ART.
THE Exhibition of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours, which opened to the public on Monday last, is one of unusual merit, and interest. It is, of course, nominally a collection of sketches and studies, but many of the works differ from finished pictures, only in the name. It happens, however, that this year there is- far more of the genuine sketch and study element than is usually the case, and that some of the best members have sent contributions of this kind which are of singular power. A few members only send works below their customary level,. and we may, perhaps, allude briefly to these, before commencing our tour of the gallery. Mrs. Alliugham's work has for the last two or three years been declining in breadth, and gaining no corresponding advance in delicacy or subtlety, and this year her contributions are the weakest we have yet seen. There was. always in her art a tendency to make much of trivial things,. and to surrender truth to prettiness. This tendency has grown upon her with its indulgence, and her self-restriction to a very minute scale of work, has exaggerated her defects of technique,. till now, when we look at her little cameos of English life, we notice an unpleasant, niggling kind of effect, very inconsistent with good work. Mr. Lamont's faults of hard colouring seem to be growing upon him, and he has, we think, done unwisely in forsaking the poetical subjects in which he made his chief successes. We would give all his late contributions for another series like that of "Bonnie Kilmeny," or a picture like Glasgerion harping the whole Court to sleep, that he might make love to the King's daughter. Mr. Thorne Waite's drawings become less interesting every year, if only be- cause the artist never progresses. He can do a vivid sketch, in clear, bright water-colour, of a rustic landscape, but he cannot, try as he will, make his sketch into a satisfactory picture, and the consequence is, that of all his works, the hurried snatches done in half an hour are the most satisfactory. Of the two new associate members of the Society, it is difficult to speak with anything like patience or justice, when we remember
• 5 Pall Mall East.
that they were chosen in preference to a man like Mr. Napier Hemy. But putting that on one side, we may say broadly that both of them suffer from that most fatal of all diseases, a power of painting prettily, as opposed to a power of painting truly. Mr. Pilebury is not what is properly called a landscape painter at all,—he is an empty farm-yard painter ; give him a blue waggon without its horses, a blue-grey barn, and a wheat-stack, and he will sit down with infinite labour and paint a miniature of them ; and very much to his credit it is that the miniature will be a good one, but that any body of painters should deliberately approve such work as art seems to us very wonderful. The other new member is Mr. J. Parker, who owes his inspiration entirely to the late Frederick Walker. His work is chiefly street scenes, with small figures. There is a good deal of feeling in these drawings for good colour, but they suffer from a too evident desire on the artist's part to make them pretty ; they are essentially of the sweetmeat kind of beauty. For instance, we took the trouble to cata- logue the colours on a small portion of one of the best of these drawings ; " Rue de Rouen, Caudebec " (No. 59). The peasant .drawing water from a tap by the roadside, has an orange cap, a pink bodice, a red skirt, a sort of purple petticoat, boots and stockings of brown and blue ; her pail is pink, and so is the slab of stone in which the tap is fixed, other parts of the wall near her are purple, blue, grey, and bright green, while the dog that lies -curled up in front of her, has an orange head and tail, and a bluish body. This kind of colouring runs throughout the work, and (if we might venture to say so in Mr. Parker's ear) spoils it. Real beauty of colour will not be gained by this artist,
unless he remodels his practice. He has at present seized upon Fredk. Walker's one fault, and exaggerated it into a theory. Walker's colour was good, in spite of a tendency to spot bright colours about in lavish profusion, not because he did so.
The only two other members who seem to us to lack some- thing of their usual force are Mr. Otto Weber and Mr. North.
The former of these relies now entirely upon his good drawing -of cattle, and places them in a dull, heavy-green landscape, overspread with dull-grey sky. Look, for instance, at the large sketch of Greenhithe (No. 211) ; it ought to be a fine landscape, and it is nothing but a background for some well-drawn cattle. Mr. North is apparently suffering from one of those temporary depressions which overtake all painters whose work is distinctly imaginative, and one of the signs is always (as far as our experi- ence goes) a temporary falling-off in their powers of colour.
Certainly both his works here lack much of his usual colour qualities, though, even with this drawback, his large landscape of the " Season of Mist and Mellow Fruitfulness," is one of the most beautiful works in the exhibition.
