ART.
THE ROYAL ACADEMY.
[THIRD NOTICE.]
WHEN the motive of a picture is chosen to catch attention by its:
mere novelty, or by the ascertained popularity of its class, we consign the work to the second category mentioned in our last
notice. In this case, the artist's success should be measured partly by the degree of common admiration, and partly by the market price which his picture commands. It is the public taste, not the author's, that is gauged by the work, and if the critic's judgment is to be regulated by these popular standards, his function will. take rank with that of the sporting prophet of the valuer of other kinds of speculation. But the artist has generally a mixed motive ; and there are, in fact, but few pictures of the class we. have now to deal with which do not supply some more artistic ground for discussion. The class of Incident pictures is that which bears the closest analogy of any to stage representation, and, in one of its favourite forms it does not bring us any nearer to, nature than is possible in a theatrical tableau. For it is actually- through a medium of this kind that many painters see and study- the incidents they affect to represent. They set up their whole scene. in the studio, dress out and pose a model or two, garnish with need- ful properties, and then set to work a copying, and copy hard and fast until the thing is done. It is but imitation once again, and in- this case imitation of the second degree. But they must feel all. the time, we should think, that what they are labouring upon so. assiduously is not that upon which they really rely for suceees. If the artist does his work indifferently well, and screws up the tone and colour to exhibition-pitch, so as to pass the Selection Committee and be bung where he can be seen, his function as a painter is accom- plished. It is upon tb e nature of the incident whicb he represents that he depends for popularity. When one is hit upon that needs must startle or attract, and, moreover, lends itself readily to descrip- tion in the newspapers, it does not need more than an indifferent artist to command admiration. The analogy is perfect to the sensational form of drama, which is the kind of representation. that can the most easily be made effective with a company of in- different players. It is the more to an artist's credit when he infuses into a• work of this kind some element which shows an, original observation of nature, or, as it were, makes a character his own, as a clever actor will sometimes do even in a trumpery play. Painters, however, who make up pictures of this kind, have rarely the power, or the refined taste, or the strong insight into human nature necessary to preserve them from being either sensational, on the one hand, or insipid on the other. The• most satisfactory are generally those which deal in comedy, notwithstanding the danger here of degenerating into farce.. Mr. Burgess's clever picture (107) of two amateurs admiring the talent shown in a portfolio of drawings by a "Barber's. Prodigy" (not J. M. W. Turner), is one of this better class. The expressions of critical appreciation, fatherly pride, and modest. confusion in the principal characters. are excellent. It tells its. story well, which is essential, and we dare say that the scene has a characteristic resemblance to a Spanish shaving-shop, which is. not so essential, to the interest. Mr. Storey's fishing entangle-. ment, " Caught " (142), where a young lady of the last century,. angling over her garden wall, has hooked the line of a sly-looking gentleman in a punt below ; Mr. Gow's little scene of the men "In Possession" (330), too demonstratively joyful, though, for such business-like persons, while the servant-maid tells her dis- mayed master that three strangers are in the hall ; and Mr.. Burr's " Domestic Troubles " (408), where a naughty boy has made a hole in the bellows ; are among the most amusing things- of the kind here. We have treated of Mr. Hodgson's and Mr. Marks's pictures under other heads. Mr. Stone, in a picture of a. French soldier's return from the war, " Sain et Sauf " (130), after his wife's confinement, puts a joyful look into her face, and a natural flush upon her delicate cheek, but otherwise paints the' flesh with less care than the inanimate objects. There is some unaffected expression in Mr. Morgan's "The Emigrants' De- parture " (1168), where the women and the old men remain. behind, while all the younger men go off, except one lazy fellow who could best be spared, and who seems likely to get an unquiet time of it at _home. Miss Starr paints a stock subject in a picture of a tired music-teacher, called " Hardly Earned" (527), and a careful study of furniture therein becomes a component part of the treatment, for she makes the room look as worn as its occupant. Mr. F. D. Hardy's drooping dress- makers working in the grey morning at " The Wedding Dress" (1177) ; Mr. Wynfield's "At Last, Mother !" (113), where a young lady announces an offer of marriage ; Mr. Calthrop's sick child " Getting Better " (263); and Mr. Yeames's " Pour les Pauvres" (4), where broken meat is being given to sisters of charity in the snow at a house-door ;—are various pictures respect- ably painted, which sufficiently indicate what they mean. Mr. Leslie, however, treats so charmingly and also truly the pretty incident of the " School Revisited " (196), by a gentle girl who has been finished' and introduced, and comes one day with jewelled fingers to be admired by her old playfellows and the younger scholars, as to raise his picture fairly into a higher class. We welcome Mr. Leslie on this return to his natural range of sub- jects ; and it is