ART.
[FOURTH NOTICE.]
CONTINUING our survey of the Royal Academy with the seventh room, the most noticeable picture is the " Habet " of Mr. Deady Sadler. This represents a monk who has caught the biggest pike of the season, showing it to the Abbot and the rest of his convent brethren. It is a large picture, full of that species of humour which Mr. Sadler habitually shows in his work,— humour of a somewhat gross, full-flavoured kind, and embody- ing a conception of monastic life very much as it is given in Sir Walter Scott's novels. All these monks are Friar Tucks, or personages of a similar character ; all have round faces and fleshy bodies, and a general aspect of joviality nardly restrained by their sacred calling. For the rest, Mr. Sadler's picture is cleverly composed and well painted, in a strictly methodical, matter-of-fact manner, and is one of those composi- tions which look especially well in an exhibition, since they strike the point aimed at smartly and forcibly. It may be noticed that this comic view of the monk's character is a very favourite one with English artists,—indeed, almost the only pictorial conception at which we have hitherto arrived. Whether there is any real artistic material to be got out of it, is another question ; we are inclined to think that all this monastic clowning is more suitable for purposes of illustrated journalism than serious oil-painting. However, since Mr. Sadler continues it year after year, we suppose it has its own public, and, as Longfellow says of Lucifer in "The Golden Legend,"— " Works for some good
By us not understood."
Near to this is one of Mr. Macwhirter's birch-trees, entitled "4 Winter Morning," in which the feathery branches of the tree are thinly coated with snow against a pale-grey sky. As usual, the artist is seen at his best in this subject, in which he has painted a great many examples ; indeed, the present picture is almost delicate in its handling. It shows little of that coarse melodrama of Nature of which Mr. Macwhirter is so fond, and of which the picture of "The Three Witches " in the pre- sent Gallery is a noble example ; indeed, if the capacity of making a good study of a bare tree were sufficient to justify a painter's election as an Academician, Mr. Mac- whirter would deserve the Academic honours which he has so long received. The picture of the cattle on the sea-shore, by Mr. Otto Weber, which hangs near this, and which is entitled " Polurrian Cove, Cornwall," should be noticed for its careful drawing of the animals. There is, perhaps, no one in England, with the exception of Mr. Davis, at the present time, who draws cattle better than Mr. Weber, though his painting is rather flat and uninteresting. Mr. Colin Hunter's "When the Boats came in" is, we are sorry to say, but another proof of how far that painter has deteriorated of late years. The coarse exaggeration of its colour and the sloppy carelessness of its brushwork, are scarcely to be paralleled in this Exhi- bition, and the one quality of Mr. Hunter's work which used to make us forget his rough-and-ready handling—_a certain poetical sentiment, that is to say—has almost entirely disappeared. His work is now nothing but an exaggerated repetition of certain effects which he has found to be popular. We should like to contrast with this work another picture by a Scotch artist—Mr. David Murray—which hangs in the eleventh gallery, and is entitled "Glen Fano* head of Loch Lomond." This is, indeed, one of the best landscapes here ; full of careful .observation, and painted with considerable skilL The treat- ment of the foreground and near water especially, with its
scattered pebbles and softened reflections, is particularly happy, and the whole picture has an aspect of out-of-doors, and very much the same freshness of impression which is notable in Mr. Hunter's work, though it is here combined with delicacy and detailed truth.
To return to our seventh gallery, what are we to say of the large picture of "Peter the Great at Deptford," by Mr. Seymour Lucas, a recently elected Associate ? Well, it is a tall composition, in which Peter the Great and the shipbuilders are examining plans in the foreground, while the unfinished ship towers up into the sky behind them. Cleverly composed, and very carefully executed, and, alas ! profoundly uninteresting this work is, forcing us to wonder what possible purpose such a composition could answer, unless it were to impress pictorially upon a child's mind the historical fact which it records. Why is it that if our artists must paint these unpictorial incidents, they do not choose incidents of our own time for their record ?