We have fortunately nothing but praise to give of the draw- ings which we now proceed to notice, and praise which is the more pleasant to give, as it consists a good deal of the recogni- tion of improvement in the work of comparatively young members of the Society.
Foremost amongst these we must once more place Mr. Albert 'Goodwin, who has in this exhibition returned to his more pecu- liar kind of imaginative work. It is a great relief, in an exhibi- tion like this, which is mainly one of disciplined skill exerted in somewhat common-place directions, to turn to pictures like Mr.
Goodwin's, wherein the poetic faculty is so strong as almost to make us forget the technical skill which the artist possesses- Look, for instance, at this drawing of " The Invincible Armada " (No. 123), a stretch of dark sandbank in the twilight, with the ribs of one or two of the great galleons, sticking up against a stormy sunset. That is what seems to us to be art ; a great subject treated greatly; a poem, a homily, and a picture all in one. Look, again, at the same artist's " Waiting for the Express," a group of people standing by the side of a line, waiting for the express to pass (No. 55). This is another side, as it were, of art, a common-place subject touched into artistic life by the hand of genius. We use the word with all care, for this is exactly what artistic genius can do, and artistic talent cannot. There are many other examples of Mr. Goodwin, but we cannot spare space to note their excellences. Those of our readers, however, who have looked at the somewhat sombre poetry of the pictures we have mentioned, should examine also his drawing (No. 360) of "Summer Twilight in the Higher Alps," if only for the sake of the contrast it will afford them. We can speak from knowledge of its truth, and its beauty does not need praise.
Another painter whose work shows considerable improve- ment—though in scope and daring, perhaps, rather than power —is Mr. Herbert Marshall, who was only elected to this Society about a year ago, and who has already become one of its most promising members. Mr. Marshall has this year forsaken the streets of London, of which he felt the poetry so keenly, and gone a-wandering through the country, doing castles, meadows and towns, rivers and shipping, with careful impartiality. All his work is interesting and much of it good, and when he has " found himself," artistically speaking, and settled down steadily to one method of treatment, be will do well. Mr. Thomas Wats son's work also improves greatly, and there are few landscapes here of the older style of colouring, that can compare with his "Harvest Field " (24S), a strong, dark drawing, full of power and freedom, and worked with an ease which reminds us of David Cox.
Mr. Brewtnall, too, sends better drawings than he usually gives us. His large picture of " He Loves and He Rides Away" is, per- haps, the least satisfactory, the colour of the large figure iu the foreground not being particularly happy. The sky, however, is decidedly good. Mr. A. H. Marsh, too, has improved; his figures are losing that coarseness of drawing that used to mar their comeliness, and he does not devote the greater part of his picture to a greyish mist, so much as usual. His " Fisher- Maiden" (No. 71) is his best example, and is a really delicate little drawing.
Leaving for a few moments the younger artists, let us say a few words about the four best drawings in the exhibition, throe of which are sketches and two finished pictures. Taking them in the order of the catalogue, the first one we come to is Sir John Gilbert's "A Painter at Work in his Studio." Taking it for what it is, this is perhaps the most satisfactory drawing of Sir John's that we have ever seen. It is bold and simple in a high degree, unaffected iu its masterly drawing of the studio and its contents, most happy in the character and action which are expressed iu the broad back and energetics movement of the artist at work, and full of delicate varia- tions of colour, obtained apparently with but little labour. The whole drawing is French in its ease and sense of mastery, but we confess that we did not know Sir John Gilbert was capable of such delicate drawing as is here found. This work deserves careful attention, and would form no bad model to set before young artists as a type of masterly and simple execution. The second sketch is very different in subject, being the " Study for a Background," by Mr. E. K. Johnson (No. 97), and showing us a bed of old-fashioned flowers left to grow very much "at their own wild will," in front of some rather tumble-down, red cottages. Mr. C. K. Johnson has been painting elaborate flower- backgrounds to his " Mother and Child" pictures, for a dozen years, but we must confess we were not aware he could produce work of this quality. Perhaps it is because he has only used pure water-colour in the flower-part of this sketch, whereas his finished pictures are generally worked in body-colour. But for whatever reason it may be, this is one of the most delightful pictures in the exhibition. It glows with colour, it is full of good drawing and delicate