ART.
IT is almost impossible to notice any exhibition of this Society without repeating a remark which is at once ungracious and antique,—namely, that the Society is sadly in want of new and vigorous blood. But the present is perhaps an average ex- hibition in point of merit, though there are even fewer sketches of striking interest than usual ; and though several of the best mem- bers do not send, amongst these Mrs. Lyell, Alfred Hunt, Boyce, Frank Holl, George Fripp, and Lockhart, of the Scottish Academy. We will say nothing of the work, which seems to us to be unsatisfactory ; but for the sake of hinting to our readers in what direction the shortcomings of the exhibition are most manifest, we would ask them to look at the four pic- tures from Nos. 12 to 15 inclusive, and compare them with the average Landscape Art of the present day. It will be seen that while they, on the one hand, fall very short of veracity to Nature, they, on the other, show even less appreciation of what is great in Art. They have even less of what is called "the grand style" than they have of pure realism; they belong simply and entirely to the school of the more or less conventional pictur- esque, which was once responsible for literary Keepsakes and Annuals, with their vignette illustrations.
Though it is only a monochrome, the most striking work in the exhibition, the only one which shows any trace of imagina- tion directed to the representation of a great subject, is Mr. George H. Andrews's "Fighting Long Ago," a sea picture, re- presenting two great galleons hammering one another to pieces at close quarters. Always at home with ships and shipping, Mr. Andrews has in this work (which, by the way, he has pre- sented to the Society) shown himself to be equally at home with life and action. The picture has, indeed, something of the quality of a fine sea-story, and after looking at it one feels a distinct sense of disappointment in its somewhat too generic title.
Those who are interested in Henry Moore's painting—and every one who loves pictures or the sea must be—should compare Nos. 7 and 31 as specimens of the artist's good and bad work. Both are sea and sea-shore pictures, both have freshness and vigour,— and here all likeness ends. The first is good in colour, and good, too, though rough, in drawing, and is in tone good throughout. The second is most distracting in colour, is careless and in- accurate in form, and its tone is absolutely destroyed by un- meaning patches of dark colour and unnecessary splodges of white paper. Of course, a certain allowance must be made for the hurry of a sketch, especially when it is a sketch of break- ing waves; but what we complain of here, is not the slightness or the roughness of Mr. Moore's work, but of the absence therein of the main facts for which really his sketch was made. No one could tell from this last-mentioned drawing what was intended to be the true curvature of the main wave breaking upon the shore, or, indeed, of any of the further waves.
We have so frequently discussed Mr. Albert Goodwin's work, that we must dismiss it here with a repetition of the remark we made last year. It is losing the fine- ness of its imaginative power, and becoming far too purely phenomenal. By this we mean that its records of nature—of light, shadow, &c.—are now being executed without any arriere penile's, almost as a meteorologist might reproduce them. The pictures of this artist are becoming scientifically interesting, rather than artistically. Let the painter of the "Siren Sea," "The Great Armada," and "The Voyages of Siudbad," look to it ! If we turn from the most imaginative member of the Society to the one who is, perhaps, the least imaginative (of the younger men), Mr. Thorne Waite, we find an artist who has a very vivid, pleasant faculty for sketching. Will he excuse us, if we say to him that there are few practices in water-colours so radically vicious and wrong, as that of drawing carefully and finishing minutely all the stationary objects of the earth, and drawing carelessly, and not finishing at all, all the fleeting forms of the sky ? Look at any of his contributions to this exhibition (and there are fifteen), and it will be found that whenever Mr. Thorne Waite wishes to draw a cloud, he pro- ceeds in the following manner. He leaves, or "takes out," an irregular white mass in his blue sky, and in the centre of this he " dohs " a " dab " of greyish or purple paint, leaving a border of white. Now, if this was only done for purposes of swiftness, and grasping a momentary aspect of the sky, we might think it showed unskilful workmanship, but could not call it vicious painting. But we find, if we look at the rest of Mr. Waite's work, that it is in its way highly and solidly finished, and that it is the sky alone which is left in this ragged and unlovely manner. This must be wrong. Take the roughest sketches of Cox, sketches which, by the way, supply the key-note to Mr. Waite's work, and you will find without excep- tion that the drawing of the sky is, with all its apparent rough- ness and rapidity of execution, more, not less elaborate, than that of any other portion of the picture. No instance can be cited, or ever could be cited, of a great artist who drew carefully -only what was easy, and left undepicted all that was difficult.
Mr. Clarence White's "Thunder-splitting Peaks of Arran " is a powerful drawing, notable for its attempt at a full scale of colour, and for a certain grandeur of intention and composi- tion, which a little reminds us of the late Samuel Palmer. This work, we are inclined to think, is not quite what the French call "sincere ;" it is unduly forced for purposes of effect, but it deserves notice for its strength, and for the comparative elevation of its intention.
