FINE ARTS.
THE ROYAL EXCHANGE AND ITS DECORATIONS.
THE Royal Exchange was opened, in part, on Wednesday ; and the public will henceforth be freely admitted into the Merchants Court.
Lloyd's Rooms and other parts of the building, however, will not be ready for occupation until New Year's Day ; when, it is expected, busi- ness will be transacted in the new Bourse. The architecture and de- corations will now be more severely scrutinized than they were by the courtly throng on the occasion of the Queen's visit, or by the crowds of sight- seers admitted on the following days. The mercantile community, glad to exchange the sorry makeshift of a shed in the yard of the Excise-office for commodious arcades—albeit these open upon an uncovered area, and are but partially screened from the weather—will be disposed to look with favour on a building that they would fain be proud of. The encaustic paintings on the walls will be at any rate more agreeable to the eye than the patchwork of written and painted advertisements that disfigured the old Exchange ; and feelings of pride and satisfaction at taking possession of a new and imposing edifice may be heightened by a consciousness that the Royal Exchange was the first public building of the present century where colour forms part of the architectural de- corations. We regret to disturb such complacent gratification by un- welcome objections ; but our regard for true art urges upon us the ungracious task of pointing out defects that render the structure and its decorations offensive to the eye of taste, and discreditable to the wealth and intelligence of the city of London. The encaustic paintings being the most novel and attractive feature, we advert to them first and chiefly. The coup-d' ail on entering the arcade of the Merchants Court is ineffective : the whole looks patchy and incomplete. The ceiling is a glare of red, the pavement dirty stone, and the painted panels on the walls are separated by broad pilasters devoid of ornament ; while each vista terminates in a naked space of wall with a ghostly statue in a niche. Nor does a closer in- spection lessen this disagreeable impression : on the contrary, the want of combination between the carved and painted surfaces and plain stone is increased by the discordance of glaring colours and different styles of ornament ; and the conclusion is inevitable that the decorator is not a master of his art.
The ceiling is divided into compartments by beams, intersecting each other at right angles, supported on carved brackets and pendants ; and
the perspective presents a double row of pendants and brackets tinted a
sickly green, with massive cross-bars of scarlet picked out with green. Each compartment is bordered with a heavy, formal pattern of reddish brown and yellow in squares, resembling a row of encaustic tiles ; and in the centre is a coat of arms of meagre design, or an emblematical trophy ludicrously puerile in fancy and style. The effect of this dis- position of colours is the reverse of what a skilful artist would have aimed at producing : the centres and projections, which should be focal points of colour and brilliancy, in order to give breadth and elevation to the rest of the ceiling, are vapid and insignificant ; while the com- partments are contracted by their heavy and mechanical bordering, and thet massive beams are pressed upon the eye by the glare of red paint. The side-panels on the walls are equally ill-arranged. Instead of pre- serving the just proportions of the arched intercolumniations, the deco- rator has cut each space into three pieces by bars carried across, to the utter destruction of all symmetry: the semicircle at top is severed from the square beneath ; which is also divided into two unequal parts by strip of painted wood. The colouring still more effectually aids this severance: the half-circle beneath the arch is filled with a bold mass of architectural foliage, painted to imitate relief, in yellow on a ground of intense blue, brown, or green; the square space is stone-colour, divided into three compartments by light arabesque ornaments, in style and colour suited to a room ; and the whole is surrounded by a broad border of pink red, the strip at the base being plain chocolate-brown. The effect of this medley is not only inharmonious, but the predominance of positive colour in the grounds and borders kills the delicate tints of the fruit, flowers, and arabesques. Here again, the centres, which are the principal points for observation, are the weakest: to the casual glance of a person in the area of the court, the panels of the arcades present each one a little brown patch like a chocolate-drop, as the principal ornament.
The entrances, where one naturally looks for something handsome, are merely capped with colour ; displaying an incongruous admixture of opaque flat tints with florid arabesques. The doorways being vaulted, their curved surfaces afford scope for a rich display of arabesque scroll- work ; instead of which, the vaulting is cut up into angular bits of ir- regular form—shapes ugly of themselves, and destroying the beauty of the dome-like curve ; and each of these compartments is filled in with a repetition of the same pattern, looking like so many tiles : over the North door there are a dozen or more caducei all of a row. The mo- notony of this reiteration of patterns, added to the discordance of colours, the incongruity of styles, and the unskilful arrangement of parts, pro- duces a singular impression of poverty and excess : the same device so continually recurs that one feels there is too much ornament and too little variety of it. This mechanical kind of tawdriness reminds one of stencilling and paper-hanging : it seems waste of time for artists to have been employed in painting the same pattern over and over again. Such is the parsimonious selection that it might be supposed the decorator invented his own patterns and had a costive fancy : they may be reckoned on the fingers. There is one pattern for the soffits of the beams ; one for the covings ; one—no two, though much alike—for the borders of compartments in the roof ; and one for the arched panels : in all five different borderings ; and these not arabesque scrolls but for- mal patterns, one single foot of which reveals its whole extent. The semicircles, some four-and-twenty in number, are varied with but four different ornaments ; the arabesques on the square panels are similar in effect though not all the same ; and the strips of fruit and flowers introduced by way of relief and enrichment, seemingly luxuriant in comparison with the running patterns, also evince parsimony of inven- tion. The only article in which the artist is lavish is red colour : what others are most sparing in the use of he lays on with a prodigal hand. All other hues are swamped in a sea of red : its weltering flood reduces the arabesques to a mere wreck of ornament.
