ART.
THE GUILDHALL EXHIBITION AND THE NEW ENGLISH ART CLUB.
THE concurrence of these two exhibitions,—the retrospective collection of English paintings at the Guildhall, and the efforts of the younger men at the Dudley Gallery,—illustrates anew the broken tradition of fine painting in this country that proves so hard to take up again. The Guildhall collection is fairly well composed,f and arranged so as to give materials for a judgment on the past, and at the New English Art Club, better perhaps than at any other gallery, is it possible to guess what are the chances for the immediate future. You enter, at the former exhibition, a large gallery filled with the popular favourites of the last twenty or thirty years, Messrs. Watts, Leighton, Millais, Orchardson, Tadema, Poynter, Goodall, Armitage, Marcus Stone, Dicksee, Leader, and so on. From this a few steps lead to two other rooms. In one of these is a collection that is chiefly Preraphaelite ; in the other, side by side with Old Masters like Rembrandt, Terburg, and Vandyck, are hung the canonised English painters of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Reynolds, G-ainsborough, ROmney, Rasburn, Turner, Con- stable, with the beginning of the decadence in Wilkie, Etty, Landseer, and so forth. The collection is evidently a most popular one in the City ; it is almost as crowded with visitors as an Academy, and that a good deal no doubt in virtue of the modern work ; but for the more observant of the visitors, and for art-students, the Corporation is doing a. valuable service by yearly enforcing the lesson written large- on any collection that brings together the old and new of the English school. The lesson is that the old men knew how to paint, and that this cannot be said unreservedly of any one of the recent men, with the exception of Mr. Whistler, whose Mies Alexander is bung in the present show. Mr. Whistler is the man of genius who has broken through the debased ideals of his time. Dignity of conception and a beautiful née of the material have come natural to him, as if he had been born contemporary of Gainsborough. But, short of genius, what a difference between the painting of the men of talent in Reynolds's time and our own ! Raeburn, for instance, would • " Tennyson's exertions have been on a higher plane of human action than my own. He has worked in a higher field, and his work will be more durable" —Speech Ig Mr. Gladstone at Kirkwall, September 12th, 1883.
1. Reynolds, Turner, and Constable are poorly represented.
not seem to have been a painter of first-hand impulse and conviction. But the large ideas and the beautiful methods of his time upheld and directed him; and he reaches, in his portrait of a lady at the Guildhall, a beauty that has proved to be beyond the efforts of painters of our time, whose natural gift was perhaps greater. Sir John Millais, for example, has indubitable genius. He touched, in his St. Agnes Eve, a point that proved in him a more original gift than that of Raeburn, but only to tumble to levels that were impossible to the older artist. The knowledge and critical standard of a great school sustains the one ; the other, uncritical himself, caught transient fire from the great inspiration of Rossetti, but fell away to the general standard. That standard is per- haps best exemplified by a picture here that made the reputa- tion of its author, and is really a culmination in its way, the Israel in Egypt. It is a culmination, because there never perhaps was a painting so seriously meant, so elaborately compounded, and so neatly executed, that showed so complete an oblivion of all the elements that charm the vision and touch the imagination in a picture. Its one idea seems to be the explanation of an incident. Exposition, of course, enters into the art of all dramatic painting; but merely to explain an incident is nothing, if you do not also aggrandise and emotionalise. The powers that the evolution of painting has accumulated for aggrandising and emotionalising a scene; the power of grand contour, of solemn light and shadow, of colours that speak a direct language of feeling,—these might well be engaged to enforce upon the mind some image of con- founding Egyptian toils and the oppression of innumerable slaves. The subject is sublime; the treatment is such as to render it unspeakably petty, and repugnant in every way to the sense of vision. Husky, trivial explanation in paint, made to look as like kamptulicon as possible, is really the prevailing impression left by the popular English picture of the last thirty years. The decadence that set in with Lawrence Landseer and the rest, steadily pro- ceeded to its lowest point in a kind of painting quite unique in its divorce from all artistic inspiration and technique. Rossetti brought inspiration ; he saw a face ; he imagined it impressively designed upon a canvas, and he plotted mosaics of gorgeous colour ; but he did not learn to paint,— the material remained obstinate in his hands, and corrupted his colour. Besides this man of genius and his followers, there have certainly been certain men of talent who have