ART.
THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF PAINTERS IN WATER-COLOURS.
THIS is a good Exhibition, though a good many of the members appear to have mistaken it for the autumn collec- tion, and to have sent thereto sketches and studies instead of completed work. The distinction, however, between the Summer and Winter Exhibition has been yearly growing less perceptible, and the terms " sketches " and '• studies " would apply as little and as much to the works which are shown here at either season of the year. It might be well, perhaps, that a line should be drawn on the hither-side of such excessively trivial and unfinished work as, for instance, Miss Clara Montalba's " Garden of the Hesperides ;" and members should hardly be allowed to send studies from their own pictures to an Exhibition which professes to represent completed work. But these are comparatively unimportant drawbacks, and the fact remains that the Royal Society of Painters in Water- Colours are well represented in this present Summer Exhibition, that it is a pleasant collection to look at, and that the average merit of the work submitted is, technically speaking, extremely high. Besides this, the Society has at last elected some new Associates, whose work is not merely an echo of what may be called the minute domestic sentimental school of landscape and figure painting ; and, like most over-zealous reformers, the Council have rushed to the opposite extreme of toleration, and selected, at all events in one instance, artists whose work is wholly opposed, both in technique and sentiment, to that which the Gallery has chiefly represented of late years.
Mr. Arthur Melville is an artist of whom personally we know nothing ; but we imagine (from the manner of his painting) that it would be safe to say that he has had considerable acquaintance with work in black and white, probably executed for illustrated weekly journals, and that he has learnt his business thoroughly, and in a school which is not governed by the authorities of Burlington House. Gerome, Benjamin- Constant, and Fortuny all seem to have taught him something, and yet we cannot say that his work is anything but original, or that his style is a direct imitation of these or any other masters. Somewhere or another in Paris, we should imagine, he had studied, though not sufficiently long to knock the colour quality out of his painting ; and that subsequently he had lived for a sufficient time amongst the Eastern scenes which he depicts, to have discovered something of their essential and less superficial quality, to have understood them intellectually as well as pictorially, to have forgotten the rattle of the tram- car, and to have lost sight of the timid proprieties which for the most part govern English art. He may never be a great artist, but as far as his pictures go, he proves himself to be a genuine one ; and there is more of the real spirit of the East in these interiors, with their small scattered figures and comparatively prosaic subjects, than in all the Arabs whom Mr. Carl Haag has ever depicted turning up their eyes to "Allah," or defending wife and child in the desert from a hovering vulture or an imaginary robber. Mr. Allan, too, who has lately been elected an Associate, is, with all his restrictions and shortcomings (and these arc neither few nor unimportant), a strong, clear-headed Scotch painter, with a keen if unsentimental eye for the more picturesque aspects of Nature, and with a fresh, outdoor aspect about all his pictures, which seem, therefore, rightly to find a place on the walla of the Society which Cox and De Wint first made famous.
Another of the new Associates deserves more than a word
of mention, for he has brought in his pictures to this Gallery a very much needed quality,—the quality of humour. Even respectable people must laugh sometimes, we suppose, and, all aestheticism notwithstanding, why should they not now and then laugh in a picture-gallery ? Art is not all sham anti- quarianism, purple mountains, sunset-lighted labourers with a baby or a sweetheart, or neatly thatched barns with blue doors, and nicely washed ducks waddling in a "property" straw-yard. Wherefore, let us welcome Mr. Emslie, with his " Shakespeare, or Bacon ?"—a convivial gathering of three, one of whom holds aloft a bust of the poet, whilst another carves a ham ; and his less elaborate joke, entitled " He Never Told his Love,"—a fat-faced boy of about six years old gazing sentimentally into the face of a maiden well-nigh old enough to be his mother. Besides which, Mr. Emslie is capable of
other things than these, and has what may rightly be called a very pretty picture of a baby and a lamb, entitled " And on earth peace, goodwill towards men." This last is, indeed, far better than a description of its subject-matter would seem to imply. It is a really delicate study of child- life, and there is considerable beauty in the expression, pose, and the surroundings of the baby. Moreover, it is original, unaffected, and entirely unconventional ; a genuine bit of imaginative work, and as little trivial as it is pretending.
