THE ROYAL ACADEMY.
[THIRD NOTICE.] IT is impossible to commence this week's notice of the Royal Academy without referring to the last election which has taken place since we last wrote. Three men have been elected Associates, two of whom thoroughly deserve that honour—if honour it be. These are Mr. Henry Moore, the seascape painter, and Mr. A. Waterhouse, painter of classic and mediaeval subject-pictures. Mr. Moore has long deserved to be an Associate, and for two or three years past it has been our constant endeavour to make his claims generally known. But of the third election what shall we say, when we know that the artist chosen is Edward Burne-Jones ? Every one's state of mind who knows the circumstances of the case, may be expressed in the saying, " Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galore ?" This is Saul amongst the prophets with a vengeance. Fancy the "Annunciation" hung above Colin Hunter's " Rapids of Niagara," or the " Chant d'Amour " cheek-by-jowl with Eyre Crowe's " Bicycling Honeymooners !" What will the old pre-Raphaelite say to Calderon's buxom young women, and MacWhirter's fallen pine-trees ; to the babies' millinery, or otherwise, of Millais and Leighton, Goodall, and Morris; to Armitage's colossal tableaux, Leader's conventional landscapes P As JEneas said to Dido, preparatory to that somewhat tedious description of his misfortunes,— " Animus meminisse horret, luctuque refugit."
Seriously, this election is a shock to everyone ; it seems almost an insult ; it is decidedly a blunder. Beyond a certain point, inconsistency is intolerable, even from an Academy. After having derided and neglected every pre-Raphaelite painter for thirty years; after pinning the medal of Academic patronage upon the rough-and-ready art of the Scotch landscaper, ripon the babies of Morris and the bicycles of Crowe; after having let Rossetti live and die unnoticed, and Holman Hunt paint his great pictures during a lifetime, without even the barest recognition ; after having done and left undone such things as these, it is too late for Burlington House and its suave President to turn round upon the great painter whose every touch has been a reproach to their art and a protest against their conventionalities, and try to turn to their own advantage the fame he has gained in the teeth of Academic neglect, and despite Academic laughter. The time is peat ; the only answer now is that which Dr. Johnson gave to Lord Chesterfield. As Ruskin once said well, the great when they are old get " too far beyond and above you to care what you think of them. They can be kind to you, but you nevermore can be kind to them. You may be fed with the fruit and fulness of their old age, but you were as the nipping blight to them in their blossoming, and your praise is only as the warm winds of autumn to the decaying branches." The italics are ours, for these words are very specially applicable to the present case. Mr. Burne-Jones may, or may not, accept the distinction which is offered him ; but in any case he can gain nothing from it,. though possibly he may lose much. We who have admired and praised his genius for many years, during which those who now seek to honour, ostentatiously rejected and ridiculed all preRaphaelite work, have perhaps the right to express a hope that this painter will not spoil the effect of his singleminded devotion to the highest art, by allying himself with an Academy, with the members of which he has, artistically speaking, no possible sympathy. Let him, by all means, decline it courteously, for it is, we suppose, meant as an honour ; or, if he accept it, let him first well weigh the fact that all those who have most admired his work, understood its meaning, and sympathised with its aims, will be bitterly grieved and disappointed by his becoming an Associate of the Royal Academy. We must beg our readers to pardon this long preamble. We will now proceed with our notice of the pictures.
In accordance with our usual custom in these later notices of the Academy, we shall in this and our next article endeavour to' get a general view of the works exhibited. Beginning, therefore, at the first room, we come to Marcus Stone's "Gambler's Wife," a woman in a big hat and last-century dress, sitting in a garden under the shade of a large tree. In the background are the gambler and his associates hard at work. This is an elaboratelyfinished picture, but not a good specimen of Mr. Stone's art, because he has been unable to give any vitality to his conception. The woman is as uninteresting as a fashion-plate, the men in the background unimportant, and the garden, and house, and blue wooden seat round the tree, all these we know too well. The Briton Riviere which hangs near this of the " Sheepstealers " is the painter's best picture this year. It is a moonlight scene, with one figure of which we only see the back ; a broken wall is in the foreground, and beyond it we look at the sheep, which are in strong moonlight. The picture is dramatic, and full of ingenuity, the attitudes of the sheep being specially good; but the moonlight is only theatrically possible. With the amount of light here shown, the shadows of the picture would be much darker, especially in the foreground, and the local colours would disappear more than they do here.
