ART.
MR. J. D. LINTON'S PAINTING.*
Tins exhibition of Mr. Linton's works will be in some respects a surprise to his admirers, not so much from its quality as front the fact that there should be an exhibition at all. This painter is one of those artists who, if he has not been entirely regard- less of public favour, has certainly never been unduly influenced by it, and has done nothing to make his art notorious, except attempting to make it good. He established his reputation in the first place as a painter in water-colours ; and his work in that medium has even now a completeness and delicacy which is scarcely to be found in his oil-paintings. But the main fact to bear in mind before criticising the quality of his
Fine Art Society, New Bond Street.
pictures in detail, is that from first to last he has gone on his own path soberly, consistently, and gravely, aiming at a technical perfection which few English artists have the courage to set before them. Mr. Linton's great praise is that at a period when Art in England has become almost a matter of commerce, when the best of our p?.inters have fallen most com- pletely uncle:- Lire influence of this commercial spirit, he has had the strength to rise superior to the temptation to spoil his art in order to fill his pockets. Be this work of Mr. Linton's good, bad, or indifferent, it is at least the best which he could do. There is a transparent honesty of intention about it ; it demands serious consideration if only because of its freedom from trick, and its deliberate and long-sustained endeavour. Possibly, we say to ourselves, as we look round the gallery, this is the work of a man whose current of life runs slowly. These knights in armour, and priests in vestments, and princes in Robes of Honour, and long-limbed damsels in miniver and brocade, are but half-alive ; their creation has been arrested almost at the sea-anemone point. As Tennyson says, in "The Deserted House " :—
Life and thought have gone away, side by side,
Leaving door and windows wide."
There is, in truth, a lack of individuality in most of these figures, almost like that which we fiud after death in the face of one whom we have known and loved. And it is, perhaps, this lack of personality which even more than the absence of all cheap modern sentiment has made most people pass by Mr. Linton's work with comparatively little attention. The artist has fallen into a strange error—an error so strange, that merely to state it appears to us to be sufficient to ensure its recognition. He has fancied that great painting in the past owed everything to its form and nothing to its spirit. He has thought that be- cause the works of these Old Masters were so technically perfect, the whole secret of Art lay in technical perfection. He might as well have fancied that scholarship was all that was necessary to write a poem. Art is like a creed ; it lives, despite every absurd and incongruous element, while its followers believe in it ; it dies, despite every improvement, when that belief fades away. A picture is not a pudding in which so many ingredients, mixed with so much care, if spread on a canvas, or tied up in a bag, produce the required result ; it is much more like the seed which you put in the ground, having carefully prepared the place for its reception, and dig about it and water it, and then, as Ruskin once said, God sends the rain and the sunshine ; and in good time, if you are lucky, you get your picture or your artist.
People now-a-days will not stop to look at pictures or think about painters ; they will only pause to buy the first and praise the second. But for any one who has a brain or a heart, and takes any interest in how the work of the world is being done, this little exhibition of Mr. Linton's is full of suggestive material. The work has not, as we have said, that quality of imaginative life which genius alone can give,—so much may be conceded at once. It must take its place, therefore, in a rank below the highest. But it has some qualities which are excessively rare in modern Art ; and of these its quietude and its dignity are the chief. Across Mr. Linton's canvasses his characters move almost like those in Lord Clarendon's history,—as if to stately music. Each composition presents rather the general char- acter of a given life than any special episode. In other words, Mr. Linton is successful in creating what literary folk call an "atmo- sphere," rather than in arousing our attention from the dramatic point of view. His Hamlet, so to speak, has always the "Prince of Denmark" left out ; the protagonist in his drama, never, in theatrical parlance, "takes the stage ;" his individuality is merged in that of his surroundings. Take, as an example of this fact, the series of large oil paintings representing the life of a soldier in the sixteenth century, which have been executed by Mr. Linton for Mr. C. F. Jacobi. Our remark is so specially applicable to these pictures that, on looking at the whole series, one is puzzled to determine whether the soldier whose life is depicted, is one special individual, or several. Nor are there in the whole series any characters who impress us with their individuality with sufficient clearness to be easily re- membered. The same faces of models, and several well.known friends of the artist, occur over and over again, but they appear to be in some measure distinct from the richly-clothed or armoured figures beneath them ; they are like weapons of which the handle and the blade have been unskilfully connected. This, or a similar defect, lies at the root of Mr. Linton's shortcomings. Though possessed of great artistic feeling, he is very deficient in all artistic heat ; the conception is cold, calculated, almost methodical.