Let us turn from this work of perhaps the youngest member of the Society, to that of one of the eldest, to the President Sir John Gilbert's picture, entitled " After the Battle," a rout of beaten soldiers arriving at a ford, with a background of distant and hilly landscape, behind which a lurid glow of flames and smoke shut out the sky. There is certainly nothing of the weak- ness of old age in this picture, and those, and they are, unfor- tunately, many at the present time, who are accustomed to sneer at Sir John Gilbert's slightly old-fashioned sense of the picturesque and the dramatic, might fairly be challenged to produce another picture of the present year dealing with a historical or quasi-historical subject which possesses at once so much sense of beauty, so much truth of insight, so much indi- viduality, and so much dramatic power as this work of our veteran water-colour painter. It is rather pleasant to remember that amongst all the nobodies who have received the honour of knighthood, this special artist was made Sir John specifically for his services to the cause of Art in raising the whole character of book-illustration ; and it is pleasanter still to find him, towards the close of a long life, doing really fine, pathetic work most calmly uninfluenced by all the changes, eccentricities, and quasi-scientific practices of the great new Anglo-French, neo-Greek, and " Nature-in-a- nutshell " schools.
Let us look a little to the Gallery as a whole. Mr. Albert Goodwin is again present with an imaginative work. We should have called it another " Voyage of Sindbad," had not the catalogue informed us that it was " The Enchanted Isle," and further complicated the difficulty by quoting Shake- speare's— " Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made."
This quotation is, we should imagine, an afterthought ; at all events, it seems to us somewhat inappropriate in illustration of a picture which represents a pool close to the cliffs, with scarlet flamingoes standing about in various quaint attitudes, and a little red man (is he Ferdinand ?) scrambling on a rock in the middle distance. But, setting the quotation and the title apart, this is a genuine piece of work, and shows imagina- tion not of the machine-made kind, but of real home growth. True, it is scarcely more than a repetition of what Mr. Goodwin has done before, and done better, in his first " Sindbad Voyages;" but the work is such as no other artist could do at all, full of delicate fancy and pleasant colour ; and the sense of faerie which the artist has striven to instil into the composition, tells its own vivid, subtle story, as all Art stories should be told, without need of title or explanation.
Those of our readers who care for comparisons of pictures, and for noting how differently the same place may appear in the eyes of two capable artists, would do well to contrast Mr. Birket Foster's " Market-Place, Verona," with a picture by Professor Menzel in the Grosvenor Gallery, of which we gave a criticism last week. In the present work, the pinkest possible faces, the most brightly coloured flowers and dresses, the utmost detail of house, and umbrella, and market-stall, and handkerchief, dress and architecture, make up a bewildering, magnificently executed, but insignificant panorama of Italian life ; while in the German painter's picture, the intellectual and the human interest have so overpowered the merely superficial details of national costume and surrounding, that we regard the Verona Market-Place little more than we do the scene in which Mr. Irving acts his Hamlet at some crucial moment of the drama. Still, the former picture is accom- plished painting, and there is nothing therein which every one might not understand.
A word, too, must be said here for Mr. H. Henshall's " Married," a picture in four compartments, entitled re- spectively, " A Day," " A Week," " A Month," " A Year." A bride and her husband in a railway-carriage, she with her head upon his shoulder ; a bride and her husband in the stern of a river-boat, he with his head upon her knee; a bride and her
husband in another railway-carriage, he sleeping, she looking out of the window ; and, lastly, a wife and her husband by the fireside by lamplight, with a benevolent nurse bringing a small baby as a contribution to the hilarity of the evening. This is an amiable and well-considered work, full of carefully wrought-out detail of costume and surrounding ; and though the artist's purpose appears to be a little mixed, it is, we sup- pose, his intention to preach a pleasant homily on the fact that love passes from the stage of passion to that of indifference, and from that settles down again into a contented domestic jog-trot for the rest of the natural life of the man and woman concerned. From the satirical point of view, one is inclined to wonder what would have happened had the painter continued the series, and continued to illustrate the fortunes of this somewhat bourgeois couple for two, three, four, five, and even six years.
There are many other interesting pictures here, but none,. so far as we remember, call for very special remark, though a word must in justice be said about Mr. David Murray's perfectly impossible-coloured picture of " Dittisham Ferry, on the Dart," with its blue and green water, and with bright yellow shadows such as no man ever yet saw, or ever shall see, till the whole world turn to coal.
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