gradation, and as a study it leaves nothing to be desired. We now come to Mr. Carl Haag's sketch of the "Ruins of Baalbec," on the Upper Nile. We could hardly have a greater contrast to the study we have just mentioned. In- stead of English flowers, African sand ; instead of English cottages, the remnant of an Egyptian temple. We looked at this study for a long time, and we must confess that it seemed to us very wonderful. It is not only that it contained so mach information about the place—we have seen pre-Raphaelite drawings that contained more—nor was it that it was superbly drawn and richly coloured. Its secret seemed to us to lie in the fact that while Mr. Carl Haag had omitted nothing of architectural or topographical detail from his work, he had yet managed to keep the whole perfectly fresh and simple in its general character, and that the work pos- sessed all the merits of a hasty sketch, with all the elaborate information of the most painstaking study. In its power the resemblance to Mfiller's Assyrian sketches is very marked. It must be remembered that this is not a picture, but, as stated in the catalogue, an original study taken on the spot. If our readers think we exaggerate the merit of this work, we would ask them to look at the amount of drawing and information conveyed about the distant range of mountains behind Baalbec, and then notice with how great simplicity of means the work is executed. The two finished drawings to which we have alluded are " The Durham " of Mr. Alfred Hunt, and " The Pandora " of Mr. Alma Tadema. The last (334) is a study of the head and bust of a red-haired girl, with a background of blue wave and sky. It is simply a study, but shows all Mr. Tadema's magnificent powers of execution ; and the hair especially should be studied, as an example of bow it is possible to give all its soft con- fusion and mass, without painting each individual fibre. Mr. Alfred Hunt's " Durham " deserves a closer and longer analysis than we can give it here, for it expresses all his best qualities of painting, and, if the truth must be told, just hints at his deficiencies. It is a close echo of Turner, the sort of echo that does not repeat words so much as manner, and in places it seems almost equal to that great master. It falls off, however, where Mr. Hunt's pictures nearly always do fall off, that is, in the foreground ; the yellowish trees in this example are lacking in gradation, and weak in drawing. The middle-distance in the valley, and the great tower of the cathedral rising from the town, are magnificently rendered, and the whole drawing is one of singular beauty.
We have left to the last what is really one of the chief features of the exhibition. Mr. Henry Wallis's series of illus- trations to the Merchant of Venice, a series which are remarkable for elaborate execution and considerable thought. Three of the series are highly-finished works in colour, the others are studies in sepia. Mr. Wallis's painting is singularly unfitted to show to advantage in an exhibition, its very merits being of a kind that require careful examination and consider- able attention. Like all painting that is fully thought out by an original mind, the first impression that it gives is, " That is not my idea,"—perhaps, if we really considered it, one of the strongest bits of praise we could give to a picture. The brush- work especially of these drawings is so elaborate, and the key of colour chosen is so full and rich, as to make them seem out of place amongst coarser and less ambitious work, and one is apt to set down as failure, what is really only comparative success in a higher field than ordinary. We can but say here that those who examine the drawings minutely will, we think, find them re- pay the labour, and that they are thoroughly well drawn from first to last. Amongst the other figure-painters, the finest contribution is the design of Mr. Frederick Shields for the decoration of Eaton Hall Chapel. It represents a Magdalen, and is an original and dignified treatment of that somewhat well-worn theme. Mr. Shields has also some other drawings, which show his somewhat monumental style of art to advantage, but all these latter are of comparatively small size. Mr. H. S. Marks, R.A., sends a series of "Heads of the People," which are well drawn, and possessed of considerable character ; and a long design for a frieze, called " Welcome l—the Arrival of the Guests," which is less of a success than usual. The figures are of the usual semicomic, medimval character. Mr. G. Du Meunier sends a single good " Sketch of a Child's Head" (394), and Mr. E. Buckman a very clever little picture of a boy in a garret, called " Cobwebs," which is singularly true in its effect of light. There are many examples, as usual, of Andrews, Frederick Tayler, and Paul Naftel. Mrs. Angel sends the usual flowers, and Mr. Henry Moore half-a-dozen brilliant sea-sketches. Mr. S. Read has several elaborate architectural works, and there is a single small example of the work of the late Mr. Samuel Palmer, who was a member of this Society for very many years.
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