pleasant to feel that the beauty and innocence which are here universally attractive belong to real life, and not to a pseudo-classic conventionality. Mr. B. Riviere makes two attempts at sensational attraction, and fails in both. It needs the catalogue, and some lines by Sydney Dobell, to tell us that the elderly shepherd, leaning on a wall with a newspaper under his arm in " War Time " (89), is thinking of a Tommy who is dead ; and the same artist's picture of " The -Last of the Garrison " (626), namely, a bloodhound that has been shot in a battered room, is a hard, prosaic representation of a painful object, and this implies a false conception of the province of art. But the actions of the shepherd's dogs in the first picture, stopping and returning to see which way their master is going, are telling and expressive, and this is a more artistic way of intro- ducing man's faithful companion into a picture than the sort of glorification of the brute which Landseer made so popular. Mr. Marks, in his "Merrie Jeste" (242), introduces a dog very effectively in the same way, sitting patiently on the top step till the two gentlemen, who have stopped to enjoy their joke, are ready to walk on again. As accessories, dogs are invaluable in all kinds of painting, but when they are separated from human asso- ciations, and made the principal subject of a picture, they only take rank with other animals. Their incidental value is especially known by portrait painters, as some of them show in this exhibition ; taking example from Reynolds, whose delicious little Miss Bowles and her spaniel has been so admirably engraved by Mr. Cousins (1094). But we have also a good dog picture, pure and simple, in Mr. Goddard's large and spirited group of bloodhounds of Lord Wolverton's pack (214). The influence of Landseer, or rather of Landseer's popular choice of subjects, is still to be seen on those animal painters who are constantly on the look-out for incidents and similitudes that may give a factitious interest to studies of the brute creation. Mr. H. Hardy has a large picture of a dead lion in the desert pecked at by three vultures, which he calls, " How are the mighty fallen!" (111); and a smaller one, of a menagerie elephant on the road awaiting the determination of a " Disputed Toll " (1218) between his keeper and the turnpike collector. The latter is the more agreeably painted, but the former is hung so that it is difficult to see the best part of it, namely, the vultures. We may forgive Mr. Hook if, for once he, too, has gone out of his way to amuse us with a taking title and a fanciful analogy be- tween man and beast. His picture of a docile herd of cows coming in to be milked, and a large black raven croaking "Wise Saws" (256) to them from a rail, is the most fresh and luminous of his contributions, and the sly suggestion that the bird resembles a priest addressing his flock is happy and amusing.
We have yet to deal with the illustrative class of pic- tures. One's delight in these must in a great measure de- pend upon acquaintance with the historical event or appre- ciation of the author that has inspired the painter ; and there is a sort of criticism which rates the merit ofliMistori- eal painter solely according to the care with which he ascertains and the fidelity with which lie sticks to his facts. Judged by this standard, the palm on this occasion may probably be given to Mr. Crowe for his carefully-painted and well-composed group of " The French Savants in Egypt, 1798" (831), with their donkeys, instruments, and curiosities within a large hollow square, in which formation Napoleon's troops resisted the charges of the Mame- lukes. The picture comprises fourteen portraits, all studied, we believe, from contemporary likenesses of the learned men whom the First Consul took with him to the East. But persons who delight to follow every minute incident, as Mr. Ward does, in the lives of the French Royal family, are gratified to see a portrait by him of Louis XVL's daughter, "The Orphan of the Temple" (219), making a sketch of her prison ; and those upon whom the fortunes of Mary, Queen of Scots, exercise a similar fascination, have -in Mr. Elmore's very much better picture of her "and Christopher Norton at Bolton Castle" (211), an illustration of a not very dramatic event recorded in a passage from Froude, which is set out iu the catalogue. Mrs. Ward's " Poet's First Love ". (380), referring to Ilogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, shares with most pictures of its kind the quality of being unintelligible without a long quotation, and superfluous after reading it. Such a. key is less wanted to Mr. Wynfield's " Elizabeth and Essex" (389), where the first thing that strikes us is that the Queen is without her wig, the important point of a well- known story. Sir John Gilbert's "Tewkesbury Abbey, Queen Margaret carried Prisoner to Edward after the Battle of Tewkes- bury" (227), aims chiefly at the picturesque, but the line of figures is unpleasantly close to the foreground. In Mr. O'Neirli picture (1185), it is easy to see, without reference to the passage from Pepys, not only "An Incident in the Plague of London," but what that incident is,—namely, the removal of a healthy child from an infected house. Mr. Gow, without further explanation than " Mrs. Baddeley at the Pantheon " (812), gives us a lively and, to some extent, a self-interpreting scene, described in Thackeray's "Philip," where the popular actress, having been refused admission by an usher, is escorted into the assembly-room by the gallants of the day under an arcade of crossed swords. But there is too much family likeness among the gentlemen.