The level of execution is uniformly maintained throughout ; the very light seems to fall impartially, with few accidents of brightness or shadow. Were it not for the enormous amount of patience, knowledge, and technical skill which is shown in these works, one would be tempted to class them with the better kind of costume-picture, for it is the costume, the armour, and the accessories generally, on which the artist has spent the greatest pains, and in depicting which he has been most successful.
One of the most interesting points for consideration with respect to this series—especially interesting, if it be taken in relation with the water-colour pictures in the same gallery—is the question of colour. The Press, with that strange unanimity which it only displays when its verdict is entirely erroneous, has been dilating on the gorgeousness, and glow, and splendour,. and magnificence, and lustre, &c., of the colouring of these pictures. The truth is that the series, as far as colour is hi the question, is greatly injured by a prevailing impression of black- ness, especially noticeable in the painting of the shadows. To say that these works resemble Titian and Veronese, is to attribute to them the very quality above all others in which they are deficient. For it is an undoubted, though a very strange fact, that Mr. Linton—who in many of his water-colour works, especially those of his earlier period, was a fine and, even in the strict sense of the word, a splendid colourist—has lost all his magnificence upon becoming an oil - painter. How anybody can look at this series, and compare the work to that of the Venetian School, is more than we should be able to conceive, were it not that we have discovered by experience how rashly writers upon Art use their terms of praise. One would think it were easy enough to see, that in so far as Mr. Linton's work in these pic- tures is influenced by that of earlier painters, it owes its char- acter to Velasquez, rather than to Giorgione. We have here the strange fact, worthy of the careful notice of every visitor to this Gallery, that all the early works of the artist here dis- played exhibit a very special and beautiful faculty of colour,, and that all the late works (which have been executed in another medium) show the absence of this faculty. And in the whole of this last series there is not, in our opinion, one single piece of really fine colour ; and, speaking roughly, we might say that with one marked exception, there is not in the whole series of the water-colours, one single piece of bad colour.
To return to the consideration of these pictures taken as a whole. The praise which is specially their own, and upon the recog- nition of which the painter's claim to success must rest, is that they are realisations, neither conventional, theatrie, nor care- less, of a form of life which has passed away. They bear to great pictures a similar relation to that which a good tableau-vivant bears to a great play,—all the actors and actresses are there, but we know beforehand that they will not be allowed to act. Is it wrong, we wonder, to wish for the clockmaker to come and wind-up the figures a little ? One remark only we shall make about one of the scenes in which the action of one picture of this series takes place. Mr. Linton has chosen to paint a portion of the interior of St. Mark's, in which the "Apostle Screen" is introduced, very slightly. Of course, he was at per- fect liberty to take any background he liked ; but we think, if he did take this interior—which is probably the most beautiful thing of its kind in the world—he might have treated it a little more kindly. Speaking from a full acquaintance with the place in question, we are bound to say that the artist has utterly failed to render any of the beauty of rich, variegated colour, which forms the chief attraction of the place in question. In this instance, he has become subject to the worst artistic con- demnation, inasmuch as he has taken a lovely thing, and made it commonplace. If the old Cathedral could speak, it would probably say, with Hamlet :—
"To what base uses we may return, Horatio."
We should have liked to criticise each of these five pictures in detail; but we have nearly exhausted our space, and can only make one or two further remarks. The best of the series, on the whole, is, as would naturally be the case, the first painted, that entitled " Victorious ;" the worst, more certainly still, is the last, entitled "The Surrender." This , latter picture is, indeed, not only poor in itself, but wrong in relation to the others of the series ; a large portion of the centre of the composition being so light in tone as to destroy the general effect when the works are
hung close together. This is one of those errors which is almost inevitable in a series of pictures, the execution of which extends over a period of several years, and the portions of which were exhibited separately. We may possibly return to the considera- tion of the water-colours in this gallery at a future period. For the present, we can only say, in conclusion, of Mr. Liuton's painting, that he is one of those artists who not only deserve recognition from the public, but honour from all those who are interested in the progress of English painting. That it is possible for such a painter in middle life, having done such work as that of which we have written, to be still outside the walls of the Academy, is one of those strange anomalies which only the governing bodies of Burlington House could explain, and they on this, as on so many other matters, are, like the ancient oracles," silent."
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