ART.
THE ROYAL ACADEMY.
[FIRST NOTICE.]
THIS year's is an April Academy,—one of shine and shower, but as a whole, bright with the breath of the spring and the early promise of the year. It is an Academy where the young men are doing the best work, and is so far full of hope and productive- of pleasure ; it is an Academy where some of those who have, done good service to Art in former years show works which can only be accounted for by failing powers or perverted ambitions, and the exhibition thus alloys our enjoyment with regret. On the whole, however, this year's collection is the best and most promising that has been held for several years.
Of the three artists who are probably the greatest in England, Mr. Watts, Mr. Barne.Jones, and Sir John Millais, the two first are absent, and the third had better have been in their company, at all events so far as his principal picture is concerned. That the painter of "The Huguenot" should have lived to produce such a work as the "St. Bartholomew's Day" in the present exhibition, almost defies belief; so utterly have all the tenderness and beauty of the early painting disappeared. This stamping, mouthing Catholic, in his rusty brown suit ; this beseeching nun flopping in the most approved Adolph i fashion at his knees ; this wooden monk, who stands with uplifted arm and pointing forefinger outside the door, presumably inciting the eavalier to join in the massacre,—are all our old friends of trans- pontine melodrama, lay-figures with no breath of life, no truth of emotion, no specialities of character, no beauty of gesture or -colour. Stripped of every modest grace, of every difficult earnest -effort after 'beauty and truth, there stands revealed in this picture nothing but the sheer hard painting ability of its artist ; of the man that is, who once lent a new grace to English girl- hood, and gave by the beauty of his art a fuller meaning to love and self-sacrifice. A bad picture,—that is the simple truth of it, much as we regret to say so, though the work is by Sir John
This is the great artistic failure of the year; the corresponding triumph is beyond doubt Mr. John Sargent's picture, entitled " Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose," in which two fair-haired children are lighting Chinese-lanterns in a garden, surrounded by flowers. The time is that of a summer's evening ; the attempt has been to show the conflict of lights between the fading day and the lanterns, and its effect upon the various coloured flowers, ." carnation, lily, lily, and rose." Had Mr. Sargent only succeeded in rendering this effect truthfully as a study, he would have done a supremely difficult thing, and would have deserved high praise ; but the artist has done far more than this. He has succeeded in painting a picture which, despite the apparent bizarre,-is of its subject, despite the audacious originality with which he has treated it, is purely and simply beautiful as a picture. The introduc- tion and, painting of the chidren's figures, the disposition of the masses of flowers and leaves with which they are sur- rounded, the delicately bold colouring of the roses, lilies, and carnations,—in all of these respects is this picture an exquisite work of art. And even now we have left its chief merit untold, and must leave it undescribed ; for how is it possible to describe in words that subtle rendering of brilliance and shadow, that united mystery and revelation, which render this composition so admirable P Honour to the young artist who has succeeded in combining, as we at least have never yet seen combined in a picture of this "impressionist" school, truth of effect and beauty -of colour, who has given us in the little world of his picture the subtle mingling of fact and fancy which exists in every great work of art, and renders its subject freshly beautiful while leaving its details true. We congratulate Mr. Sargent upon this achieve- ment, and do so all the more heartily as it fell to our lot last year to speak strongly as to what seemed to us the wilful ugliness of his large portrait group. But for the future let him remember there is no excuse. He has proved himself capable of producing a beautiful thing, and so given hostages to fortune.
From a twilit garden to the crowded circus in front of the Royal Exchange is a far cry ; but this latter subject is the one which Mr. Logsdail has chosen for his picture, which is, after Mr. Sargent's work, the cleverest thing in the exhibition. We say distinctly "cleverest," not meaning thereby most beautiful or most admirable. It is simply a piece of marvellous percep- tion and dexterity of handling,—a coloured photograph in its reality of incident ; a picture in its grouping, its selection of facts, and its concentration. Here, if anywhere, we can say with confidence, "the man knows his trade." There is a little more than that in it, truly ; but this prevailing impression springs from the picture's very accurate representation of shadow and light. The work is, in its intellectual motives, perceptive but not sympathetic, clear-headed but cold ; and -technically it is here and there a trifle coarse in its handiwork, and a little thin in colour. We mean by this last that the -colour has no apparent deptli,—one looks at it, but not into it ; and with all really fine colour, the latter is the case.
One of the most popular pictures of the year will most pro- bably be Mr. Waterhouse's " Mariamne," in which he has shown the wife of Herod leaving the Tribune after her trial, and turning her head towards the King in one last appeal for pity. This is an impressive, and in several ways a fine com- position. The chief woman's figure is nobly posed, and both face and attitude are instinct with dignity and impressive- nese. The attitude and expression, too, of Salome, who stands in the background by the side of the King's throne, are cleverly conceived and painted ; and the colour of the whole, though hardly very subtle or delicate, is unobtrusively pleasant. To this it must be added that the picture is, like so many modern works, scarcely likely to improve upon acquaintance, or to be enduringly delightful. There is a thin dramatic quality about its intellectual aspect hardly
superior to that which we might gain from a tableau at the Porte St. Martin or the Chatelet ; it is rather emotional than tragic, and the imagination of the artist seems to have abruptly weakened after he had conceived the chief figure of his scene. The Herod, for instance, is a broken-down, unin- teresting object, who practically counts for nothing in the com- position; the Judges and the executioner, the merest lay-figures; and the architectural details, though effective enough as a back- ground, savour of stage carpentry. From a technical point of view, the weak point of the work is the painting of the marble steps, balustrade, &c., which are in the immediate foreground. They are practically the least substantial things in the picture, as any of our readers can easily determine for themselves by holding up a catalogue across the picture (at the height of about one-third of the whole composition), and looking at the spaces above and below. This lower third of the work is, indeed, out of tone, having been kept down so as not to interfere with the prominence of the central figure ; and the result is the loss of solidity and a certain flimsy, stagey effect, which will not let us forget for a moment that we are looking at paint and canvas. Nevertheless, this is an attractive picture, and, for a young man's work, a notable achievement.
