ART.
HAVE we Londoners seen all, or all the best, of our Old Masters' pictures ? That is the question which the present exhibition at the Royal Academy prompts us to ask. For, in comparison with the collection of former years, the exhibition is a poor one, and not only poor, but small, eked out with difficulty with a collection of Renaissance bronzes, models, and what the Academy catalogue denominates, no doubt rightly, " plaquettes."
The Early Italian moth, in which examples of masters before Raphael were usually placed, is closed altogether, much, we may fancy, to the relief of certain Royal Academicians, to whom the dim shining of these medimval saints, with their formal draperies and golden backgrounds, was, if report speaks truly, a source of
continual offence. Three rooms, indeed, hold all the pictures that are shown this year, and these three are not too full, nor, to speak plainly, especially interesting. We do not propose, in the present notice, to enter into any detailed criticism on special pictures, but rather to stroll round the Gallery, and take a glance at the general aspect of the collection.
It will be a surprise to many of the visitors, as it apparently has been a great surprise to various enlightened critics, that the picture which looks the best in the first room is a comparatively unimportant one by William Collins, the father of our well-known living author. It represents three boys seated upon a small hillock against a background of sunnily grey sky; in the distance are some trees and small figures, a cottage, and a wood. No composi- tion could be more simple, nor, according to our modern lights, could any treatment be more conventional. The boys, and the knoll on which they are seated, are as black as a hat, without apparent rhyme or reason, and the whole of the landscape is kept down to a pitch of unnatural obscurity for the sake of enhancing the brightness of the sky above. Let us grant all this; but let us grant also that the artist has achieved his object,—has succeeded in giving to the sky that impiession of life, that transparency, that brightness and distance, at which he first of all aimed. Let us look a little further. Here are three ugly little boys, whose features we can hardly distinguish, seated in an indefinite, and certainly not especially beautiful landscape, against such a sky as may be seen on any early summer morning. Simple materials—why is the result so fine? What is it that gives a sense of dignity to the composition, which renders the work so distinctly a picture, which endows it with so much human feeling and interest ? These are questions which it would take a volume to answer; we will only suggest, in passing, that some part of the interest and beauty of which we speak, is due to the evidence of design which the artist has put in his work.
The details of this picture are not found out haphazard, nor flung on the canvas thoughtlessly ; they are combined and arranged with a definite idea; and despite various errors and short- comings which our artists nowadays easily avoid, they therefore possess that interest for us which belongs to a work in which we can trace a definite thought and the action of a genuine personality. Note, above all, in pictures of this age and this class, the entire absence of the "bizarre "and extravagant quality which we so often see in the painting of the present day ; true, we feel tradition uncomfortably in them sometimes, feel that it has blinded the artist's eyes to certain facts be might otherwise have seen ; but we feel its good effects also,—we see that the originality of the painter has gained in dignity and strength by the early discipline which he has undergone, by that training in the admiration of the great painters who have lived before him, which has,'in Ruskin's fine words, "shed the reflection of its light upon the works of his hands." So we will pass Mr. Collins's black boys and sunny sky, in spite of its being the work of what a daily contemporary contemptuously calls "a ,.cockney artist."
And now look at the big Constable lent by Mr. Agnew, which represents Brighton and the Chain Pier when there was still a green sward in front of the Marine Parade, and before the little fishing-town had become" London by the sea." If it is per- missible to call such a work "a jolly picture," this is the expression which we should like to use concerning this composi- tion, for it is jolly, in the right sense of the word ; full of fresh air and brisk movement, and a broad, healthy vivacity of life, such as raises our spirits almost unconsciously. Of course there are magnificent technical qualities, and—not, perhaps, quite so much of course, but still indubitably—there are many -deficiencies, if one only cared to note them. The sea, for instance, is about as muddled in drawing and conventional in colour as it well could be, and its waves have not much more transparency than if they were masses of hay blown about by the wind ; but the sky, though apparently much injured, especially in the lower
portion, by cleaning or rubbing of some description, is simply magnificent, grandly disposed, full of air and movement; and in some subtle manner the artist has communicated this movement and this freshness to every detail of the picture; it is this which makes the work so fine; this is, in truth, a picture en plein air.
it is worth while to notice that, despite the entire originality ef Constable's treatment, and all his independence of thought, he too is in entire harmony with the older traditions of painting in everything save his actual technique ; bat on this point we have here no space to enlarge.
