ART.
THE NEW ENGLISH ART CLUB.
THE exhibition opened last week in the rooms of the old Dudley Gallery in the Egyptian Hall, is a collection of pictures by as body of artists who style themselves the "New English Art Club." The name is perhaps an unfortunate one, for if there- be one peculiarity more marked than any other with reference- to the pictures in this collection, it is that the motives of nine- tenths of them are rather French than English. Both techni- cally and intellectually they are of Gallic origin ; and if there be- such a thing as an English school of Art, it is quite certain that these compositions do not belong to it. It is not, we suppose, a gentle sarcasm on the part of the young artists who have formed this Club, to give it this leading title ; they do not wish na to imagine that new England is to be equivalent to France. But they do mean to point out that they have taken a direction. which will be followed by English artists in the future,—that: the old beliefs are dead or dying, and new forms springing up in their place.
And this is to a certain extent true ; but only to a certain• extent. The old conventionalities which marked the British school of painting are no doubt vanishing away. They never had any real hold upon life, and the first serious challenge of their supremacy has disclosed the futility of the theories on which they were based. In so far, therefore, as the members of the "New English Art Club" are dealing the deathblow to many antiquated and trivial ways of regarding Nature, and reproducing it in pictures, we wish them all success. But if they imagine that they are going to revolutionise all the canons- of Art which have hitherto been accepted—to substitute ugliness for beauty, eccentricity for interest, harmony for colour, effect for drawing, and accident for composition—they are considerably mistaken in their supposition. These things are not to be done- by any body of young men, however energetic and talented,—nor,. for the matter of that, by any body of old men. The qualities which have constituted the groundwork of loveliness in every work of art which has ever existed are not doubtful, and are- unchangeable. They are founded upon the verities of Nature,. feeling, and thought, upon the intellectual, physical, and spiritual experiences which underlie the whole life of man. People do. not go to picture•galleries, or buy pictures, simply to admire the dexterity of the artist ; they go, or they boy, to gain the sight- of a beautiful or interesting thing ; to be taken away for a while, from the world of ugly facts and sordid emotions into a world in which even the commonplace is made beautiful, and touched• with hints of poetry and meaning. It is this fact which young painters of the present day are so apt to forget ; to exhibit their own dexterity is their one great aim, and they do not see that; the result obtained is pleasing to no one but themselves.
There-is apicture in this gallery by Mr. Steer, entitled" On the Pier-Head," of a young lady in a short pink frock and steeple- crowned hat, sitting in front of an almost white sea, which, if it. be executed in all seriousness, is one of the most extraordinary examples of artistic perversity which, it is possible to conceive,.
• F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley.
'Oar readers will naturally ask in what is this composition so -extremely peculiar ; and it is excessively difficult to explain the character of Mr. Steer's picture in precise terms. Suppose an ordinary representation of this subject had been painted, and that then the artist had taken a small-tooth comb and scratched -over the whole surface of his canvas from left to right, and had subsequently robbed the paint smooth with the palm of his -hand ; in this way we imagine—and we are speaking in all seriousness—such an effect as Mr. Steer's, or some similar effect, might have been produced. There is neither outline, nor detail, :nor definite form, nor meaning of any kind whatever to be found aerein : of this picture we might say most truly :- "Life and thought have gone away,
Bide by side,"
and taken with them hand-in-hand both Art and common-sense. Underneath this strawberry-ice young lady, there is another work by Mr. Steer, which ie perhaps even more extraordinary, —some children sitting on the grass under bushes, in what, we suppose, is intended for sunlight. The whole of the canvas is covered diagonally with long lines and spots of the brightest possible colours ; all the children seem to be sitting in a drifting rain of sweetmeats or liquefied rainbows,—the whole effect being one garish, shapeless muddle. Mr. Steer is, however, certainly the most ultra member of the Club, the great pillar of which is Mr. J. S. Sargent, the portrait-painter. This artist has at the end of the gallery a picture of a young lady in a white ball-dress, sitting on a red sofa against a dark background of room. The picture is, we think, forced in its light and shade, by which we mean that the woman could not be so intensely lighted as she appears 'to us, without more light being distributed in the other parts of the room in which she is sitting. But after all, this is perhaps a permissible license for a painter to take, especially when he has succeeded in gaining thereby such a brilliant effect as Mr. Sargent has obtained in this picture. "Tremendously strong !" -is the expression which nine artists out of ten would use in speaking of this work ; and it would be just. The picture is .painted in a masterly way ; the pose