ART.
HUNT AND MERYON.* ALL that is fitting to be said of William Hunt's style of work ; the peculiarly narrow bounds within which his success was certain, his happy contentment in his pictures, and his healthy love of his subjects, all this has been written by Mr. Ruskin in the prefatory notice of Hunt which is contained in the catalogue to the small exhibition in Bond Street, and never, perhaps, has our great art writer been more happy and more just in criticism. The description of the quiet and comparatively uneventful civic life led by the artist, and the succeeding technical description of the manner in which Hunt and Prout worked, is a'wonderful specimen of the criticism which touches into a glow of life a generally uninteresting subject, and renders the reader not only appreciative of the artist's skill and cognisant of his method, but also gives him a feeling of kindly sympathy with the life which was so narrow and yet so earnest, with the man who, having few sources of delight, yet felt the power of those few so keenly that they were all-sufficient to him.
Having lived for a dozen years or more in a house with many examples of both Prout and Hunt, and studied thorn carefully, we can but echo the following quotation from Mr. Ruskin's Catalogue, which seems to us to go to the very heart of the matter :—" The uncomplaining resignation of patronage and
" Hunt, Fine-Art Soolety, Bond Street.-116ryon, Burlington rine-Arta Club,
BaYtiO ROSY. unblushing blindness to instruction, were allied in both painters with a steady consistency in technical practice, which from the first and to the last precluded both from all hope of promotion to the honours, as it withheld them from the peril, of entangle- ment in the rivalries connected with the system of exhibition in the Royal Academy. .Mr. Hunt's early drawings depended for their peculiar charm on the most open and simple manage- ment of transparent colour, and his later ones for their highest attainments on the flexibility of a pigment which yielded to the slightest touch and softest motion of a hand always more sensi- tive than firm. The skill which unceasing practice, within limits thus modestly unrelaxed, and with facilities of instru- ment thus openly confined, enabled each draughtsman in his special path to attain, was exerted with a vividness of instinct somewhat resembling that of animals, only in the slightest degree conscious of praiseworthiness, but animated by a healthy complacency, as little anxious for external sympathy as the self-contentment of a bee in the translucent symmetry of her cell, or of a chaffinch in the silver tracery of her nest,— and coveting, through the course of their active and unevent- ful lives, the frankness of the bird with the industry of the in- sect." So well throughout this preface are sympathy and insight mingled, that it will well repay our readers to buy the catalogue, even at its somewhat high price, it propos of which it may be suggested to the Fine-Art Society that it is a little inconsistent with Mr. Ruskin's teaching to make their prices so high. Those to whom this exhibition will be mainly useful and interesting are art students and artists, and the charge of one shilling and sixpence for a catalogue, and a shilling for admission, to one small, inconvenient room, is decidedly exorbitant, and seems to evidence a desire rather to make money out of Mr. Ruskin's repu- tation, than render the Gallery generally useful and accessible.
From the Fine-Art Society to the Burlington Fine-Arts Club is but a few minutes' walk, and were it only for the sake of the con- trast, it is well to go there, after seeing the Prout and Hunt Exhi- bition,—a large, well-lighted room, a little cold, despite its blazing fire, and a little empty ; a dozen or so of catalogues scattered about for the use of visitors, and on the walls a series of etchings by a Frenchman of the name of M4ryon, the story of whose piteous life and death are too well known in London at the present time to need repetition. Let our readers think of everything that Hunt's work betokens, before they look at these etchings ; what sort of feeling do we gain from the branches of may and gar- lands of roses ; from the melons, apples, and grapes ; from the brown jugs and copper basins, tho birds and fish, the plough- boys and milkmaids, smiling in contented stupidity, or eating with frank appetite,—from, in fact, all the subjects of Hunt's pencil P A notion of a secure life, fenced in from great perils, as it was debarred from great aims, narrowly, but faithfully loving the sweet country, which yet it had not breadth of heart, of intel- lect, fully to understand ; only rejoicing in what superficial brightness lay easily to be perceived in the fresh faces of healthy boys and girls,—the varied hues of flower or fruit,—it is im- possible to conceive of our old water-colour painter as a man troubled with many doubts, or subject to many passions, or even as being, in any ordinary sense of the word, of the tem- perament of genius, unless, indeed, it be true that genius is only the power of taking infinite pains. In his greatest work, as, for instance, the picture of the listening stable-boy in the Bond-Street Gallery, there is no slightest hint of any real insight into the nature of his subject, or thorough sympathy with it. The work is glorious in its mastery of broken colour, and the figure is full of humour, but nothing more. If that stable-boy ever had a moment when he was not laughing and listening, Hunt never saw it, nor do we get a notion of anything of the kind. So, too, with his pieces of fruit and fish and bud and flower. They are most exquisite in gradation, most lovely in hue, and most natural (generally, not always) in arrangement, but give no idea of any prevalent feeling in the artist's mind with regard to them ; such, as for instance, we can trace in the works of F. Walker called the