Look at Sir Augustus CaLlcott's long, narrow, classical landscape, very much the size and shape of an ordinary shop. shutter, in which Corinthian temples, and aqueducts, and classically attired maidens fill in the vacant spaces of "moan- tam, grove, and stream," apparelled in the celestial light of Claude. Very certainly we have got a long way from Con- stable and the Chain Pier ; this is Italy, and the Italy of the poet's dream, not of actual fact. Actual fact, indeed, has little to do with the picture ; it is eclectic in the highest degree, trying to make beauty by uniting a series of pretty things according to certain rules of Art. Well, the question is whether it does not succeed. In a way it does ; it is beautiful to a slightly greater extent, and in a precisely similar manner, to that in which a bride-cake, with a plaster vase of artificial orange-flowers for its central ornament, may be beautiful. The point is this, that there is a difference between selecting and combining your natural effects, and playing with them ; that directly the artist begins to " confection " Nature, as it were, to take lots of little bits of it, and stick them up one by the side of another, without relevance or any worthy purpose, Nature takes her revenge in the simplest possible way, by ceasing to be natural. In a world which holds all our interest
by its connection with our passions and our sympathies, the attempt to make a beautiful landscape art in which the senti- ment shall be one of pure decoration, must necessarily faiL It
is taking the breath of life out of the streamlet and the wood- land, and reducing them to mere dead shows with which the spectator has no connection. Granting all this, then, we may still say that in its own special bride-cake beauty, this is a fine picture, beautifully worked, fall of soft, sunny atmosphere, dreamlike in the distance of its removal from all the ordinary facts of life, and instinct with a certain languorous and yet
innocent Epicureanism, such as we have all felt "on summer Sundays when the bells ring " in the early morning. Before we leave this room, let us cast a glance at the " Ivybridge," one of the numerous " Ivybridges " of Turner, with its dark stream flowing tranquilly amidst scattered rocks shaded by slender, willowy trees. This is one of the later pictures of the painter's early period, and is somewhat yellow in tone, as is usual with his works of that date. Its chief beauty is in beauty of colour, and in the perfect harmony and peace of the composition as a whole. There is, too, in this first room a very beautiful land- scape by Claude, called "The Enchanted Castle," of which we will speak in detail in a later notice.
The Dutch pictures in the second gallery are distinctly, in our opinion, less interesting than usual ; but one work deserves the most careful attention, and this is a dark interior by Peter de Hooghe, entitled "A Music Party." The picture is extremely dark, probably, we should imagine, owing to some change in the colour of the varnish which has been employed to protect it—bat through this darkness the peculiar transparence and light, light of an almost crystalline quality, which we specially connect with De Hooghe's painting, shines clearly ; technically also, the handicraft has all the solid completion and reticence of De Hooghe's best works. It is entirely unaffected and simple, and yet absolutely right; and it is remarkable that while nearly all other Dutch painters of this time, no matter how great their genius, seem to have sought in their pictures for some subject which would specially display their technical skill, De Hooghe's general inclination is rather to conceal than to exhibit it ; he does not love brilliant contrasts, and tours de force of light and shade, but displays his wonderful powers, as a rule, in subjects which are placed in broad and simple daylight. This picture, therefore, which is rather in its treatment that of a Miens or a Gerard Dow, is especially in- teresting. At the end of this room there is another of Rem- brawn's windmills standing on a declivity against an orange sky ; but what that is new or interesting can be said to-day of such a work ? It has the many magnificent qualities of its author ; it is a little extra-dark in places, and a little less in- teresting in composition than many of the very similar subjects by the same hand.
We can only stop to say a word on the general aspect of the large third gallery. It is full of big, and in many cases too big, pictures, as, for instance, in "The Apotheosis of the Duke of Buckingham," by Rubens and Jordaens, at one end of the gallery, and the great Sir Joshua Reynolds of the Marlborough family (ten feet square) at the other. Both pictures are fine in places, both are no doubt magnificent works from a picture-dealer's point of view (" very important examples," would probably be the exact words given) ; but both are perfunctory and irritating as a whole, very evidently "done to order," and not pictures on which the painters have spent themselves as well as their labour, or of which, if they should perish, the loss would detract in the slightest degree from the artists' reputation. Surely the Titian which hangs in this gallery, of "The Rape of Europa," cannot be the same one that was lent to the Royal Academy in 1876 I) The composition is, as far as we remember, identical; but we can hardly imagine that the Academy would be likely to exhibit the same picture twice ; at all events, the work is a magnificent piece of decoration, and full of fine quali- ties of colour, and it is worth while for those of our readers who are interested in Art, to compare the treatment of the flesh in this composition with that in the big Rubens before. mentioned. Despite the softness and roundness of Titian's flesh-painting, there is in it, as opposed to that of Rubens, something of the sculpturesque quality ; the limbs are at once more delicately and more firmly modelled, there is no insistence upon the various details of skin and muscle, but rather the body is regarded as a whole, and the result is, in con- trast with that achieved by the Flemish painter,—an almost absolute purity of impression. To compare small things with great, it would be fair to say that Titian stands in this respect in rela- tion to Rubens, as does the work of Mr. Watts to that of Lefevre. We must leave all account of the Renaissance bronzes and sculptures, and details of other pictures than we have men- tioned, to a future occasion.
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