ART.

WATER-COLOURS AND PASTELS.

THERE is a good deal of water-colour on view at this moment in London. There is the Exhibition of Sketches and Studies at the Old Water-Colour Society; one of the members of that Society, Mr. Alfred Goodwin, has a private exhibition at the Fine Art Society's rooms ; and Mr. Francis E. James, of the New English Art Club, has another at the Dudley Gallery. These collections suggest some reflections on the art. Perhaps no one is so sanguine as to go to an exhibition of " sketches and studies " at the Old Water-Colour Society in the expecta- tion of finding either, It is too fantastic a vision, to think of swift impressions by Mr. Birket Foster, broad notes of effect by Mrs. Allingham, studies from the life by Sir John Gilbert. No ! they can do "no such gay thing," as Emerson said to Carlyle when Carlyle urged him to write a " Book." Forth once more go Sir John's familiar banners and hobby-horses ; the similitude of a Bush, R.W.S., and of a Cottage, R.W.S., are as finished in winter as in summer; the walls have the air of fatigue that "faithful" treatment induces, whether in man or Whatman. This is the result of what in some is pure love of niggling for its own sake, in others is reverence for Nature untempered by respect for a material.

Consideration for the medium used is the last thing likely to appeal to the outsider, to whom a picture is simply an imitation, or rather an illustrated catalogue, of Nature, and to whom, therefore, the picture is the more satisfactory the greater the number of facts conveyed, at whatever cost to the manner of conveyance. A sketch, to such a view, is a sin against knowledge; a picture is a contrivance for exhibiting a maximum of facts, as if there were no such thing as pleasure in the world, as if ships must always exist to stow cargo and carry ballast. But if this is the view natural to the outsider, to the artist the obligation to Nature and fact is an accidental one. Reproduction of Nature is not his object ; and if he does borrow a thing or two, he is no way bound to take over all the effects of the establishment. Where he does feel a con- stant obligation is to his means, because they are also his end. If it is part of his game to refer us to a beauty in Nature, it is another part to delight us with the nature of a material.

What is the special quality of water-colour by which the artist must steer himself when looking about for effects in Nature to be water-coloured, and by which he will limit the draft he makes on facts P The quality is simple enough. It is wateriness. Quite independently of attempt or success in representing, a beautiful effect of material is produced by spilling a little colour on moist paper ; and it is the busi- ness of the artist to retain that charm, whatever fact in Nature he uses it to express, and whatever fact in Nature he has to forego because it cannot be so expressed. This is the opportunity, this is the limit of the art. What it can best give, it will give only between the laying and drying of a wash. Much may be done within these bounds to express fact by the dexterous play of colours and gradations of wetness, but by no means everything. Unlike the case of oil-painting, where to add a fresh layer of paint is on the whole to improve the look of it, and where, accordingly, one range of fact may be superposed on another, the water-colourist has to make up his mind to it, that every touch superposed on a first wash reduces the life of the colour, tires the paint. To retouch no wash is a counsel of perfection, no doubt ; still, it is the rule that the water-colourist is allowed one helping from the dish of Nature where the oil-painter may have more ; and he is therefore wise if he chooses a dish that one helping will go far to empty, or if he must take up with more complex effcts, he will do well to be frankly abstract in his rendering. Better to shorten his story than to speak with a sore throat.

What, then, are the effects in Nature that lend themselves to this medium:1nd that no other will render so well P Surely flat surfact viita a play of colour on them, like the walls and roofs of i.bouses '-paces of water with reflections ; spaces of sky that show a vaporous fusion of cloud and light, or clear gradation of colour, but not too much of defined and broken modelling; and, generally, things seen in masses and blots of tone. But it will be a mistake to worry out the broken detail of foliage, to attempt fully to realise texture, or to follow the intricacies of scattered markings and patterns.

Why is it, then, that the tradition of the Old Water-Colour Society is so clean against the proper use of the art P The twist, doubtless, is due to Turner. Turner used water-colour chiefly as a stage in the process of engraving,—of steel- engraving. Now, the steel-plate does not suffer from elabora- tion ; it rather benefits by minuteness of work. Hence a certain justification for Turner's stippled water-colour. The origin, again, of Mr. Birket Foster's style is, in a way, the same. He turned from drawing for engraving to painting,

and continues to stipple as for engraving, and to tint the drawing. Colour to him seems to be merely a convenient and pretty means of discrimination. Here accordingly comes in. a distinction between one kind of stippling and another. Turner had one eye on the engraving, but he had another on Nature in this matter of colour. If he loses the first freshness of his material, he gets some compensation in the research after subtleties of natural effect; and the one or two members of the Old Water-Colour Society who use stippling to the same purpose get something of the same compensation. To bring the matter to a point, it would probably be impossible by direct painting to get some of the delicacies of natural fact rendered in Mr. Alfred Hunt's Reefs at Low Tide,— for instance, the bit of near cliff, with the muffled light and misty shadow on it. The quarrel, then, joins on this point,—whether this " finish," this elaboration of effect, makes up for the loss in general freshness. To put it shortly, can you " finish," and so get to the end of the fact. without having to lose its beginning ; and which, the start or the finish, is the more valuable P We suggest the possibility of one preference or the other ; but we may add that there is yet another battery that might be opened on the school of finish. So far we have urged the merits of directness as a sympathy with the medium. But it may also be defended as, after all, a most important expression of natural truth. A fine effect of Nature strikes us, not as something laboured and overwrought, but as effortless and fresh. To this, a fact of the first order in Nature, corresponds the look of directness in Art, and to elaborate for the sake of lesser facts is to lose the expression of a larger one.

