ART.
LITHOGRAPHS AND WATER-COLOURS.
Lithographs at Dunthorne's—Mr. Whistler at the Fine Art Society's—The Old Water-Colour Society-31r. Peppercorn at Goupil's.
"LITHOGRAPHY made easy for Academicians" might be the title of the exhibition at Mr. Dunthorne's. There are some excellent lithographs in the collection. There are the litho.
graphs of Mr. Whistler, of Mr. Charles Shannon, of M. Odilon Redon. But much of the work is the result of a horrible "revival," "movement," "boom," as it is variously called, aided by a mechanical invention for the transfer of draw. ings in lithographic chalk from paper to stone. This invention is no very recent affair, but has been in use for some time. From the unfortunate wording of the circulars sent out by Mr. Dunthorne, it might be hastily supposed that Mr. Goulding, the well-known printer of etchings, had invented transfer-paper. This is not the case. Mr. Goulding's paper is smoother in surface than the transfer-paper in ordinary use, so that the impression, when printed, has less of a grain. The innovation he proposes is that the litho- graphic printer should use some of the devices of the etching printer, helping out the tone of the impression by washes of ink obtained by a second printing from a fresh stone. This procedure will no doubt be welcome to those artists who cannot themselves obtain in their drawing the effect they wish ; but the merit of lithography, to those who know their mind and their business, is that it renders the exact mark made upon paper or stone by the draughtsman's chalk. For the printing of a good lithograph, in a word, the most per- fectly mechanical reproduction is beat; in the helping-oat of the poor lithograph we cannot profess to be much interested.
It cannot therefore be too clearly understood by those who take their first impression of lithography from this exhibition, that with Mr. Goulding's inventions and methods, whatever their merits, the work of Messrs. Whistler, Shannon, Redon, and some others, like Mr. George Thomson, has nothing to do. The bulk of the show is the result of a hasty rally, at the instance of a committee charged to furnish examples of English lithography to the recent centenary exhibition at Paris. These hasty rallies to a new or revived method on the part of draughtsmen who hope to find salvation from common- place ideas in a novel medium, are among the most dispiriting features of the day in matters of art. It will be remembered how, some years ago, it was put about by writers on art that there was a revival of etching. The truth was that two or three men of account were making etchings. The lazy public, always divided between a kind of prurient curiosity about methods and dislike of their proper employment, was promptly satisfied with a Rood of evilly entreated copperplates. That flood ebbs slowly now, leaving the one or two etchers as before. Bat a fresh deluge threatens, and a worse, because the procedure of lithography is so much easier than that of etching. Again the one or two artists have turned to an old procedure ; again curiosity and envy of their results have invaded the ranks of those who forlornly hope to attain to art by a new process ; again, no doubt, public taste, indifferent to the work of the competent, will set its own favourites to vulgarise and hackney another medium. Now it is not an altogether indifferent matter that a procedure should be thus mishandled by a multitude. The very look of the thing, etching or litho- graph, becomes staled by all this imitation, just as a dainty fashion in dress is discredited by infinite draggle-tailed parody ; the exquisiteness of the masterpiece is obscured, and the eye turns sickened to less trampled fields. It is there. fore no encouragement to art to lure the R.A. or unofficial favourite of the populace from the craft he habitually vul- garises, to give him a piece of paper and a bit of lithographic chalk, and to stand over him while he knocks off a litho- graph for an international or other exhibition.
The difference between work done on this sudden provocation and work to whose making a real inspiration and a real study have gone, may be appreciated by comparing the two litho- graphs by Mr. Charles Shannon with the" studies " of Messrs. Tadema, Dicksee, MacWhirter, &c. If a true proportion deter- mined our estimates of contemporary work instead of official or popular notoriety, Charles Shannon would be known for one of the few authentic artists in the crowd, a man inspired. And the inspiration is no more evident than the study, the deliberate choice of a medium for what it best can do, the sedulous nursing and development of its capacities. How one of tl ose designs will poetise a whole room, drawing the eye to a spot made precious not only by brooding imagination, bet materially precious as well by greys and blacks and whites exactly like no others.
Mr. Charles Shannon is still so little known as to be com- monly confused with the portrait-painter of the same name. Oa a name already classic it is unnecessary to insist. Mr. Whistler shows at the Fine-Art Society's rooms a large col- lection of his lithographs. I suppose no artist has ever com- bined so high a degree of critical taste with the like powers of seeing his subject. This quality comes out to admiration in a medium whose abstractness invites to a dainty economy of means. At the chosen pitch of abstraction, a single touch of the chalk is to render—say an eye—and you watch how in that touchavarying pressure this side or that, ahairbreadth ex- tension or check, suffices to suggest the modelling that a dc zen touches might fail to render in clumsier hands. It would be hard to pick and choose. The little dancing figure, drifted across the paper, the shop-windows where sunlight plays bide and seek with the things behind the panes, the witty remark or the reverie on sitter or town prospect, all these crowd into the memory. But perhaps the most haunting is the forge scene with its lunette of blackness from which the figures- of the smiths emerge with such mysterious richness of effect. The simplicity of the design combines with this effect to a singularly fine issue.
We are often told that the Old Water-Colour Society main- tains the traditions of a peculiarly English art. 1 wish I could fall in with this pleasant superstition; but I think my fellow-critics who recite it are imposed upon by a name. What I find most flourishing on the walls of this gallery is a number of rather recent and very rank traditions of illustration. There is nothing to complain of in the early models where a conventional blue and brown were employed in representing a view conceived in black and white. But it is a tedious and shocking thing to find all the machinery of colour effect laid out on drawings as radically false in tone as black-and-white illustrations are bound to be in the absence of colour. A few of the painters here do conceive their work in colour-values ; and Mr. Clausen's or Miss Montalba's drawings accordingly preserve something of the emergence of things as they are seen. In most cases we get a complication of stains in no relation to one another, or to their white paper, and appealing to a very poor decorative sense as colour. A very notable exception to this general condemnation is Mr. Alfred Hunt's Warkworth Sands. Like all his work, it is wanting in broad decorative effect at a distance ; but it is the work of an eye stored with learning in natural forms and delicate change over limited areas beyond that of any landscape-painter since Turner. A drawing of Whitby Harbour, now hanging at the Fine-Art Galleries, is an example of the minute wreathing of his composition, like jeweller's work on a chain. Mr. Lionel Smythe and Miss Rose Barton deserve notice, and the studies of a flower-garden by Mr. E. K. Johnson are pretty.
A man trained to observe tone and colour by the practice of oil-painting, is more likely to keep these qualities when he turns to water-colour, than he whose eye has been nailed to his white paper and to the water-colours of others, as if no National Gallery existed. Mr. Peppercorn's water-colours at Messrs. Goupil's have this virtue, and also the largeness of view that is more common in the oil medium, since it permits a greater physical freedom in getting away from the work and judging of total effect. It is like leaving a stuffy room with nagging voices, to come from the old Water-Colour Society among these green harbours and open places. Mr. Peppercorn has never bartered the birthright of his artist's vision for that emphatic trifling with peddling incident that makes a popular painter. It is time surely, after these twenty years or so, that he should find a more ample recognition for the good fight he has waged. D. S. M.
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