ie at once easy and dignified; -and whether it be a good likeness or no, which we are unable to say, there is plenty of individuality and life in the face of the sitter. Judging it from the highest standard, the picture has two great fanits,—it is superficial and coarse : it bears the imprint of a man who is satisfied with his own ability, more than he is occupied in penetrating to the utmost, the possibilities of beauty in the scene before him. The work is cold, as if it had been executed by a machine, and has no hint of tenderness, no .suspicion of poetry. One would recognise the sitter anywhere, but one would know nothing about her,—there it is, in a nutshell. Perhaps the most interesting picture in the gallery from a popular point of view, is Mr. Kennington's "Battle of Life," a garret interior, with a depressed wife leaning her head upon her bare arm, a slatternly child nursing a sickly baby, and the father of the family, presumably just returned from an un- • successful search for work, seated in a chair, with his arms hanging down by his side, and an expression of weary resig- midi= on his face. This picture is carefully painted in a rather ,sad-coloured key well thought out, tells its story plainly, and on -the whole without affectation. Mr. Kennington is, we think, a _young man who should do good work bysnd-by ; but he must be on his guard against allowing his literary sympathies to ran sway with him. The picture is perhaps rather more of an illus- tration for the Graphic—careful and good though it be—than a completed painting. Everything in it seems to run to grey, and it is difficult to avoid looking at the work as a narrative, rather than enjoying it as a beautiful combination of colour and form. No doubt it is most difficult to combine all of this ; but nobody who knew anything about it ever yet thought that Art was easy. Between Mr. Steer and those who, like him, will not have any definite subject or shape in their pictures, and Mr. Kennington, who is apt to forget that there are things besides subject and shape, there is a medium in which we recognise that all the great pictures of the world may be classed. How- ever, when all deductions are made, the " Battle of Life" is a good work for a young man to have done, and one of the best -compositions in the gallery.
There is one picture here of which we feel inclined to speak in terms of severe depreciation, if only because of its wantonness in taking a beautiful subject, and making it at once odious and ugly. And this is M. Theodore Roussel)] life-size work of an entirely nude model sitting reading the newspaper in a small folding-chair. Our imagination fails to conceive any adequate
reason for a picture of this sort. It is realism of the worst kind, the artist's eye seeing only the vulgar outside of his model, and reproducing that callously and brutally. No human being, we should imagine, could take any pleasure in such a picture as this ; it is a degradation of Art. Let us look at pleasanter things. Mr. Herbert Dalziel's sheep in a green meadow, against misty blue trees, behind which the harvest•moon is rising, is beautiful and simple, and has a considerable touch of poetical feeling. Mrs. Adrian Stokes's little girl polishing her copper pane is a good example of a simple subject, pleasantly and thoroughly carried out. But perhaps the most clever thing in the gallery is Mr. Arthur Hacker's peasant-boy, who is standing in a green landscape, with his milking-pail under his arm, whistling merrily. This little picture ie not only ex- cessively good in its atmospheric effect, and natural and vigorous in-the pose of the figure, but it has a certain quality of humour and truth to life. The boy seems to be caught in the act, so to speak, not deliberately posed as a model. Close to this there is a fine study of sky by Mr. W. L. Wyllie, a great cumulus cloud risinghigh in the heavens above a golden corn-field. There are two small examples of Mr. Stanhope-Forbes's and Mr. A. Parsons's works, but neither call for detailed notice. Mr. Gotch shows a carefully painted composition, apparently done at Newlyn, in Cornwall, possibly inspired by the work of Mr. Langley ; this is a fisher-boy saying " good.bye " to his sweetheart in the shadow of a porch. Some " Fleurs de Marie," by Mr. Francis Bate, are brightly and delicately worked ; and Mr. Shannon's portrait of Mrs. Lockwood shows what Mr. Sargent's method becomes when handled by one who has not yet attained to the originator's skill.
Two of the most interesting works of what may be called the Impressionist school here are those of M. Jacques E. Blanche,—. one, the portrait of Prince Poniatowski ; the other, a balcony at the Dieppe Casino, in which latter work there is a curious combination of twilight and the flickering of Chinese lanterns, rendered with skill and originality. This composition, indeed, is most subtle in its gradations of blue ; and though its colour is, we think, just a trifle exaggerated, it is no more so than might be expected in a work which is evidently intended as a protest against the conventional treatment of the scene depicted.
On the whole, the exhibition is, notwithstanding all its faults, a most interesting one, because it shows what the young men are thinking of, and trying to do ; it shows alike their errors and their successes, and, with a few exceptions, of which we have noticed the most objectionable, the contributions to the gallery are really deserving of attention and consideration.
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