ART.
TWO EXHIBITIONS.
I.—" FAIR WOMEN" AT THE GRA.FTON GALLERY. THE fair women range from the time of Holbein to the time of Boldini, but in effect the exhibition is of the great English school of portraiture, with just enough of what preceded and of what has followed to put it in proper relief and per- spective. We may trace the portrait of a lady from the early lime, when the saint had but lately gone from her side and left the gravity of the donor in church upon her features, through the art of the Court and the presence-chamber down to the easier, though still stately drawing-room and nursery
of Reynolds; or may watch the means of visual attack and effect accumulate, from the searching line with just so much of modelling as explained a face, on to the delight in subtly rounded form for its own sake ; from the shadow that merely expounded to the shadow of picturesque mystery, and from the pleasant decorative tint that distinguished a mass, to the glow of colour that expressed a splendid mood. With means selected from this completed armoury our tradition begins in Rubens and Vandyke, and decays through Lely, Kneller, Richardson, Hudson. Then comes the extraordinary revival and afterglow in Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Romney, with its decay in Lawrence and Hoppner. To see all these painters together is to have a general impression of wonderful coherence and grandeur; it is only on a second review that the individual differences become very marked. The exhibition is one to be visited again and again. Perhaps the most remarkable among the less familiar pictures is the Zurbaran in the large room. It hangs next a Lely conceived in the same scheme of colours, and to compare the treatment of the blue and gold by the Spaniard with the more careless though still masterly paint, ing of the Dutchman, is to have a lesson in painting. There is the same superiority in the tender delicacy with which the details are handled, while preserving an equal breadth ; and in the design of the Zurbaran a stricter sense of form contrasts- with a somewhat sloppy grace in the later painter. A re- markable Romney, the Elizabeth, Lady Forbes, of Sir John Hay, is also unfamiliar; the huge hat boldly taking its place in the design and yet cunningly subdued so that the flesh tints may carry, attests the decorator. Two famous Rey- noldses—the Duchess of Devonshire and Child and Mrs. Hartley as a Nymph with a Young Bacchus—are splendid examples of the combining and wreathing of forma with a Venetian science; and there is a most interesting group, No. 185, that shows how Sir Joshua's colour and handling instinctively altered with another medium. Among the moderns, an un- usually fine Watts, the Bianca, is the picture that goes best with the older school, based as it is on the same ideas of pic- ture-making, and the beauty and candour of expression in the face make it the more attractive.
The common ideas in picture-making that give so handsome and congruous an air to the large room, would be interesting to analyse at length. Those painters, so constantly em- ployed in the complicated art of portrait-painting, and so constantly successful, worked on a base of secure science, very different from the tentative naturalism so frequent in the present day. Not only had they the secret of how to make paint lie handsome on canvas, but they had a clearly arrested idea of what a picture ought to look like, the kind of relief their flesh was to have against its conventional background, and how "a flesh" was to be made. In Reynolds particularly there was a conviction on two points,—warmth of tone and fullness of form. It is sometimes argued that the glowing golden-whites of the painting of this period are a mere effect of age and varnish, and that the chilly flake-white of the modern picture will acquire the same tone as years go on. Nothing could be more absurd. Reynolds, with his eye on Titian, definitely argued that the central, important masses of a picture should be painted in warm colours, and that a white should be supposed "illumined by the rays of the setting tem." He argued that the pleasure felt in such an arrangement had a logical basis in nature ; that since the illuminated part of any object is warmer than the shadowed, so the relieved, lighted mass of a picture should answer with a warm colour to the light that fell upon it. "It is presenting to the eye the same effect as that which it has been accustomed to feel." It is a curious piece of casuistry, but if any one compares the sunset illumination of a Reynolds with the paler tints of daylight in the lookers-on, he will see how steadily the painter acted on his theory. Upon this golden base he proceeded less by the modern piecemeal measurement of " values " than by the picture- making idea of " keeping " to get his idea of bright flesh, and in the treatment of forms, clumsy as his drawing sometimes was, he attained that full roundedness which the modern too often loses in the notation of minor planes and projections. Beside the Reynoldses and Romneys, Mr. J. J. Shannon's painting looks flat and papery, and Mr. Herkomer's flesh upon white turns to brown upon grey. Gainsborough, much as he shared in the general picture-idea of Reynolds, was, of course, a heretic on some point*. He held by the
cool Vandyke rather than by Titian. His full-length lady in blue is a protest against the yellow theory, and sometimes he draws a head like a vaguely constructed bag, on which separate points of feature and expression are noted with an intuitive subtlety, but a loss of construction. Interesting as those individual outbreaks of his are, it is doubtful whether in a general comparison his portraits, as pictures, would hold their own against the fullness and glow of Reynolds. The rebellion in the matter of colour is against one term in a whole convention, and the large sketch, for all its charm of expression, does not hold against the "fullness" of Sir Joshua.
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