ART.
JOHN LINNELL.*
THERE is a small exhibition of pictures now open at the fine- art galleries of Mr. Arthur Tooth, which, though it only con- tains twenty-five pictures, deserves a few words of notice. The works therein are all by one master, the late John Linnell, and are all landscapes. Taken as a complete illustration of this artist's powers, the collection is an excessively incomplete one, and the works have not been especially well selected ; but in place of a more comprehensive exhibition, the friends of the artist will be glad to see even these few specimens of his work brought together at such a time as this.
It would have been a charming satire upon the conduct of the Royal Academy, which for twenty years refused to admit Linnell to its coveted honours, had a complete collection of his works been shown upon the walls of Burlington House; but the story of his first failure, and his subsequent rejection of Academic distinction, is so old a tale now as to be almost forgotten, and few of the Academicians who voted for other candidates during the period in which he sought admission to their ranks are still alive. It is well known how, after having had his name upon the list of candidates for twenty years, he at last withdrew it, and how he, a little later, refused the honour for which he had waited so long.
It is to be regretted that there is not in this gallery any specimen of the artist's powers as• a portrait painter, for it was in works of this class that Linnell's powers chiefly matured themselves. Surely, one or two of these might have been obtained with little trouble, for the list of their subjects in- cludes many well-known names, such as Malthus, Whately, and Carlyle. The majority of the landscapes here are later specimens of the artist's work, painted after he was seventy years old, and show clear evidence, in their confused com- position and unevenness of finish, of failing power. It is curious, though painful, to notice how-
" Fade the bright sun pictures one by one,"
under the hand of age; how the colour grows comparatively thin and poor, the drawing increases in coarseness and uncer- tainty, and how all concentration of light and shade becomes neglected.
It is a difficult art to understand, this of Linnell's, its faults and its perfections are both so alien to modern schools of paint- ing. Its spirit is more akin to that of the late William Palmer, of the Old Water-Colour Society, than that of any other painter, though something of this resemblance, which is very marked,
• The Loan Collection. At A. Tooth's, Haymarket.
may be, perhaps, due to the fact of both baying received instruction from John Varley. The influence of this latter master's work, especially in tree-drawing, is strongly trace- able in Linnell's pictures. But the likeness to Palmer is more deep than any mere superficial resemblance of style, or details of treatment. It is in the man himself, and his manner of regarding the subj eats of his art. Linnell was not, perhaps, a poet, as Palmer was, nor did he see the sky, shining with such lights of crimson, purple, and gold as did the painter of the " Tityrus," or "Heaven's Gate," but he had the same feeling for a landscape as a whole,—the same classical ideal of what a landscape should be, the same way of combining figures, trees, fields, clouds, and skies, to convey one dominant. impression, the same broad manner, and the same love of gorgeous colour and elaborate composition. And this method of -working and insight—or oversight, if we may so call it—led him to become a stylist in landscape of the most marked kind- He probably imbibed much of this from Varley, than whom, perhaps, no English artist ever painted more artificial pic- tures. After all, it was the fashion of the early part of this century, and no artist, born, as was Linnell, in 1790„ could hope altogether to escape therefrom. There is, notwith- standing, a healthy out-of-dooriness in his work,—a freshness and brightness, that are more of the fields than the studio. If they are not Nature, they are at least natural, and they are singularly free from doubt and hesitation. It is a sort of " Up- Guards-and-at-'em " sort of painting, animated by much the same feeling as won the battle of Waterloo. They are hardly great art, either in motive or technique ; there are in them few of the finer qualities of imagination, and their execution, though free, and frequently masterly, is often heavy, and not seldom coarse; There is a crudity of feeling in the pictures that seems to affect the colouring, which is always on the point of be- coming very fine, and which is almost always rained by some shortcoming, which seems to have been wilfully inserted. Perhaps his faults are more those of his age and his education than his own, but there can be little doubt that his art suffered. severely from the lack of proper training in the art of painting. Three or four years at such schools as those of Paris or _Antwerp would have given him the technical instruction which there was no means of acquiring in England, either then or now.
Judged by modern standards, his landscapes are deficient in human sympathy ; they are exclusively pictures of Nature. By this we mean, not that they are what is called realist pictures, but that they are reproductions of Nature treated exclusively from the pictorial side, as opposed to the real or the imaginative. They are neither Turners, nor Gainsboroughs. Still less are they Walkers, Corots, or Rousseaus. Intensely interesting, as reminiscences of a school which has passed away, and which included in its ranks the greatest landscapists that England has ever had; thoroughly good, pure, and healthy, with old-world health and simplicity—pleasant and fresh to look upon, and easy to understand—they are examples of a type of work, which has had its influence, and said its say, whether for good or evil, and which must be laid reverently with this, the last of its professors, to its rest in the quiet country churchyard.
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