The execution is on a par with the taste of the designer : the draw- ing of the few heads and figures introduced would disgrace a pupil of the School of Design ; and the ignorance of light and shade shown in the imitations of relievo is deplorable. The arabesques are heavily and timidly handled, and muddled in colour : here and there a bit of firm and decisive execution may be met with, but the mass is bungling and slovenly. The fruit and flowers are in two or three instances well painted : there is great inequality, however, which the dark and narrow ground conceals from cursory observation. The shields in the ceiling are bright enough in colour, but devoid of relief ; and the scanty drapery of the mantles gives them a mean and flimsy appearance, instead of the gorgeous richness of heraldic blazonry : no coach-painter would suffer such work to go out of his shop. But the climax of incapable feeble- ness is attained in the symbolical devices or trophies : they are in de- sign and execution identical with those juvenile efforts of the pencil that figured in school-girls' drawing-books and on card-racks half a cen- tury ago. One in particular will be recognized at a glance,—the bee- hive, rake, and watering-pot, tied together with the ribands of a gipsy hat I The others are of kindred fancy. The Arts are symbolized by a painter's easel supporting a nondescript portico ; Letters, by three sus- picious-looking volumes with an owl perched on them—emblematical of the Minerva Press ; Industry by a clock and a cock crowing at sunrise. Commerce has a triad of emblems—a turtle betwixt a tea-chest and a carboy ; the globe eclipsing a box of cigars and resting on a roll of tobacco ; and a bale of goods hoisted in the air by Mercury's caduceus instead of a crane ! Such are the subjects with which the merchants of London are edified in the nineteenth century. Why, such obsolete puerilities would not be tolerated in a pictorial primer of the present day. If the citizens do not wish their Royal Exchange to be made a laughingstock, they will have these silly devices painted out. The decorator, Mr. SANG, is a German ; and the extent to which he it patronized, notwithstanding his bad taste and inferior talents, may have taught him such contempt for English ignorance as to induce the supposition that anything is good enough for us. And he is justified in this notion ; for, though the Royal Commission passed his specimens by unnoticed, he finds patrons among architects as well as the aristocracy. But how such absurdities should have been allowed in the Exchange is inexplicable. The common sense of any one, however ignorant of art, might have sufficed to perceive the unfitness of these ridiculous em- blems as ornaments of a place of business. In point of taste, skill, and originality, the architect and the decorator are on a par: the style and execution of the building and its decorations are congenial. The building itself needs little to be said of it. Any compilation of architectural commonplaces on a grand scale is sure to be imposing to the vulgar eye, especially when profusely garnished with ornament. The principal feature of the Royal Exchange, its portico, has been con- verted from the fiat screen originally designed by Mr. TITE into a re- spectable sort of façade, by projecting it one intercolumniation. But for the two couple of chimney-stacks that deform the roof, the view of the building from the Mansionhouse would be handsome ; though the stiff figures stack upon the shallow pediment, displaying little more composition than a step-ladder, only serve to relieve the blank that the tympanum exhibited in the original design. The centres of the two side fronts evince the architect's inability to make anything of them : as entrances they are mean ; as centres they are weak ; making each facade appear as if it had been cut in .wo and joined again to lengthen it. The rounded corners or haunches of the back seem to bulge out with their own feebleneu; while the tower rears itself up be- tween them like a huge tail to the monster. These features have become familiar to the citizens ; but the beauties of the inner court are only now disclosed to the public gaze. The apparent smallness of the area first strikes the eye ; to this the heaviness of the architectural details materially contributes. The bizarre fashion of the window- dressings beggars description : they can only be likened to a con- glomeration of three or four different openings one within the other. The parapet, too, is a bijou in its way. But the most exquisite oddities are the puny arches pinched up in each corner of the arcade, their headings filled with heavy blocks of stone to prevent them from being crushed by the thrust of their larger neighbours : they put one in mind of rickety urchins afflicted with hydrocephalus. The stone carving is so coarse and mechanical as to appear un- finished : the capitals of columns and pilasters are scarcely more than rough-hewn ; the swags of fruit and flowers are mere ponderous frippery ; and the lion and unicorn that support the Queen's arms over the grand entrance would shame a respectable shop-front : the animals are of the true rocking-horse build. What would have been the hand- somest ornament of the area, judging from the print of it—the tesselated pavement—would not stand the weather, and was taken up and replaced by asphalte. Some kind of pattern might have been introduced to relieve the dull monotony of its dark hue ; and the arcades surely ought to have been laid with tiles or tesserm. In short, the whole thing is an elaborate failure—an effort at magnificence ending in showy vulgarity. If the commerce of the City had advanced no more than its taste in art, judging from a comparison of its first and present Bourse, the new build- ing would not have been needed.
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