one most remarkable and beautiful piece of laze- work (No. 12) of Greek-Venetian character. It is made up of little figure subjects, conventionalised into the prettiest forms, with a much broader sense of design than one often finds in lace.
I may take the opportunity here of mentioning an exhibi- tion which may be easily overlooked at a crowded season, all the more because its somewhat contentions title and the preface to its catalogue might lead the Press to treat it with less notice than it deserves. This is the collection of pictures and drawings belonging to Mr. Harry Quilter, now on view at the Dudley Gallery. The Old Masters are few of them of much value; but the water-colours by Fred Walker and Pinwell, and the drawings by the latter and by Rossetti, Madox-Brown and others, should not be missed. Rossetti, like Giorgione at another time, was the focus of a poetic moment in painting, and the passionate and tender sentiment that inspired his rendering of humanity, affected a wide circle. He, for all his fine decorative ideas in painting, was a better draughtsman than a painter, and the same is true of the lesser men he affected, in whom his passion became a kind of gentle intimacy. Water-colours like those of Walker and Pinwell display no enlarged sense of colour, but a great deal of delicate and refined observation of personality. Pinwell's are best when least elaborated in colour. It is a pity that the black and white drawings have got crowded out into the vestibule. Among these is a singularly fine profile-drawing of a youth with long hair that recalls Leonardo and Bellini. A noble landscape, with a large cloud, by Mr. Watts, is among the paintings. If Mr. Quilter had attention to spare for anything in modern art but its Cherets, Dudley Hardys, and other journalists, he might have observed, at recent exhibitions in the Dudley Gallery, the work of Mr. Henry Tonks,—work curiously allied in feeling and execution to that of Walker and Pinwell. It is, of course, true enough that the general run of popular illustrators of to-day compares badly, in breeding and refinement, with the extraordinary group of thirty years ago, that included the names of Rossetti, Millais, Whistler, Keene, Boyd-Houghton, Sandys, Walker, and Pinwell.
D. S. M.
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