struggled or suffered in this time of a deplorable laxity of tradition. There is Sir John Gilbert, for example. He has never struggled, it is true; he has never cared enough for a subject of his own to find any difficulty in representing. He has flung out careless illustrations, but they are the im- promptus of a, man who knows what a picture used to be ; they are flung out in the grand manner. "This is the sort of way," he seems to say, "that a picture ought to be knocked together; you would have a figure there, relieved against another something like that, and with a movement and swing not unlike this; and here would be a red, and here a purple, if one painted the thing in colour." It is a well-bred chic in a brown tint. Mr. Watts is another artist who remembers what pictures were,—who is haunted by Venetian breadth and splendour. But with a deeper nature he strives to put a material of his own into those pictorial terms, and his hold upon nature is not so strong as his sense of the picture. The lady's portrait here is in a different world from that of the common photographer; it has a breath of pictorial nobility; but the eyes and month compromise too hastily; they are conven- tional in a pretty manner, so curiously at odds with the general intention. The paint, too, clogs under his brush. The same incompatibility in the mixture of new and old, of traditional and original, is evident in Sir Frederic Leighton's picture. The Idyll is the work of an artist and a scholar. The contours of the man's figure cut well against the sky, and he balances the women ; the landscape elements are subdued to accord with the figures ; leaves, sheep, &c., have their just definition and emphasis,- even if the tree follows rather weakly round the outline of the group. But conflicting with this largeness in the picture-making, is something of the petty current ideal; the chocolate-box contends with the Elgin marbles. The material, too, is thinly, if consistently, handled. Mr. Orchardson has struck out a personal, and at the same time very tender and beautiful, way of drawing ; but the ideal of explanation claims its sacrifice in Her Mother's Voice. By planting the old man by himself on the canvas so that the picture splits, and by attending to his expression so as to neglect the expression of the picture, Mr. Orchardson toils to explain his title ; a needless task, if the consent of his figures had made an appeal less determinate but more pictorial. Then there is Mr. Herkomer's Last Muster, with its strong character-drawing in coarse colour and paint; and Mr. Tadema's amazing piece-work. Pass them one and all in review, and always a weakness of imagination or execution declares itself, or a gap between them. It is only in Mr. Whistler's picture that the fusion of dignified vision and beautiful method is complete, as it was in Reynolds or in Crome.
To pass from this exhibition to that of the New English Art Club, is to ask the question, how far the younger English school is taking up the broken threads. To be without school, without anything given to work upon, either in subject or method, is a situation that only genius can cope with, and in which talent remains sterile. Genius is, at all times, rare ; but there is evidence of sincere research in several of the contributors to the exhibition. Mr. Steer's is perhaps the strongest instinct ; there is less of calculation and more of the lively impulse of a picture directly seen in his portrait, than in most of the works hung. Mr. Edward Stott, too, strikes one as having the quick conviction and emotion of something beautiful, though there is groping and occa- sional clumsiness in execution. Mr. Ruse is more conscious and theoretic in his work; relief, silhouette, colour, all an- nounce themselves as schemes; schemes that are carried through with abundant force and skill, particularly in the Portrait of a Lady. How carefully in this the forms are packed and fitted, and the fluent lines made to accord ! In the other portrait, contrivance becomes a little too obvious ; the building, so to speak, seems to be introduced for the sake of the scaffolding; and if the purple note was wanted, it ought to have come in more credibly than in that pot of flower& But the research alike of composition and of quality in the paint displayed in these portraits, and in some of the landscapes, like Mr. Thornton's, is a hopeful sign ; they are elements liable to be obscured in the impressionist research of effect. M. Monet has held a conversation with Nature of amazing freedom and intimacy; but his prolonged diary has seldom been slimmed up and digested into a poem; he is too eager for further talk, for fresh views. Mr. Sickert has an ambition beyond the diarist's, but a hesitation seems to trouble him in the last stages of his task. His music-hall scene strikes an extremely true and beautiful note in its effect of illumination. Degas would have found with equal cer- tainty the essential lines and modelling of the figures, and made of a delightful study of colour a complete picture.
D. S. M..
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