ART.

THE INSTITUTE OF PAINTERS IN OIL COLOURS.

[FIRST NOTICE.]

THE first exhibition of the Institute of Painters in Oil Colours opened its doors to the public on Monday last, with a collection of about eight hundred pictures, and it is worth while to say a word or two as to the formation of this new Society. It has grown, as its name denotes, out of the old Institute of Painters

in Water-Cohurs, and is modelled upon the same lines as those upon which the elder Society was reconstructed last spring..

No member is allowed to exhibit more than three pictures, an& the works of outsiders are equally eligible with those of they members. The Society consists of a President, Vice-President, Council, and members, the number of the latter being (we imagine) not strictly limited. At present, there are, including the Council and Presidents, about one hundred Members, amongst them several As ociat es of the Royal Academy, and many artists of at least equal importance.

A great deal of notice has been excited by this exhibition, but its full significance has hardly, we fancy, been perceived. The truth is that the Society might very easily become a rival, and a very formidable rival, to the Royal Academy, and will,, at the very least, probably affect, to the public benefit, the con- duct of that institution. Even in this first exhibition, it is, perhaps, more fairly and fully representative of English Painting than is the great May show at Burlington House, and though there is but little which is very remarkable in the way of im- agination, very perfect in the way of execution, or very sym- pathetic in the way of feeling; yet the show is, as a whole, more free from glaring defects than that of the Academy. Anyhow, we would have our readers realise that this new Society includes a hundred artists, chiefly young men, who may be said to repre- sent English Art and its present tendencies more than any other body which has yet been formed in England; and we see no reason why, if they chose, they should not supplement their Winter Exhibition by a Summer one, which would prove at least equally attractive.

This Sooiety has been well advertised and well managed by business men, and is likely to be a financial success; but it is none the less true that it gives to young artists the very oppor- tUnity which was so much needed,—the opportunity to show their works, under favourable conditions, side by side with those of acknowledged and accomplished painters. It is, indeed, in this first exhibition, owing to the restriction of the number of pictures to be sent by the members, a more fair and open show, than any other which we know of in England; and it is un- doubtedly true that the thanks of all English artists are due to the three or four energetic men who have organised and carried out the scheme of founding this Oil Institute.

And now as to the character of the works exhibited. In this first notice, we do not intend to speak in detail, but rather to. say a few general words as to the chief defect of this exhibition, and of the present condition of oil-painting in England.

We get almost tired of saying, and no doubt our readers are still more tired of hearing, that there is a woeful lack of imaginative art in England, and especially in the special Gallery of which we happen to be writing. But we shall continue so say it, on the (Julia cavat lapidens principle. Perhapsthere is not really less imagination in this collec- tion than in most, but the deficiency is certainly more evident. There are an enormous quantity of futile figure pictures, which seem, apart from various technical qualities (good, bad, and indifferent), to have no reason for their exist- ence. Sitting upon a sofa in the middle of one of the galleries, and looking at the opposite wall, we noticed that out of the eighty or ninety pictures which faced us, there were about twenty-five in which figures formed the principal part, and that almost without an exception these represented girls with large hats doing nothing, girls with bare feet carrying something, girls with pretty faces sitting down, and holding a letter or a rose- bud ; or else children playing with pegtops, or babies dressed out for portraiture. " Que diable !" as Lawrence used to make the valiant dragoon say in Maurice Deering, "we are men, and not school-girls." And why should we have such a sickly sentimental and inane representation of our race as this ? A foreigner might walk round these eight hundred pictures, and look in vain for a trace that the people who painted them had ever had a history, a passiou-es a feeling of any kind beyond the region of tlir. domestic virtues. A fat, well-fed triviality is " theJail of the ser- pent" over them all ; they sink in a Sloughbf Despond where beauty has given place to prettiness, ad feeling has been destroyed by sentiment. One man, a.21-. Stock, honestly tries to be imaginative; he fails, butli failure is delicious, com- pared to the successes with *Inch he is surrounded. One woman having a strong lot for poetic art (Miss Eveleen Pickering), gives us a pictee of the children of Night, which is equally pleasant in imRrfection, and with these exceptions,

none of the hundred members, or of the two or three hundred outsiders, seeks to exercise our intellect, or to touch our hearts with any subject beyond the scope of a pensive woman or round. eyed child. Here are the subjects of the first ten figure pictures, which are selected (on account of their superior interest, we suppose !) for the illustration of the catalogue. Several women with dogs,—one ditto, with a distaff ; back-view of ditto, with a curtain ; ditto, with spinning-wheel; ditto, with baby ; ditto, with sick baby ; ditto, with child ; ditto, with child and fruit- stall; ditto, with lover; ditto, with basket of lunch ; and so on, to all eternity.