Mr. William Collingwood, too, has three drawings, all of which are interesting, and one of which, a picture of the rosy glow upon an Alp, is a very fine study of an intensely difficult offset. His second large picture, which is called "Going to the spring," is in reality only another study of sunlight, this time of diffused sunlight, seen through thick foliage. As a picture, it is, we think, a failure ; the figures, the tree-trunks, and the dower part of the work generally are feeble and uninteresting, but the foliage suffused with sunlight is finely and truthfully rendered. Look, for a contrast with this, at the moonlight study by Mr. Holman Hunt, a little sketch which he has painted, we should imagine, in as many minutes as he generally takes years. It is a curiously dull, dark effect for this painter to have chosen, but it is true, and has that indefinable touch .of mystery and individuality which the work of a great figure-painter commonly possesses when he attempts land- scape. There is upon the first screen another little work by Mr. Holman Hunt, called "Near .Ashburton," which is more in his accustomed manner, and has all his wonted iridescence of colour. It is a lovely little drawing, of which the most hypercritical could only say there was a slight excess of purple in its shadows. Miss Clara Montalba has apparently been spending the autumn in Holland, and all her sketches here are of Dordrecht or Zyndrecht, or places of the same type. They are clean, brilliant, and strong as ever ; but for some time this clever lady has been surrendering the finer qualities of her colour to the effectiveness of her contrasts, and why she does not work in monochrome is more than we can cenceive. After all, no contrast is so strong as a blot of ink 'upon a fair, white piece of paper. Besides which, her work gets less human—if we may use such an expression—day by day. The skilful hand is still there, but nothing else. There is no trace of old William Hunt's maxim,—" Paint what you love, love what you paint." As with many clever women's work, its lack of tenderness is, perhaps, its greatest characteristic, and in this it is not so much masculine as it is unwomanly. A delightful pen - and - ink drawing of Mr. Du Manner's should be noticed, if only for its sharp and almost crystalline beauty of line. Many artists have used the pen with greater power than Mr. Du Manrier, and with greater elaboration. No one, to the best of our belief, has used it with more "finesse;" and it is notable that though his work is, as a rule, almost over-finished, he possesses that rarest of artistic faculties, the power of suggesting all the details which could not be elaborately copied. Rarest, we mean, to find in combination with the power of elaborate work. As a rule, the artist who suggests best is least able to finish satisfactorily. There is a wonderful instance of this in one of his drawings for Punch's Almanack, this year, the one which represents the great mesmeric duel between a Frenchman and a German. In this, Mr. Du Meunier has, in a way which is little short of marvellous, marked the national characteristics of each combatant, and has especially given to the German very hairy arms. Any one who will take the trouble to examine the few touches with which the artist has expressed this fact, and expressed it with the utmost power of which it was capable, will be surprised to find with how excessively few touches the effect has been produced. It is this union of 'elaborate with suggestive work which renders Mr. Dn Maurier -so great an artist, and gives to his work that combined elegance and ease in which it is, in illustration, unrivalled.
Mr. Poynter only sends to this gallery two heads in red chalk, both studies. These are interesting, as showing the growth of refinement which is taking place in this painter. Both are quite genuine pieces of work, without that somewhat strident muscularity which used to be noticeable in Mr. Poyn- ter's studies. Less anatomical, they are equally right, and they have gained far more in beauty than they have lost in force.
Mr. Herbert Marshall, one of the younger members of the Society, is doing good, all-round work, and showing occasionally, as in his "'Westminster," some fine qualities of colour. His "Westminster" is quite the best of his works, though the Victoria Tower, in it, does seem to be (we dare say it is our imagination) a little out of the straight line. There is also a little drawing of a City churchyard, with some black railings bounding its quietness, through which we see a street crowded with passers-by, and vehicles of every description. A good subject, this, tenderly touched; not with all its meanings dwelt upon, but one or two of the lightest prettily suggested. Mrs. Allingham, who is never so good as when her work is tiny in scale, and restricted almost entirely to landscape and cottage- scape—if we may use such a word—is here in great force. There are few English water-colour drawings which would not look either tawdry, brutal, or dull, by the side of "At Sandhills, Surrey," and there are several others of almost equal quality.
Mr. Wainwright (a comparatively recent Associate) is one of
the cleverest young men in the Society, but his work this time is so unpleasant in its motive, and shows such a preference for the ugly or the offensive sides of Art, that we do not intend to speak of it in detail. His large picture of a hideous French- woman, in high-heeled shoes, leaning back in a chair, with crossed legs, is, in our opinion, the most frankly ugly and abominable bit of clever genre we have ever seen. It is a pity that Mr. Wainwright, who has learnt how to paint, should have quite forgotten what a picture should be like. Certainly, "The world where we weary ourselves," as he calls this precious work, will not be made less bothersome by such pictures as this.
We should like to say a few words about many of the other works, but we approach the limits of a possible article, and must group all that remains together. Strange it is to see in the same exhibition the crudest of amateur pictures of the Falls of Niagara hung in the place of honour, and the most delicate studies by Ruskin on screen or the floor. Can it be that the fact of the one being by a princess and the other by a professor has anything to do with the arrangement ? Strange to see a good picture by Mr. Brewtnall, of a girl in the snow, entirely ruined by the introduction of an extraordinary, red head-gear, which is at least as large as an ordinary umbrella. Strange to see that Mr. Pilsbury's Farmyards and Hayricks are not yet exhausted. Strange to see a clever, faithful artist like E. K. Johnson weary- ing us by the 275th representation (or thereabouts) of his pretty little daughter. Strange to see Edwin Buckman degenerating from the decorative satirist, into the painter of the most mawkish common-place, for what could be more mawkish than a lamb picking up a badly-drawn rosebud from a child's grave ? Strange to see that J. D. Watson's lover is still waiting in the same nice clean boots and breeches for his tarrying mistress. Strange to see Birket Foster's hand (which must be pretty well the oldest in the Society, now) still doing feats of such manipulative dexterity as few young painters could rival. Strange to see Mr. Thomas Watson wasting his delicate landscape drawing on such dull, uninteresting subjects, and many other strange sights are to be seen, as well as clever pictures to be enjoyed, in this gallery. But the strangest sight of all is to see the old and the new kinds of Water-colour Art, side by side, and to witness the unavailing struggle to maintain out-worn theories of beauty, and exploded conventionalities of treatment. For, indeed, the Royal Water-Colour Society, as a body, never seem to have read Tennyson, or any of the myriad poets who have expressed in different ways his saying of,—
" The old order changeth, 3 ielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."
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