ART.
THE GROSVENOR GALLERY.—(MR. CECIL LAWSON.) [FOURTH NOTICE.] IN our last article upon this Gallery, we spoke of Mr. Lawson's art in its broader aspects, and tried to show what, in our opinion, were its chief characteristics ; in the present article, we shall close our notice of this painter, by saying a few words upon some of the special pictures which are exhibited here. We need not trouble ourselves about the numbers of the pictures, for the most important are all in one room, and there will be no difficulty is identifying the subject of our remarks.
The first thing that is likely to impress a stranger is that there are three distinct divisions, into one or other of which these landscapes fall, each of which seems to have been more dependent upon the painter's mind than upon his hand ; that is to say, his works are not divided the one from the other by increase or deficiency of technical skill and knowledge, so much as by the different ways of regarding his sub- ject which the painter adopted at various periods. Pictures like " The Minister's Garden," better known, perhaps, by its second- ary title of " A Tribute to the Memory of Oliver Goldsmith," the " Kent," the large moonlit "Pastoral," and many of the smaller works, show a purely recording habit of mind, in which the chief fact is the curiously impartial comprehensiveness of mass and -detail. The second phase gives us an artist who accepts little -or nothing from Nature, animate or inanimate, save certain broad aspects of sky and atmosphere ; and into these, as it were, he dips his little poetical idea, and brings it out again triumph- antly in the shape of a picture. Looked at carefully, with the scalpel in one's hand, many, if not most of the compositions belong- ing to this class will be found to have what are commonly called uninteresting and even ugly subjects. But it is beyond denial that the pictures themselves are both interesting and beautiful. They are melodies played upon a simple instrument by a hand that waited for the heart's prompting," like the singing that we hear on some quiet summer evening, as we drift "down stream," when words neither wise nor witty in themselves become full of suggestion, from the silence and the distance through which they reach us. This is no over-strained simile, for there is truly a pictorial equivalent for muffled music in such works as "The Wet Moon," "The Silver Mist," "The Strayed," and the dark grey picture entitled "A Lament," in which Mr. Lawson embalms his regret at the disappearance of the pictur- esque frontage of old Chelsea, and shows us grimly the hideous engineering preparations for "laying the foundation of the Chelsea Embankment." As under the first phase the painter is almost annoyingly matter-of-fact, impartial, and universal in his selection of subject, sa in the second, he carries partiality and imaginativeness to the other extreme, and looking from one to the other series of pictures, is like turning from Southey's epic of -" Madoc, Prince of Wales," to Tennyson's poem of" Break, break, break." There would be comparatively little that was strange about this, were it not that apparently many of these dissimilar works were executed at one and the same time, and the only explana- tion which we can suggest, is, that in the smaller works Mr. Lawson was taking his pleasure, while in the larger he was toiling after an ideal of grandeur which he was never fated to reach. We shall say a word of this presently.
Meanwhile, let us note the third phase, distinctly later than the two we have named, and in some ways embracing them both. To this belong such pictures as the large landscape in-the vestibule at the top of the staircase, the picture of " The Pool," exhibited at the Academy two or three years since; and all the later dark pictures, some of the Riviera, some of England, mostly with rather heavy blue skies and rolling white clouds. In this last phase, we see the painter trying to bring together truth to nature, certain conceptions of composition, and some poetical idea, to reconcile the different sides of his character, and com- bine them into one splendid pictorial whole. Let us say frankly that in this he never succeeded, and probably never would have succeeded, had his age rivalled that of Titian. The one picture which came nearest to such a reconciliation was that of "The Pool," in which heavy, shapeless trees stand darkly over-shadowing stagnant water, while, under their interlacing branches, we see a sunny landscape. The picture is powerful in the extreme, full of silence and suggested evil of all kinds ; a pool for the Red Fisherman, if ever there was one yet. But it sacrifices too much to its power ; there is no form, hardly any colour, in the whole work. The very birds which flutter across the surface of the water are ragged, and almost indistinguishable from one another. It is a dream of a pool,—a nightmare, we should have said,—but not a great painting.
The later pictures showed the failing of the artist's colour- power much more strongly. The foregrounds began to be compounds of sticky blacks and orange-browns, which, with a little dull green, formed the main portion of the scene, in order to emphasise the effect of the blue sky and cumulus clouds which overspread the whole. The truth is, that Mr. Lawson was only a colourist in a very limited sense of the word. When
he really tried to imitate the glow and depth of Nature's tints, he failed completely. The hollyhocks, &c., in "The Minister's Garden " are by themselves shabbily poor in colour, the hops in the great " Kent " picture have not a trace of the real, delicate transparency of the real thing; his meadow- sweet looks as if it had been made at a bonnet-shop, and his blades of grass are as coarse in their hues as if they had been plucked from the robe of an Alhambra dancer. In all these things he was trying violent, hurried imitation of Nature and in all of them he failed. But in greater matters, or, perhaps, we should say in less in- dividual details, he succeeded almost as invariably. The effect on a given landscape of twilight, or mist, or rain, or warm sun- shine, has hardly ever been given more beautifully than in many of the pictures of which we speak. The light of the silvery sky and its reflection in the river, in the " Cheyne Walk" (1870), is a marvel 'of delicate beauty, and every little fleck of colour on the figures or in the falling leaves, is inserted with exquisite taste and rightness. And in all the pictures which record his impressions, his colouring is never coarse, but gently suggestive of beauty and nature. The truth about his colour faculty is that when he was not thinking of himself—or rather, of his big canvasses—he was sufficiently an artist to paint in harmony with the conceptions which he was seeking to embody, but that when he was working on a large scale, and colour became, as it were, a necessary element in the work, it was a stumbling-block to him, and he did one of two things,—either, as in the large, early works, he attempted to give it its due prominence, and failed ; or, as in " The Pool" and later works, he turned his back upon it altogether. He was not a colourist, though he tinted some almost monochrome drawings exquisitely. He was not a refined, though he was a roughly accurate draughtsman; but he was a man who had in him a strange power of awakening the sympathies of those who studied his work. He was always trying to do it better and bigger than it had ever been done before, and as we have said, it is such comparative failures as those he made, which help artists to paint nobler pictures, and the public to appreciate better Art.
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