ART.
THE ROYAL ACADEMY, AND THE HANOVER GALLERY.
IN the room devoted at the Academy to water-colours and pastels, there are to be found, in the midst of the customary harvest of a trivial eye, two remarkable works, and several of merit. The two, which rank with the best works already singled out from among the oil-paintings, are a water-colour by Mr. Lionel Smythe, and a pastel by Mr. Edward Stott. To come upon a painting in this room which appeals by the' invincible merits of largeness of vision, character in drawing,. beauty in colour, dignity of style, is something of a shock, for the art of water-colour in our country is chiefly given over to professors of the opposites of these qualities. Mr. Smythe is' no conjurer with his medium, but he sees things in large and right relations ; and that is the indispensable quality for a painter. His favourite subjects, one would think, are likely , to appeal to a public that cannot be expected to appreciate independently the qualities referred to; Mr. Smythe is one of the few painters who can represent children, This year's drawing does not give so wonderful a revel and tangle of' them as last year's (an etching of the latter is hung in the Black-and-White Room); but an eye for the character of children, and the power of giving them movement, come out as clearly in this simpler group. To come on Mr. Stott's- Nature's Mirror is to pass from landscapes that are prose catalogues, and indifferent at that, to a landscape that is the poetry of nature. It is due here to the almost unfailing discrimination of the Hanging Committee, to mention that two other contributions of Mr. Stott are, like his Bathers of last year, so hopelessly skied, that it is impossible to say how much better they are than most of the pictures on the line. While the Academy hangs upon its line, and the public is encouraged by critics to applaud, landscapes like Mr. Good.. all's Loch Lomond, this is as it should be; but why should' artists continue to send to an institution that caters almost wholly for the lowest and most uneducated tastes in painting Our poets do not submit their works to the rejection or the. mercy of the smallest type of the editors of the Family .Herald or Police News. But because, in matters of painting, taste and education are very much less common than in matters of literature, the Tennysons and Svrinburnea of painting, except for the one or two who by a miracle are Academicians and painters still, must be hustled aside ; while the taste which in books would feast upon Hugh Conway and' Mr. G. R. Sims is regaled, not to say surfeited, by a thousand' canvases. And if we are to believe the bitter cry of an evening-. newspaper, these authors of the shilling dreadful and the drawing-room ballad in paint no longer know their busi- ness. They have been told, it seems, that painters should' care nothing for " subject " (to the painter, of course,. subject is half the battle, but his " subject " is seldom the same as the " subject " that commends itself to the book-maker), and accordingly they have deserted the good' old anecdotes and neglected to illustrate any new ones ; hence vailing and gnashing of teeth among the dealers who look out for taking pictures to engrave. It does seem a pity' that the tradesmen who have a knack for this kind of commo- dity should go out of their way because of a misunderstanding;: and the paper referred to is kind enough to suggest several' historical situations out of which the painter of this class and_ the print-dealer are likely to make a profit. But to return to, the Water-Colour Room. Among the water-colours and pastels' of merit may be mentioned those of Messrs. Nisbet, H. G. Massey (1,187), A. G. Bell (1,212), R. Jones' (1,174), J. Muirhead- (1,259), L. G. Cauldwell (1,265), R. G. Hutchinson (1,271), A. D. Rendall (1,295), A. G. Webster (1,309), M. Cotton (1,375);. and J. H. V. Fisher (1,394). The miniatures are, without exception, of the character of reduced photographs.
It were greatly to be wished that our exhibiting Societies.
were in the habit of extending hospitality to foreign artists, by direct invitation to the best of them to fill a given room or space. How salutary it would be, for instance, at the Academy or the Institute, to have a gallery given up to such a collection of water-colours as is to be seen at present at the Hanover Gallery in I3ond Street. They are the work of modern Dutch painters ; and when it is remembered that it was the collec- tions of older Dutch art in this country that gave birth to our landscape-painting, and when it is observed that a like fact, collections of contemporary Dutch water-colour, has given a fresh turn and impetus to water-colour in Scotland, it will be understood how useful such a step might be. The English art has too long been in a kind of hack-water; it is the Dutch who are in the main stream. Let anyone go from the Old Water- Colour Society to this exhibition, and he will see, if his eye is not inveterately tamed to small and disconnected observation of things, what is the difference between that way of observing and the observation that is capable of appreciating, and the method that is skilled in presenting, large relations. Take, for example, at random, H. J. Haverman's Merchants of Tangiers. Here the principal subject is a heap of oranges, and the artist, knowing that what he wants to carry away from that heap is the flush of colour, and not the needless assertion that he had counted the number of oranges, renders the blaze of orange, instead of losing the blaze by going close up and drawing the unimportant outlines of the individual fruits. It is often retorted that the painter saves himself the trouble of drawing by such a proceeding, and it is insinuated that he probably could not have drawn if he would. The trouble really is not to draw this or that, but to draw what is wanted ; it is much easier and lazier to go on drawing all the indifferent facts that can be seen. That is to save oneself the trouble of seeing a picture. Art in the matter is to see Its largely, to omit as freely, and to draw as subtly what is included, as is the case with A. H. Koning's sketch here of A Gray Day, Dordrecht. Look, again, at Thorn Prikker's colour fantasies. There is plenty of drawing in them that does not advertise itself; but everything that was not wanted for the picture in hand (as, for instance, the features), is thrown out of focus and obliterated, and attention is concentrated on an effect of colour and quality.
When foreign models are put for ward as examples to English students, we aro usually told that this is to impose a unifor- mity of method, some foreign trick of technique, on our native homely impulses. How foolish Raah talk is may be realised by any one who will look at the pictures by French artists at the same Hanover Gallery. . He will find there all sorts ; Rosa Bonheur, or Diaz (in certain moods), with as bad an impulse in colour as our own Landseer or Maclise ; but, not to speak of masters, like Corot, already classic, he will find a contem- porary painter, Cazin, painting as little like a machine-made French academic student as our own Orchardson. A master like this throws over the studio method that suits with a model posed for days and treated as still-life ; he reverts to a seeming nairet6 of observation, and aims at catching a character in movement, at snatching the charm of a scene at the cost of some of its less important anatomies, at rendering the ." fly-away" look of things in a quick, coloured hour. The ,Bathers here is not a first-rate example, but good enough to suggest these extra-academic merits; and it may be profitably compared with a work of Mr. Clausen's hanging in this same gallery. The Little Haymakers is extremely skilful work, and more "correct," if figures are to be wrought on still-life principles ; but in the matter of life they want what Cazin or Raffaelli seize upon, and to catch something of life is the highest form of "correctness." No one should miss a Courbet here, a lovely piece of sea and coast colour, or twenty other things that might be named if space allowed. D. S. M.
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