The old Indian story about the blue sky is applicable here; the sky is too blue, it is,—monotonous. Is it conceivable that the intelligence of the average picture-buyer is so low that it cannot rise to a subjeat of any other sort than the ones we have noted above P It is quite right that dogs should wag their tails in expectation of food, and that cats should rub their heads coaxingly against the hand that feeds them ; that children should play pegtop, and infants be dressed in blue bonnets and frocks, and mothers nurse their babes, and girls eat, as well as "smell of, bread and butter ;" but surely painters might find better subjects for immortal art than such as these P It is not the painters who are to blame, or at least not chiefly ; the painters are but tradesmen of another kind, who supply the wants of their customers. It is the fashionable, enlightened patrons of Art, who have produced this puling-woman and play- ing-baby species of picture, who won't buy anything unless it is pleasant and pretty, as if their galleries were but big sweetmeat boxes, and must be stuck over with bright, meaningless colours, and. objectless forms. And the dealers who minister to them are, perhaps, even more to blame, since they do all in their power to foster this foolish taste. There are a couple of lines pregnant with suggestion in an old artists' song which used to be, and we dare say still is, sung by Academy students. It refers to the way to make an unsuccessful picture sell, and if all else fails, the student is instructed to,—

" Bub it down

With madder-brown,

And sell it to a dealer."

Any one who has had the least to do with the artist fraternity knows well how this painting of pretty pictures is forced upon artists by the dealers and by the public. As a rule, the artist worthy of the name, has in him, at first, "a strong voice which no one will hear ;" and to him, in his unsuccess, frequently almost in his starvation, enter the public and the dealer, with the cry, "Why don't you work like other people P" And as his strength is, he resists a longer or a shorter time, and, perhaps, if he is exceptionally brave or fortunate, he wins the day, and revenges himself by painting a hundred times at an exorbitant price, the thing he likes best ; but in far the greater number of instances, neglect, circumstances, friends, and dealers are too strong for him. He accepts the conventional prettiness as his ideal, and so he joins that ignoble army of martyrs who have killed not themselves, but the best portion of themselves.

This is not, perhaps, noticing the Gallery, but we cannot see this effect of fashion and frivolity seizing hold of all our best artists, and creeping over the work of our young, enthusiastic men, without raising a protest. "Every one is saying all good

things" of the progress of Art in England now, and we disbelieve (at least, partly disbelieve) in the truth of the saying. A tremendous impetus has been given to Art industries, and in proportion to their previous stagnation they have leapt forward at a bound, and every society that can

be formed to produce art is formed throughout the king-

dom; and yet painting is not progressing in anything, save technical excellence. Our landscape painting, which forty years ago led the world's Art, has crossed the seas, and is only to be found in France ; the nearest approach to Constable and. Cox is to be traced in Danbigny and Rousseau. Turner has not only left no equal, but not even a successor; and De Wint, one of the greatest, as well as one of the most English, of our painters, has no rival to-day. The pre- Raphaelite influence, which might have given us a splendid modern type of figure painting, is dying quickly day by day, and nothing is taking its place ; and even the domestic art of such men as Wilkie and Mulready, was better and truer in feel- ing, as well as more splendid in execution, than the women and the babies which have taken their place. As to still-life paint- ing, the only substitute we have for old William Hunt is a Frenchman called. " Fantin," who paints our roses and chrysan- themums as if they had just tumbled from a cocotte's bonnet. Go and look round the National Gallery, or South Kensing- ton, and then see if you can talk about our progress in Art ! Why, "Old Chrome" himself was a better landscape painter than any who is living now; and we have not, out of all our hundreds of "genre" painters, one who can touch the work of the " Wilkie " or the elder "Leslie."

The truth may be expressed very shortly as to the present state of painting, as exemplified in the Academy and in this Gallery, which, as we have said, is even more representative of the present state of English Art. Figure painting has ceased. to be heroic on the one hand, and domestic on the other, and become either dramatic or sentimental.

Landscape, in the old sense of the word, has ceased to exist, and its place has been taken by natural-history painting (as Ruskin calls it), which may be defined as the collection within a frame of all the materials for a (landscape) picture, as one collects in a basin all the materials for a pudding. They want stirring up, boiling down, and putting into shape.

In our next notice, we propose to speak at length of the best pictures in this Gallery ; but we would say, in conclusion of this article, that every one of our readers can, if he or she will, do something towards bringing about a better state of feeling with regard to painting than that which obtains at present. Do not want a. picture to be pretty, and nothing else, but want it to express some special beauty, and possess some not too trivial meaning. Do not praise the work for its dexterity rather than its accomplished power. No really great painter ever suggests instead of finishing, anything capable of being fully rendered. Do not mistake melodrama for action, and sentiment for feeling, and do not, above all, try and drive young and immature artists into the same round of thinking and painting as their elder and. more famous brethren. Let them be crude, as long as they are earnest, and exaggerated, whilst they are sincere.