Mr. F. E. James outside the Society (like Mr. Arthur Melville within) does make the attempt to use water-colour as its nature seems to suggest. He succeeds best with his flowers. His drawing of these with the brush, his rendering of fragile and shadowy petals, is often very fine, and always direct and simple. His landscapes and his skies must be praised with more reserve. In these he often tries to render too much with means too simple. To combine truth of colour with full tone in this kind of water-colour is impossible, and the attempt to do it often leads to mere muddiness. Nor does Mr. James's sense for colour appear to be a very fine one. He has something of the crudity, and at the same time brightness, that Mr. R. W. Allan, of the Old Water-Colour Society, another direct worker, shows. Mr. Melville, on the other hand, is a colourist, as the little abstract of a Spanish street, Ronda Fair (No. 211), and Castle Allardyce (No. 42), prove.

Mr. Alfred Goodwin is a difficult case. There is Turner in it, there is Ruskin in it, he tells us there is Madox Brown, and wilful wanderings, and Japanese art, and the habit of hardly ever painting till afterwards, and there is the fine original fantastic spirit of Mr. Goodwin. He is capable of the awful sunset at the Royal Water-Colour Society, but that is not characteristic; his sketches usually arrest one with the feeling that an artist has been there, has found a picture, and has lost it again : they waver between something beautiful and a. horrible suspicion of a chromograph.

THE DOWDESWELL AND GOITPIL GALLERIES.

AT Messrs. Dowdeswell's there are two collections on view.. One is a rather heavy exhibition of " pictures by artists. residing in or painting at Newlyn, St. Ives, Falmouth, &c., in. Cornwall,—a collection illustrating the Artistic Movement which is associated with that part of England." The other is a welcome foil, a roomful of pastels by Mr. James Guthrie,. not illustrating any particular movement or residence. They are the anonymous notes of a colourist, and happened to have been made at Helensburgh on the Clyde.

The Cornish collection is not so strong as it might have been. The best men are not represented by their best, and what comes out very clearly is that the " school" consists of one or two men of talent and technical accomplishment, and a sad tail of followers who doubtless live in " that part of England," but paint as if in Ancient Britain. There is many a canvas here that Mr. Redgrave, Mr. Frith, or Mr. Horsley might be proud to sign. Among the painters who need be considered, however, there are two distinct groups. There are the painters of incident inside or outside of cottages, of whom the chief are Messrs. Stanhope Forbes, H. S. Take, Chevallier Tayler, and F. Bramley, and the painters of waves and coasts, like Mr. Adrian Stokes. There is more pleasure of colour and atmosphere in the work of the second group than in that of

the first. Mr. Stokes's own two sketches, and Mr. Simmons's After the Storm, looking East (14), are bright and fresh ; there is delicate silver-green in Mr. Hemy's In the Wake of the Pilot, off St. Ives (56); and Mr. Olsson has two glowing sunsets. Mr. T. M. Dow's On the Sands at Lelant (49) infringes the patent of Mr. William Stott for extremely simplified sand and sea. and air.

Mr. Stanhope Forbes sends a landscape with figures, dated 1882 (The Convent, No. 100), which shows his painting in a key much nearer to Bastien Lepage than what he gives us now His later and blacker style is illustrated by The Bridge (98) and the Girl's Head (105). Both show his very great technical skill as a draughtsman with the brash ; and in the former, with its lounging, quiescent figures, the difficulties of drama ren- dered by careful portrait-painting hardly come in. They do come in when one turns to a picture like Mr. Take's The _Message (11). Just as, in the case of his well-known Chantrey picture, All Hands to the Pump,—the figures were evidently posed about a pump, but not pumping,—so the telegraph-boy in this scene affects one as standing for his por- trait along with two other studies, which are not so good. The technical mannerisms associated with Newlyn come out most obviously in Mr. Bramley's Domino (39),—pride in the square- brush touch with a final flick, and in painting across instead of along. Both were useful correctives to curliness of drawing, but to make them so obtrusive is like overdrugging a patient, and so giving him a new disease.

To pass to Mr. Guthrie's pastels is to cease to be haunted with the previous question as to whether the picture had any call to be painted, and whether the author's motive was really pictorial. Here is an artist who, from the casual groupings on a steamer's deck, from the dust-cloud on a road, from the lights across the river and the sands at night, from a railway line or embankment, can skim away the colour and the pleasure with a light, quick hand. And bow admirably he -treats his medium ! leaving the paper often to do half the work.

Mr. George Hitchcock, whose pastels we had the pleasure of praising last summer, exhibits a collection of pictures and sketches at Messrs. Goupil's. Among them is the tulip-field which made the artist's fame at the Salon, and of which a variant was seen in the last Academy. By a freak of fancy, Mr. Hitchcock has approached sacred subjects by way of his Dutch gardens, the Annunciation suggesting an accessory figure to his lilies. We prefer the peasant mother and child without a halo to stamp them as Madonna and child, and we think Mr. Hitchcock is more successful with his figure coming over the sand-dunes, where the halo is a real sieve, than in the Manger (8). The study for the dunes (17) is one of the finest things here ; and there are other landscapes, grey-green fields and trees and purple irises, and bouquets of red-roofed fishing-towns, that deserve looking at.

In the same galleries, there is a series of drawings by M. Boutet de Monvel, to illustrate Fabre's novel, " Xaviere." They are carefully made out with the point—the artist's turn being for severe outline—and tinted in water-colour. The colour is no colour, except perhaps in the Parapluie Rouge, and the drawings do not seem even to reproduce well in photogravure. But there is well-defined character in the figures of the priest and the little girl, and the others, and also some power of design.