ART.
THE GRAFTON GALLERY AND OTHER. EXHIBITIONS.
CHILDREN are deadly judges of the affected and insincere. Among the grown-up, there is a tacit allowance made for all those social pretences and postures by which the intercourse of incompatible people is mitigated. They are accepted as evidence of peaceable intentions for the time being among natural foes, as creditable, if not graceful attitudes of truce. Bat to those newcomers, those outsiders to the social com- pact, how absurd must appear such thin feints of being agreeable as the compact imposes, how weird the disguises that society permits to the shy. The elder approaches them with the uncouth grimaces and gambols that pass for a pleasant manner with the grown-up, and is met with a stony gravity, a terror or a wild mischief, according to the spirit of the child. Only the simple and unaffected may venture among those innocent barbarians.
But if the pretender to geniality has a hard time with children, the painter has a harder. The pretence of senti- ment, the fashionable trick that does duty for a feeling, ia as rife in his art as in human intercourse, and is doubled by the pretences of the eye. The one pretence like the other is baffled by the child. How is the barbarian to be fitted with the snit of a fashionable expression, and how is the blunt eye to attack those soft elusive contours ? One and another tries and fails, and at the Grafton Gallery you find a compendious history of affectations, and a number of methods of drawing varying between the pudding and the peepy goblin, but very few children.
Only the greatest can approach them. Velasquez caught the pathetic gravity of the child, subdued by the air of the court as by a church ; and Rembrandt, the profoundest and most sincere of painters, does not fail when tried by this severest test. There is a portrait of the little Prince of Orange at the Grafton, beside which everything else in the Gallery disappears, and ceases to exist. I have tried once and again to look at the rest, and take them on their merits, forgetting this comparison. But the task is impossible ; and one returns helplessly to the master after these conscientious excursions. This bead is drawn, and the others, compared with it, are not. It is grave and dignified, as befitted a Prince's portrait ; and yet it has a hint of that tender glee that the others caricature into all manner of grimaces. It has, as a critic has well said, the " look of a being new to the world," but also the haunted remembering look that Wordsworth and Shelley embroidered with their fancies, as of a face still acquainted with secrets and as old as fairyland.
One of the few pictures that bears looking at after this is- the Miss Linley and her Brother of Gam' sborough. She is not a child; the two faces are almost overcharged with feeling.
If Rembrandt extinguishes the painters of his own and the succeeding century, there is as unmistakeable a gap between the Miss Alexander of Mr. Whistler and the nineteenth-century,
children that surround her. This picture is no less distinct for its poetry of wistful indeterminate childhood among those objects in a nurserymaid taste, than it is for the beauty of its whites and blacks and green-tinctured greys among those slabs of sticky and slaty paint.
There is an exhibition now being held at Mr. Van Wisselingh's, in Brook Street, that does much to redeem the barrenness of the present season. The name of Mr. Mark Fisher must be fitfully known to most frequenters of galleries, and familiar to all who value honest work in painting. This collection will place him more exactly than has been possible hitherto. He is not a completely balanced painter; he must be reckoned with the Constables and Moneta, rather than with the Turners and Corots. He excels in one or two qualities, he is indifferent to others. He has a keen eye for the troth and beauty of atmospheric colour, and absorbed in noting the silver and green of a landscape, he composes only by an after-thought. His forms are often clumsy; his handling fits some things better than others,—is not very flexible. But a study like that of a chestnut-tree in blossom reflected in water is so faithful to the beauty of the thing,— strikes with such exact delicacy the essentials of the subject as it attracts the colour-sense, that the positive merit of the painter is much more important than his defects. There are only a few living painters who could rival that performance. It is a mind much like Constable's, with an affection for country sights and creatures, and a sincere pleasure in noting how light and weather affect their appearance.
Two English character draughtsmen of great talent are holding exhibitions of their work,—Mr. Phil May at the Fine Art Society's Gallery, Mr. Raven-Hill at the Carlton Gallery in Pall Mall. There is this difficulty about work produced not for the wall but for the page, that it is an exhausting business for the eye to examine it on the wall. To look at these close-packed collections is like reading a book where pages are pasted on a wall, instead of held in the hand. It is better to frame a few and keep the rest for examination in portfolios. Mr. Phil May's method is now famous whether in his own hands or those of a horde of imi- tators. Its peculiarity in technique is an extreme economy and clearness of line dictated by the necessities of newspaper- printing. But in the hands of its author, this simplicity and ease in the final line rests on a real study and a quick eye for character and for the essential lines that express it. It is, however, something of a relief to turn from the machine-like manner he has developed to drawings done without the fear of process,—a little drawing of a horse and cab is one of the most sensitive in the exhibition. Mr. Raven-Hill does not push economy of line so far ; his mind is less set upon clear definition, and more on colour and mystery in form. With him, too, it is pleasant to see the drawings executed in pencil or crayon, as opposed to the more starved pen-and-ink medium. Both artists do gallant work under the driving tyranny of the joke. If there were a reasonable illustrated paper and editor and public to be found, we should get work from them with less of this preoccupation and more of what really attracts them in the study of strongly marked and humorous character. Mr. May, of the two, is the quicker wit, Mr. Raven-Hill the more feeling. His circus-picture is not very good in colour, but it is a remarkable composition. He is a man forced to be funnier than is natural to his talent. He has to sacrifice the deep humour of the thing seen to the illustration of the spoken joke. D. S. M.
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