ART.
THE GROSVENOR GALLERY EXHIBITION.
[FIRST NOTICE.]
Sea COUTTS LINDSAY leaves the management of the Grosvenor Gallery—at all events, the hanging of the pictures—too much to his assistant directors. Were we to judge of the present
exhibition by the pictures which occupy the places of honour at either end of the large gallery, we should be forced to consider that the collection was one of very inferior merit and interest.
It is somewhat too absurd to find Mr. Holman Hunt's two pictures in inconspicuous corners, Mr. Watts's and Mr. Sterne- Jones's relegated to the side-walls, while Mr. C. E. Hand usurps the place of honour with a picture which it is scarcely worth while even to condemn. At least, we say to ourselves, if the Academy does hang all the pictures of its members on a line, it does not place quasi-amateur productions—which need a page of the catalogue to explain their meaning—in the chief places of honour to attract attention. This is a matter to which Sir Contts Lindsay should see to. The Grosvenor Gallery has always had a strong infusion of the amateur element, and if works of such inferior merit as the one to which we have alluded are to be given the best places, it will very soon happen that the better class of artiete will refuse to exhibit hero at alL Is the collection as a whole a good one P That is a difficult question to answer. Relatively to the Academy—considering, that is to say, that each of the pictures is supposed to be a " picked " work, and considering also that the strength of the examples shown this year lies almost wholly in the contributions of Royal Academicians—the collection is, we should say, only of mediocre quality. That this is so, is mainly due to the compara- tive inferiority of Mr. Burns-Jones's work, of which there are no lees than four examples,—two large figure and landscape com- positions, one portrait, and one decorative panel. Moat of these works have been greatly praised by the daily papers. But to say of such a work as "The Garden of Pan " that it is equal to the "Chant d'Amour," the "Merlin and Vivienne," "The Golden Staircase," "The Days of Creation," or, indeed, any of Mr. Burns-Jones's finest pictures, can only be excused by technical artistic ignorance or great indifference to critical accuracy. The awkwardly scattered composition of the above- mentioned picture, the monotony of the colouring, the lack of subject and emotional interest, when compared to the pictures we have mentioned, must, we think, be evident to all who look at this "Garden of Pan" with open eyes. There remains the beauty of the handicraft, which is as great, if not greater than ever, but which ill atones for the absence of the painter's more personal qualities. For the first time in looking at this artist's productions—and these words apply also to the picture of "The Baleful Head," which represents Perseus showing the reflection of the Medusa's head to Andromeda—we seem to feel an almost total lack of impulse and spontaneity. The painting seems done to order—elaborately, carefully, and beautifully done, but still done in harness—and although this might not be a great defect in many an artist's work, it is an immense defect in that of Mr. Burns-Jones; now-a.days we miss the feeling which has hitherto always arisen within us on contemplating his pictures, that he has painted them less because be would than because he must. There are in each of the works in the present exhibition, isolated passages of great beauty—for in. stance, the painting of the foreground of reeds and grasses in " The Garden of Pan," and that of the apple•tree in "The Baleful Head "—but the pictures as a whole no longer delight us. We are no longer transported into a pleasant world which we know has no real existence, but which we take on faith of the artist's genius ; but we are enabled to look coldly and critically at the way he would have us travel, and on the whole, we decline to follow it.
Let us turn to Mr. Watts's "Judgment of Paris," in which the three goddesses are shown to us, standing on a mass of rolling clouds. Here at least we may still find the old pleasure, for few more beautiful things than this have ever passed from this great master's easel. Did this picture do no more than conclusively demonstrate the absolute purity of feeling and impression with which it is possible to paint, and render beautiful upon a canvas, the naked human body, this would be, in our Mrs. Grundy-ridden age, a sufficient reason for our enjoyment. But the work is alike a demonstration and a poem. The loveliness of the colouring alone is a matter for which to be thankful. For the rest, technical criticism of detail would be- ns it nearly always is in Mr. Watts's pictures—tolerably easy. The picture, perhaps, could scarcely be defended from the point of view of the modern naturalistic school. It is a painting by an artist who has something of the sculptor's eye, and who seeks for beauty more in form and expression than in absolute realisa- tion of detail. But round what might be the coldness of senti- ment and the somewhat abstract quality of conception of the female form in this picture, Mr. Watts has woven a veil of lovely colour, which endows the composition at once with a genuine pictorial motive.
The most beautiful landscape in the exhibition— beautiful despite various imperfections—is Mr. J. W. North's autumn valley, which he has entitled "An Upland-water Meadow," and in which we look across a stretch of green field down to a hollow filled with brown trees, beyond which the ground rises again in long carves nearly to the top of the picture. This landscape has something of the epic quality in its beauty, and a touch of the "grand style " which makes it more than a drawing from Nature. The author has been at once a poet and an artist, and has given new meaning to his fields, woods, and clouds. As we said in one of our recent notices, in speaking of Mr. North's painting, the world is too busy to heed work of this kind, and the mere absence of bravura and of painting up to " exhibition-pitch" will probably cause most people to pay but little attention to his pictures. As little, indeed, as they will perhaps give much to a gigantic work by Mr. Mitchell, entitled "From Death unto Life," with a text appended to it,—" And many bodies of the saints which slept, arose and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the Holy City, and appeared unto many." This picture, which is, we imagine, about 20 ft. square, represents an old man and woman in a vaulted room, through the open door of which a young girl robed in white is entering slowly with a fixed expression of face. We confesethat we see in this work no ground for the extravagant praise which we have read concerning its merits. Were the Grosvenor Gallery as large as the French Salon, we could perhaps afford sufficient space for a work of this magnitude and of this quality. But to fill up nearly the whole of one end of a most important gallery therewith, while pictures of ten times its merit are shoved away into subordinate positions, is only another instance of the injudiciousness or partiality with which the hanging of the pictures in the Gallery has been executed. The subject is more or less slap-trap, and the treatment scarcely more than conventional ; the drawing careful, but dull ; the colouring cold and uninteresting. It is a most ambitious work for a young man to have undertaken, but it is not worthy of the scale on which it has been executed, or the position in which it has been placed.
We will close this first notice of the Grosvenor Gallery with the mention of a most admirable brace of portraits by Mr. H. Herkomer,—so good, that joined with two which he has sent to the Academy (and of which we spoke last week), they raise him, in our opinion, to the very first rank of English portrait-painters, placing him only next to Mr. Watts and Sir John Millais, and considerably above either Mr. Roll or Mr. Galen. They are both fine in style, and good in colour; they are solidly and carefully painted ; they are beautiful' as pictures as well as portraits ; and they show a power of insight and characterisation of which, we honestly confess, we did not believe Mr. Herkomer to be capable. These portraits represent the late Professor Fawcett and the present Earl of Pembroke ; and of the two, considering the great difficulty of representing a blind Professor,—the picture was, we understand, mainly, if not entirely, executed after death from photographs,—the former is perhaps the most admirable. We, who have frequently written strongly about the recklessness and crudity of much of Mr. Herkomer's work—and we have not scrupled to say that in many instances it appeared to us that it was simply coarse and mere- tricious—must confess that this year he has produced four portraits which practically give the lie to any such imputations. It is doubtful whether any living English painter could have depicted these diverse forms of maiden, artist, professor, and aristocrat with as complete success. Here, at all events, we can say with perfect certainty, that if it be Mr. Herkomer's mis- fortune to be a Slade Professor, he is at least a Professor who. knows how to paint.
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