As we have said, the younger artists have the best of it in this exhibition, and one of their greatest successes is to be found in Mr. Frank Herkomer's portrait of his father, the Royal Academician and Slade Professor at Oxford. This is a dark, almost black, picture—the Professor is in his University gown— very carefully and thoroughly painted, and unusually well drawn. The worst part of the work is the manner in which the hands are drawn and painted, which, though expressive, is somewhat coarse and clumsy ; but the likeness is excellent, the suggestion of colour very harmonious, the flesh-painting distinctly good and very unaffected. A successful bit of work, indeed, this, for anybody, and most creditable if it be, as we suppose, by a quite young painter. As a contrast to this black Professor, look at Mr. Albert Moore's delicately robed maidens, in thinnest draperies of orange and white. A very elaborate and delightful piece of decorative painting, artistic in its every touch, and admirable in the attainment of the desired purpose in the most direct way. There are very few English painters who attempt at all work of this character, where a definite scheme of colour and composition is thoroughly worked out from first to last, and the required result is attained with something amounting to scientific certainty. If a fault must be found, it is that Mr. Moore's purpose is a shade too evident. It is once more notable that this painter has not yet been elected to Academic honours, though, as we have been saying for the last ten years (in common with pretty well every artist in England), his work has long had no rival in its especial line.
"The Last Watch of Hero," by Sir Frederick Leighton, P.R.A., deserves recognition, if only for the attempt shown therein to return, if ever so little, to the real world of passion and human experience, as opposed to the dreamy Arcadia in which the President has so long lingered. It is a single figure standing behind a marble-columned balustrade gazing eagerly towards the spectator. In the predella there is a study in monochrome of the body of Leander washed ashore upon the rocks. The picture is only partially successful ; the heroine's face is, to tell the truth, uninteresting ; perhaps the imagination is too severely strained by being asked to see a whole tragedy in a half-length of a nicely draped female with her eyes wide open. For the rest, it is smoothly painted in the President's usual manner. The lower portion of the window-seat, which forms the base of the picture, is curiously out of tone with the rest of the work,—so much so that we should imagine it has been by oversight left unfinished.
In this first notice we can only briefly allude to one or two of
the remaining pictures which we afterwards hope to criticise at length,—to Mr. Solomon's "Samson and Delilah," in which, in a twenty-foot canvas, the shorn hero struggles with his captors; to Mr. Henry Moore's big blue seascape, with its weight of tumbling water, and clotted masses of clouds in a blue sky; to Mr. Hubert Herkomer's portrait of a lady in black (un-
named), one of the most solidly painted and good portraits in the exhibition ; to "Mr. W. S. Gilbert," as painted' by Holl, in grey velveteen riding costume ; the best Holl portrait of this year; to the, in our opinion, best portrait of all, the one of "Mr. Briton Riviera," also by Mr. Herkomer, admirable as a likeness and masterly as a painting ; to the two pathetic subject-pictures by Messrs. Bartlett and Stanhope Forbes, of some Irish peasants bringing a little coffin across to the mainland for burial, and of some tramps descending a brown (rather too brown) lane in a a weary, hopeless fashion ; to Mr. Tadema's comparative failure of "The Women of Amphissa," to which we feel much as a sceptical Athenian might had he caught Aris- tides out in cheating at marbles ; to Mr. Faith's "Sir Roger de Coverley," or Mr. Brett's picture of Ardentive Bay, which he informs us was painted when the barometer was very low, but which is nevertheless as bright as English paint can make it. Nor can we stop long to discuss Mr. Dicksee's "Hesperia," with her hanging robes of gorgeous hue and texture, her enticing face and pretty hand, and everything about her that could be desired in the way of orange-groves, statues, &c., but sadly wanting a figure to support her drapery. Mr. Albert Goodwin, too, is here for a moment in the grey beauty of Assisi "sleeping in the moonlight," for the truth of which effect the present writer can vouch ; and in another voyage of Sinbad, in which a great galleon frets a stormy sunset with its splintered timbers, and tumbled masses of ruddy sea- weed coat the rocks against the dun water. Mr. East has a good landscape, and Mr. MacWhirter a fresh loch scene, and Mr. Colin Hunter is, as usual, forcible, and as rough as he con- veniently can be. Mr. Crofts has a good, steady try at "The Retreat from Moscow," and would be very successful with his subject, were it not that Meissonnier has done it before him. And so, with one word about Mr. Onslow Ford's statuette which he calls "Peace," and which is an interesting and unpretending piece of work, we must close the present notice.
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