ART.
THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF PAINTERS IN THERE is no doubt a charm about the Old Water-Colour Society's Gallery which, seek the (London exhibition) world round, is not met with elsewhere. A quiet atmosphere of bygone times and unhurried life, a discreetness of aim and a technical completion in the work shown, combine to do away with the
effect of the turnstiles and the shilling, and the roar of busy West-End London which breaks upon the ear every now and again, while our eyes are, with our hearts, far away in Surrey lanes or on Kentish chalk-hills, or where the curling emerald breakers are beating down the golden sands of the " Land of Strangers."
Year after year there is, broadly speaking, little change. A
new-comer or two may for a brief space resist the sobering in- fluence of his fellow-members ; but he, too, is quickly absorbed, or is so lost amidst the rest as to make scarcely a per- ceptible difference in the character of the exhibition. It is the tradition of the past, not the hopes of the future, which we find embodied here. Nineteen out of twenty of the members are, in Art at least, Tories of the good old school, and new things are to them altogether abominable, if only from their novelty.
Well, the mere existence of such a fixed point in the ever- shifting systems of modern art is a good thing ; the history of the Gallery, moreover, is a history of the development of that school of English landscape-painting which is the nation's greatest artistic glory. He would be a Goth indeed who should invade this Art Senate, where the long grey-beard fathers sit resting on their ivory staves unmindful of the revolution that is at their doors.
By all of which we would be understood to mean that the present exhibition is very much the same as the last, and that many folks will be glad to find it so. Is it, after all, a misfortune that Mr. George Fripp's irregularly timbered barns, with their grey, thatched roofs, and their surroundings of fence and field, meet us as old friends,—meet us pleasantly and
quietly " Are you here again ?" we feel inclined to say to Sir John Gilbert's dark landscapes, as we peer into the recesses of their woods for the knight in armour or the white- robed damsel who is generally to be found riding or loitering there. Even Mr. Paul Natters pretty transformation-scene conceptions of Nature are for the moment pleasant, and we note that one of the new members of the Society (Miss Constance Naftell bears the same name, and wonder whether this may not be a daughter ; and if so, whether she will follow in her father's footsteps, or depart to worship strange gods with the Impressionists or the Realists. Here is Mr. William Callow, as of old, with fifteen or twenty contributions, fall of dexterity and ingenuity, and from their own point of view, most delicate and skilful in their manipulation. "'Tie a vile phrase" (or phase) of Art (in oar opinion), it is true ; but then, how well the man does it, and what a relief it is in some ways from the dreary grey nothingness of the new Anglo-Gallic school ! Surely, Mr. Callow, too, shall this day receive the honour due to very patient and workmanlike labour. Nay, is it too much to ask those who, like ourselves, have known the Gallery for many years, to remember old days, and get a little pleasure from the sea-coast and village scenes of Mr. S. P. Jackson, who must be, we should think, one of the oldest members of the Society, and whose pictures belong almost entirely to a forgotten style of landscape-painting ? Quite true ; they are conventional ; there is no denying it. Nature does not look like that, and never did ; so much one can nowadays say clearly. But, remember, this painter's day was in another generation; his work deserves recognition from the point of view of his time, and, more- over, there are virtues in it which we frequently miss just now. There is a broad, simple aspect in these pictures, partly due to the intellectual motive and partly to the artistic capacity of the man who painted them, which is refreshing even in its imperfection,—can we not fancy one surfeited with analytical fiction, enjoying greatly for a moment even an inferior edition of " Cinderella " or " Jack the Giant-Killer "? " Bat Jack dodged the blow, and raising his sharp sword, cut off the giant's head." Mr. Jackson's is a child's book of Nature, one- syllabled and imperfect, but plain and healthy; full of no nasty undermeanings, and evading all perplexing topics, but, as far as its purpose extends, going straight to the point.
Here, too, are Carl Haag's passionlessly perfect Eastern
sketches, in which the solidity of stone, and rock, and steel, and crumbling, sunburnt earth, the depth of bine skies, the glow of strange, richly coloured draperies, are all expressed with a dexterity of craftsmanship which has in its way never been rivalled. The " Meissonier " of water-colour is Mr. Haag, and in this collection he is seen at his best—seen, that is, in sketches, which display his power and conceal his weak- ness. Nor must we forget this year the small collection of pictures at the end of the room by the late Mr. Collingwood Smith, one of the Richardson and Rowbotham school of landscapists, and following a method in art which it is not unfair to call the " chromo-lithographic," but nevertheless a genuine artist, with a keen eye for picturesqueness of subject, and, as were nearly all the men of his generation (in this Society), a workman of extreme delicacy. The present day knows nothing (and, we suspect, cares at heart as little) concerning the technical feats of skill which the old method of water-colour painting necessitated,—feats which, from the manual point of view, are far beyond any required in the medium of oil-colours. And in such respects, men like Mr. Richardson and the late Mr. Smith were pre-eminently skilful. You might not like their work— personally, the present writer greatly dislikes it—but it was impossible, without utter ignorance of the medium, to deny the unutterable care and dexterity by which it had been wrought out. And speaking of the younger members, at least we have here much good work of an interesting kind, though, as we have hinted, the effect produced by the older men and by their old ac- quaintanceship is apt to make most old folk look little at the newer pictures. Here is Mr. Herbert Marshall, for instance, with one very large and several smaller pictures of Fowey, Cornwall, well drawn and composed, and pleasantly coloured. If we had not determined to find only pleasant things in the Gallery on this occasion, we might perhaps, if Mr. Marshall will allow us that expressive phrase, "pick a bone" with him on the subject of the colour. As it is, we will only suggest that he should not remember Westminster too clearly when he is painting in the West Country. Mr. Albert Goodwin sends contrasts such as perhaps no other artist in this Gallery is capable of producing, and they range from the sunny freshness of an Alpine morning, to the lurid, supernatural darkness which overhung Gomorrah before its destruction. This year his work has many of its best qualities, and though it does not extend, fully maintains this artist's claim to the position of an imaginative landscapist. Tech- nically, we are glad to notice that Mr. Goodwin is to some extent giving up the Aver-abundant use of carmine in the outlines and shadows of his foreground, which has of late years disfigured his work. Mr. Brewtnall, too, has two or three small landscapes, in which there is a distinct trace of imagination, though with this latter artist the imagination is of a less intellectual and poetical character than in the case of Mr. Goodwin,—perhaps we might say truly that Mr. Brewtnall's is a more purely artistic imagination. There are many other artists whose works we should, if possible, like to notice, bat whose pictures we must reserve for a future date, though one word of hearty admiration must be given to the little seascape of Mr. Francis Powell, which is a sort of Henry Moore in miniature, brilliant and fresh as Nature herself, and excellently drawn.
Previous page