Tons, however, the most telling of the historical pictures are those which have the narrowest foundation on literary or antiquarian data, and therefore depend most largely on the artist's invention and design. Mr. Pettie's impressive group of Highlanders in green tartans, finely painted and effectively lighted, is called "Jacobites, 1745" (1217). The chiefs are supposed to be intent on a document relating to the coming battle of Culloden, and we need no more of history for the purpose of a picture. This is a diploma work, and one which worthily represents the painter. Mr. Armitage, in putting together in a simple academic form, a group of Christian sectarians disputing at a conference before Julian the Apostate (518) mentioned by Gibbon, contents himself with the artistic expression of what is essential to the incident, contrasting with good effect the clamorous discord of the theologians and the pagan's quiet smile as he reads his safety in their disunion. One of the most attractive pictures in the exhibition is also on a historic subject, though its chief popularity arises from other elements. In the " Babylonian Marriage Market " (482), de- scribed by IIerodotus, Mr. Long has found a still better occasion of painting a row of comely damsels than he had in the picture he exhibited a year or two ago, at the French Gallery, of a Spanish priest selecting a servant. The present large composition is the best work we have seen from his hand, an exceedingly well-painted one, and agreeable in its colour and quality of light. The subject, which might, and would by a Frenchman, have been handled quite otherwise, is here treated with perfect delicacy ; but its chief attraction is the bevy of fair women, seated in a line along the foreground, with the added source of entertainment that, in sup- posed accordance with the ancient custom, they are drawn up strictly in the order of their beauty. The picture professes to illustrate an elaborate process of apportionment of wives and fortunes between rich and poor which is said to have prevailed in Babylon. Herodotus relates that once a year in each district the marriageable virgins were assembled together and sold by auction by a public officer, one by one, beginning with the most beautiful. When she was disposed of, at the highest price she would fetch, the ugliest was put up, and knocked down to the man who would take her with the least money, this money being paid out of the sum received for the fairest. So far the method of proceeding is tolerably plain, though we should like to know whether the residue, if any, went into the State treasury or was settled on the prize wife. But it is not so easy to understand how the process would be continued under the more equal conditions of the central part of the series. Of course the whole system depends on the theory, pro- bably not quite true even in Babylon, that beauty is the one thing desirable in matrimony ; but it also assumes that there is an ascertainable zero-point, on the right side of which the attraction is to be reckoned as of positive and on the wrong side as of negative value. Mr. Long, following a modern commentator on Herodotus, assumes that there is such a boundary-line, and places his central figure squarely upon it, in an attitude of the calm in- difference which is supposed to result from a consciousness of the fact that she is to be given away gratis. But there could, in reality, be no reason why she should be made a subject of money competition as well as the rest. And the whole affair was probably a much simpler and more arbitrary process than Mr. Long represents it to be, and did not demand any of this nice graduation of beauty and ugliness. But without it we should not have had so pretty and symmetrical or so amusing a picture. Antiquaries and
ethnologists will, no doubt, find plenty to object to in the accessories, and in the types of man selected to repre- sent the people of Babylon ; but it is not necessary to be particular in these matters, where the whole conception is next door to a fancy scene. It would, however, we think, have been more conveniently treated in two pictures or compartments, one assigned to the female candidates, and the other to the auction, which, as it is, is cramped into the background, and loses much of the attractiveness to which it is fairly entitled. In the historic department of the gallery must be further mentioned a graphic picture by Mr. Crofts of a portion of the field of "Ligny" (877), which, with those by M. Philippoteaux and Miss Thompson, already mentioned, makes an interesting trio from the Waterloo campaign. Mr. Topham's picture of fugitives taking sanctuary in "The "on- vent of San Francesco during the Sacking of the City of Assisi by the Perugians, 1442" (403), is rather more an exciting scene of dramatic danger than a study of an historic event, but it has its value accordingly. In illustration of writers of fiction and of the drama, there is a strongly-painted scene by Mr. Pettie, "Hal of the Wynd's Smithy" (223) in "The Fair Maid of Perth," where the brawny blacksmith offers to fight the chief MacIan, as the price of a hauberk ; but the Highland gillie in the smoke of the forge is too melodramatic, and like a stage ghost ; two artists, Sir John Gilbert (540) and Mr. Pott (1200), give conventional versions of Don Quixote among the ladies at the Duke's Court ; Mr. Cope does little to elucidate Shakespeare in his pink version of "Anne Page and Slender" (56), and Mr. Millais confers no great lustre on either poet or artist in his " Crown of Love" (214), a magnified copy of a poor illustration made long ago to some stilted verses by George Meredith, in Once a Week. Credit is due to Mr. Ward and Mr. Kennedy in their respective pictures, " Lady Teazle, as Spinster, playing her Father to Sleep" (283), and "Mr. Hardcastle tells the Story of Old Grouse in the Gun- room '" (892), for suggesting a good class of subjects for illus- tration,--scenes, just a little off the stage, which bring out the characters designed by an author under circumstances in which he has not fully described them himself. In the latter picture, the idea is rather cleverly carried out, but not so in the former. We still leave unexamined the portraits, landscapes, and sculpture.
Previous page