Mr. Marks's " Good Story," a group of topers in a village inn,. is a good and very carefully worked-out example, but not so successfully humorous as this artist is wont to be. We prefer the small, one-figure composition, entitled "A Lecture on Parrots," which, besides its graphic humour, is one of the most exquisitely painted pictures which we have ever seen in the Academy. Let us not be misunderstood. Mr. Marks's painting is of the very reverse kind to what the French artists would like ; it belongs. rather to the old Dutch school, and its peculiarity lies rather in concealing its method than revealing it frankly. But if we accept its aim, it would be hard to find a better example than the " Lecture on Parrots." Everything is not only finished, but finished with the fineness of a skilled workman. Of Mr. Hodgson's " Don Quixote and the GalleySlaves " we can say little in praise ; a coarsely-coloured landscape, with well-drawn but perfectly uninteresting figures, it is alike feeble, violent, and dull. And on the other side of the door in this first room hangs a picture which, though it justifieswhat we have said of Mr. Dicksee's work during the last two or three years, we are very sorry to see. It is called " Chivalry," and represents a maiden in a blue gown tied to a tree, whilst in the background a knight in complete armour is sheathing his sword. By his feet lies his dead antagonist. The actual brushwork on the picture is good, and so is the drawing of the tree and its foliage; there praise must cease. The maiden wriggling away from the tree is conventional, insipid, and uninteresting ; the very long knight trying to sheathe a sword which is too long even for him, is simply comic. The subject is as stale as could be well found, and there is a fatuity about its rendering which is very irritating. Damsel in distress, knight, landscape, even the
sunset light behind them, all seem to be well-fed, proper, and comfortable. It is a treat to see Mr. Yeames doing something more worthy of his reputation as an Academician than his latter pictures. This year his " Prisoners of War " must be counted as one of the pictorial successes of the season. It shows ns two
English middies in a French seaport, guarded by an old French soldier, and gazed curiously upon by the fisher men and women of the place. The painting is adequate and the colour pleasant, but the strength of the conception lies in its grasp of the occasion. Dramatically, it is clever in the extreme ; the pose and expression of the middies make the picture, and deserve to make it. In the shortest words, Mr. Yeames has " hit the mark." But we should like our readers to contrast with this, a work by Mr. Storey, also an Academician, of " Zeuxis painting his Venus from the chosen five." We do not wish to say anything more about this picture than to direct to it the attention of our readers. In the second room a good specimen of Mr. Val Prinsep's Indian work hangs near some of Cowper's cattle, neither worse nor better than usual. Heywood Hardy sends a large picture called "Roused," which is unfortunate in giving us only bits of animals,—one half of a boar, and two halves of dogs pursuing him. Good as a study, but a bad picture,—or, rather, not a picture at all. The nurse and child of Mr. Barnes,-entitled " Her first Visit," is noticeable for the graceful shyness of the child's attitude; it is carefully and dully painted. Mrs. Merritt's " Eve " is a nude figure of a woman sitting on the ground with her legs crossed, her head bent down upon her knees, and her arms clasped round her ankles. Why such a position should he chosen, and why it is significant of Eve, the Academicians who hung it, and Mrs. Merritt herself, probably know ; it seems to us simply a rather poor life-study in a very unfortunate position. A doubled-up body with no face, and with even its extremities half hidden, is a bad subject for a picture. Give a look to this flimsy, but pretty, girl of Miss Alice Havers, who is " Divided" from her aristocratic fisherman by a very little stream ; and look, too, at one of the last purchases for the Chantry Bequest, the " Stream," by Mr. Hook. Satire is wasted upon those whose skin is protected by the "triple brass" of Academies, or we should be tempted to give a hint of the way in which this bequest was administered for the benefit of—not the public, or Art, but the Academicians themselves. All are having a slice of it in their turn ; let us hope that when the cake has been served round, there may be a slice or two left for further division.
Of the third Gallery, what shall we say more than we have said already ? The portraits by Holl, Leighton, and Millais have been noticed, the Homeric Tadema and the French Orchardson likewise, the " Andromeda " of Mr. Calderon, fat, happy, and fresh-coloured, must be passed in silence, lest we rouse the ire of the British matron. The large river-scene of Vicate Cole's is soft, mellow, and sweet as ever. There is a fine rock and seascape by Mr. Peter Graham ; a little " cheap," perhaps, in its rendering of the cliffs, but strong and fresh ; but his best picture is "Evening," in the first room, a sunny landscape with a grand crimson sky of the cirrus order.
Mr. Pettie's " Challenged " shows him at his best,—a best which he has not given us of late. It represents a young man just risen from bed after a debauch trying to recollect the details of a quarrel over-night—the challenge for which he holds in his hand. Near it, through the open door, we see the figure of his antagonist's second. The work is dramatic and powerful, though complacent. It is a picture which could hardly be lived with comfortably, for neither its sentiment nor its colour are such as make pleasant companions ; but its strength is unquestionable, and it is worthy of notice with what extreme ability Mr. Pettie has portrayed the figure of the departing second. We feel be has just turned upon his heel, and put his hat on with a slap of the hand.
We shall finish our notices of this exhibition in our next article.
Previous page
