ART.
ROSSETTI AT BURLINGTON HOUSE.
THE Royal Academicians, in their Academic capacity, can hardly have had a very merry Christmas-time. Scarcely had the last revels of Boxing Day ended, than Baron Hnddleston and his jurymen were disposing of their pretensions to con- noisseurship in sculpture and drawing, and ere the New Year has fairly "settled into its stride," the Council and President have drawn down upon themselves the general censure of the- Press and the public, for the manner in which they have crowded into one small, ill-lighted room the chief works of a great painter's lifetime. So loud and so consistent, indeed, has been the condemnation passed upon their conduct in this latter matter that, we believe, for the first time in their history, they have been shamed into making some tardy and grudging amends, and, when we were at the exhibition on Wednesday, half of another small room had been utilised for hanging the Rossettis.
Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was by no means an artist with- out faults. To the calm perfection which marks the works of many of the older artists, he never attained. To the last, there was in his painting, his drawing, and his manner of conceiving his subject, many peculiarities,—we might almost say con- ventionalisms. What may be just noted briefly in this con- nection is that these conventionalisms were in the main original ones, and though, perhaps, something analogous to them may he found in early Italian Art, they were, in no sense of the word,
imitations of the practices of previous painters. The strange physical peculiarities which many people find so trying in Rossetti's women, are due, by no means, to any defective knowledge on the part of the painter, and still less, as we hold, to any deliberate affectation. It is perfectly easy to find in his poetry, as it was to see in his house and its furniture, that his mind consistently ran in a strange groove of mediasvalism ; and he chose the types of womanhood, and accentuated their pecu- liarities, which he found would best serve the purpose of his art. If there is one thing more certain about his paintings than another, so certain that even a second Belt jury would have to consider it, it is that their feeling is entirely natural and spontaneous. If ever a "passive master lent his hand," that master was Rossetti ; and in looking at his work, one is chiefly possessed by the fact of its mastery over the man who executed it. This is not the painting of an Englishman of the pre- sent day, who is looking to mediEeval Italy and trying to paint like its artists ; it is the work of a man who in thought and feeling (as half by birth) is an Italian to the core, and who has so saturated himself with the literature, poetry, and -religion of his countrymen of ancient times, that his real life is more that of Florence in the fourteenth, than London in the nineteenth, century. Had we space, it were interesting to com- pare him with Mr. Burne Jones, who wears his "rue with a -difference," and try to show the discrepancies and similarities of their art ; but here we can only pause to point out the great vital distinction between them. Mr. Burne Jones is a painter' of the present, who regrets the past; Mr. Rossetti was a painter of the past, who ignored the present. By this, we do not mean that Mr. Burns Jones takes his subjects from the present, that is well known not to be the case ; but that when he paints his old-world themes, he does so as a Modern, with a half-sick re- gret that they are past. But to Rossetti, they are not only alive, they are the only verities living. And this springs from the difference of *hat is sought to be represented. The living artist is wedded to the form of ancient life, as evidenced in the dresses, the architecture, the quaintnesses of movement, the - peculiar, half-allegorical manner of representing it, which was -adopted by the elder Italian painters, and with all these things be seeks to make his canvas beautiful. That is his aim. But Rossetti does not think about his ancient life at all, does not think -very much about making a beautiful picture. What he does consider is how to tell something as truly as possible. That he tells it in terms of antiquity is owing to his being,—Rossetti. But, with him, truth means truth of emotion, and if he can gain that, he will surrender to it all else. He is, perhaps, the only painter in the world who deliberately works in the same picture on two totally distinct lines, the natural and the conventional, and succeeds in combining them without offence. The conven- tionalities which he introduces are so dramatically and emotion- ally natural, that the mind accepts them frankly, and, Tecognising their aid in enforcing the meaning of the picture, -would not, if it could, have any more consistent treatment. In -a matter like this, a painter's method must be judged by its results ; and if the result is beautiful, the justification is complete.
One other point must be mentioned, before we speak of this more fully. We have not yet used the obnoxious word "pre- Baphaelite" in this article, but we must do so now, if only to remind our readers that in connection with that celebrated word and the brotherhood it denoted, one charge has been frequently made, and maintained up to the present time. It was said that, alike in the painting and the poetry of the school and itsfollowers, there was an unhealthiexaltation of the sensual side of love. Without stopping to discuss that, let us ask if this can be alleged as against Rossetti's pictures. Taking them as a whole, the answer is most certainly, "No." And yet a very slight varia- tion in the form of the question would necessitate a different answer, for never in the whole course of Art has there been a large collection of works by one painter in which the subject was so completely limited to various phases of love. It will be found, however, that in each of those pictures which represents a love- scene (and there are very many) it is, in so many words, an im- possibility to think of the painter as taking a sensual view of his subject. From the whole Beatrice series, to that wonderful picture of" Found," which represents an incident of our own day, Mr. Rossetti's love pictures are free from any sensual or morbid suggestion, unless it be, as perhaps some would have us think, morbid to paint this matter at all. We should be disposed to say that as a painter of love and lovers, this art of which we are speaking has never been exceeded, perhaps never even approached. We know no corresponding paintings at once so free from exaggeration and defect of the sexual passion, they are neither ascetic nor sensual, but preserve the perfect and healthy balance of manhood and womanhood. To this must le added the remark that the larger single figures, in which no story is told, are not, perhaps, quite free from the charge above men- tioned. Their luxuriance of beauty, their full lips, their masses of hair, their brilliancy of colouring, are more akin to the women of Rubens than those of Raphael ; and the main impression that they convey is one of Perfect and somewhat sensuous loveliness. But Even in these there is almost invari- ably to be found a meaning which is absolutely distinct from the above expression ; and the majority of them are embodi- ments of some definite poetic conception. In truth, in all Mr. Rossetti's work, his aim is to embody some poetic idea, to express in terms of colour and form certain thoughts and emotions. We do not say that his view of the province of Art was absolutely the highest, we do say that it was warped by shortcomings which were the inevitable results of the painter's life, nationality, and mode of thought ; bat when all allowance is made for the possible faultiness of his conception, and the admitted drawbacks in the manner in which that conception was wrought out, what are we to say to the work as it stands ? Simply that it forms the most lovely series of pictures which we have seen in the whole range of modern Art, and to find a parallel with which, we must go back to Italy and her greatest masters. There is not a single living colourist in Europe (we will give our readers Asia, Africa, and America, in), whose pictures would not look cold and clay- like, if placed in this gallery ; there is not a single colourist the world has ever seen, beside whose paintings some of these might not hang, and hold their own. We are not speaking hastily or in exaggeration in saying this ; it is a literal fact that there is no lovelier colour in existence than that of which there are many specimens here. And here, before we close the article which touches the general view of Rossetti's Art, we must just note two of its other great merits, first amongst which is its power. There is not a feeble bit of work in the exhibition. Strange it is often, bizarre sometimes, but weak never. And again, its grace is very remarkable. The manner in which the position of the hands and arms and the poise of the head carry out the main idea has all the unstudied beauty of free, natural movement, as opposed to the manufactured grace of the schools. And, for a minor detail, the treatment of drapery has never in modern times been more successfully grappled with. From the slightest chalk sketches, to the most highly-finished oil pictures, the drapery is splendidly disposed and painted, with no small unmeaning folds, and still less with great, unbroken masses, such as used to mark what was called the "grand style." As a last word, it is consolatory to find that nine-tenths of the visitors to Burlington House pass through the four large first galleries unheedingly, and collect in crowds in the little room where the Rossettis hang, crowded, but triumphant.
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