"Fish Shop" and the "Cottage Garden." So, to sum up. our impressions of Hunt from his work, it is that of a patient,
honourable, but, withal, narrow-minded man, dwelling con- tentedly in one groove, and finding quiet satisfaction in so doing, probably getting up at the same time every morning, and drink- ing the same glass of gin-and-water every night; never quarrel- ling with his neighbours or neglecting his duties ; one of those, in fact, in whom the great strength of England consists, who find it possible "to live faithfully hidden lives." Contrast with such a man, painting such subjects, the subjects and the personality of the French artist, whose works the members of the Burlington Club have now col- lected for exhibition. There are two portraits of Mdryon in the Gallery, both etched from life by contemporary artists. From these, he seems to have been tall and dark, with -a hard, restless face ; and in one, drawn shortly before his death, the emaciation of his face is very apparent. Both like- nesses are disappointing, and do not convey the idea of being like the man. They were probably taken under singularly dis- advantageous circumstances (one was executed at Bicetre), but they are sufficient to give the main traits of the character, which seem to be strength of purpose, restlessness, and power of imagination. It might be the face of almost any one except that of a quiet dweller in a London suburb like our Hunt. And in the etchings we find, the same qualities as in the portrait, though far more fully developed, especially on the imaginative side. The etchings are almost entirely views of Paris, and are painfully true to the Paris with which the artist was acquainted. If our readers can fancy their pleasant bed-rooms at the "Con- tinental" or the " Louvre " suddenly changed to a fifth-floor -garret high up in Montmartre, their furniture minimised, till a chair, and bedstead, and deal table are all that remain; their -view over the Tuileries Gardens altered into a long perspective .of tumbled roofs, grey walls, and chimneys, from which thick volumes of smoke belching forth, obscure the fair city of plea- sure ; and can then imagine what a morbid, imaginative man would feel and think, dwelling in such a place, in want of actual tread, and only leaving it, to wander by night along the streets and quays of Old Paris ; then, perhaps, they can fancy the frame of mind that produced these works, and feel a little for the man who lived so lonely a life, amid died. such a fearful death.
The subjects of the etchings are various architectural ones, but in the finest the prevailing feeling is always the same ; it is one of gloom, if not despair, and the impression given by the -whole collection is a most painful one. The "Rue des Mauvais Garcons" is especially full of thia subtle horror ; the place looks as if a murder lead been committed there, and yet there is -absolutely no tangible point to account for this feeling. It is Simply a small etching of HOMO low houses, one of which has iron bars in front of a glassless window, and an irregularly paved street. In the etching of the Morgue, which is, in our -opinion, the most distinctive and, on the whole, the greatest of M6ryon's works, there is a perfect drama in the small figures which surround a body that is being carried into the dead-house; while through almost every window there are either half-dressed figures, or something to indicate the poverty of the house. So throughout these etchings, their gloom increases till it changes into absolute mania, and. the sky is filled with all kinds of demons and monsters riding down upon the accursed city. That is the key to the whole matter in Mdryon'e mind, soured by disappoint- anent and perverted by disease. Paris was accursed, given over to frivolity, heartlessness, and vice in its fashionable quarters, and to want, woe, and despair in its poorer ; and as he was of the poor, he etched its darker side.
Between William Hunt, who died full of years and honour, after a long life of respect and peaceful energy,—and Charles Iel6ryon, who starved himself to death in Bicetre, after a brief life of continued failure, how piteous is the contrast,—how seemingly unjust the reward! Is there any thread of connec- tion between them ? Only this,—that they present two aspects of the artist mind, as well as two aspects of the life of the poor. Hunt gives us a smiling peasantry fit for hanging upon draw- mg-room walls, and aciting self-congratulation amongst the better classes ; and Meryon gives us the life of a great city
as it is seen by those who live amidst its terrors, instead ,of its pleasures, and see its vices without disguise. And so
Hunt paints his flowers and his peasants calmly, without emotion and hurry, and is honoured. Mdryou paints feverishly the dreadful facts he sees around him, till at last his mind gives way before the strain, and neglect and starvation helping, he -dies in the public madhouse. Now, what little we can do to repair the wrong his country- men did him seems almost irony ; and yet it is, perhaps, as well that Englishmen should realise that there may be amongst their own countrymen, men who are living now as was Mdryou IWing a few years since in Paris,—unable to gain money or sight for works which have, perhaps, as unique a value as these records of a wasted life which have been collected by the Burlington Club.
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