Give us the Prince of Wales laying the first stone of the Tower Bridge, or Sir Edward Watkin inspecting the workings of the Channel Tunnel. They might then, at all events, produce work which might be useful for the future, even if it were not delight- ful in the present. But as for these dull renderings of com- paratively uninteresting historical incidents, they seem to us to have no artistic or intellectual value, but to be simply com- binations, more or less successful, of costume and archwology. Their utmost value is to be accurate, and, indeed, they never ought to be looked at, save when treated by Mr. Freeman on the subject, to enforce their interest. A thousand times preferable in our eyes is the unaffected conventional picture-making of Mr. Edwin Hayes—the old-fashioned sea-painter—in that at least he does succeed in making a pleasant picture, although he makes it somewhat too much after the fashion of a pudding; so many boats, so much sky, so much sea, a light here and a dark there, and all according to recipe. Still, the work is fresh, and if not natural, gives an impression of Nature which is perhaps, on the whole, more true than many so-called naturalistic paintings. Mr. Hayes is, moreover, a fine work- man, who draws his boats vigorously and well, and puts them into the water easily. His skies, and seas, and shipping all belong to one another, and from one end to the other, the picture is a complete piece of work, done 'by an artist who knows his business. Perhaps the same may be said of Mr. C. E. Johnson, a painter who, by the way, habitually tackles a subject of extreme difficulty, and, to use an ex- pressive phrase, "does his level best at it." The present composition, which is in the next gallery to the one of which we have been just speaking, is entitled "Cub-Hunting in the Midlands," and is one of the pleasantest works we have seen by this artist, showing a broad open space in the foreground sur- rounded with great trees, and in the distance long stretches of richly wooded country. Miss Clara Montalba gives a fine bit of drawing, entitled "The Port of Amsterdam." Bat this lady's work has, as we have frequently had occasion to remark, lost very much of its attractive quality owing to her adoption of certain mannerisms. She seems to have lost all power of seeing Nature at all accurately, and twists whatever scene she is occu- pied in reproducing, into accordance with her preconceived ideas ; so that, whether it is the Thames at London Bridge, or the Grand Canal at Venice, or the Port of Amsterdam, we have always the same dark water and white sky, reddish sail, and dark blots of rich colour for all the details of hull and mast, and figures which are introduced. It is a pity, too, for this lady is a genuine artist, and can, when she chooses, give us as delicate work as any of our male painters. Perhaps she will one day give up painting in this swaggering, masculine style of hers. It is not necessary that she should thereby lose any of her power, though she will undoubtedly gain much in beauty. But at present the best things she does are her least-finished sketches, since in them we are not forced to recognise the incompleteness of her style. In this seventh gallery there is also a very large picture, with figures of more than life-size, by Mr. Solomon J. Solomon, entitled "Cassandra," a nude man carrying a nude woman down some steps from an altar surrounded by a kind of a mist of smoke from a torch cast down in front of him. This is work which is far more common in the Salon than in the Academy, a huge tour de force by a comparatively young artist bidding for fame ; or, rather, trying to snatch it rudely from our grasp. The figures are well drawn and well composed, but the whole composition is just a little blatant, and it is far too evidently a work which the artist has executed for the purpose of showing his skill rather than for any delight in the subject. Still, pictures like these are not likely to become common in the English school, and there is a good deal to be hoped for from a young artist who has the pluck to go at an intensely difficult subject like this, and come so near to success as in the present instance. The one word we would whisper in Mr. Solomon's ear is that he should not forget, in trying to become a painter, that he should also be an artist, for the artist is not a man who paints well only, but who paints well something which be sees, and makes others see, to be beautiful ; and, perhaps, in this connection, "An Arab Dance," by Miss Dorothy Tennant, may consistently be noticed, since in that Miss Tennant has taken an every-day subject, simply London children dancing in the street, and made it beautiful by the mingled truth and ingenuity with which she has treated it. There is probably no prettier piece in the whole Academy than the broken line of these dancing children, and the subject, though just a little sweetened by the kind woman's hand, is never- theless in its essentials a faithful likeness. The children are not dressed up for exhibition purposes, or credited with any undue amount of grace or picturesqueness. In this special line Miss Tennant has always had a touch of real genius. It is several years now since we remember seeing a large collection of her drawings of London children, which she had, we believe, then done entirely without instruction, and which, as a matter of fact, were infinitely better than any of the smooth, fat nymphs whom she has imitated from M. Henner of late years ; and we hail with satisfaction her return to her own subject. No one has ever yet painted the "idylls of the gutter" as well as Miss Tennant might paint them if she only gave her mind to it.
Let us turn to a very different work, Mr. Logsdail's Venetian canal scene, which shows us the interior of one of the rougher kinds of Venetian gondolas, with a party of men, women, and children breakfasting, in one of the larger canals. This picture of extreme ability is, perhaps, more vivid in its rendering of out- door light than any work in the Exhibition. It is painted, too, with great dexterity, and a kind of hardihood which has almost the effect of genius. The colour, too, is, if not good, strong and impressive, and the artist's brnshwork is greatly superior to that of the ordinary English painter. It is, indeed, just the sort of picture that a clever student would almost worship, and that is, perhaps, its greatest condemnation, as well as its most attrac- tive quality. Every one finds on looking at this composition that he cannot get away, not even for a moment, from the skill of the artist who executed it ; we cannot think of Venice, or the at fresco, or any one of the characters in the boat. We realise the scene with our eye keenly, but with our mind and heart not at all. It is a fairly painted puppet-show, a gaily coloured and ingeniously drawn superficiee of canvas and paint, and that is all ; there is nothing behind it and nothing beneath it, so to speak, and the impression left, after a long look at the work, is a dazzled, bewildered one, just as if we had been looking at the reflection of the natural scene in a mirror whilst standing on our head. After this glare of Venice, it is a pleasure to tarn to the cool, blue-grey sea, and stormy yellow sky, of Mr. Henry Moore's "Breezy Morning on the East Coast," and notice that what our clever countryman has missed in Venice, our own special sea-painter has been enabled to find on our own shores, —namely, poetry and beauty.
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