A RT.
THE ROYAL ACADEMY.
[LAST NOTICE.] IN this, our last notice of the Royal Academy Exhibition for 1886, we shall endeavour to complete our survey of the few rooms which have not yet been noticed, and say a few words on the character of the Exhibition as a whole.
First, then, to finish our review of the galleries. We commence with the mention, in the eleventh room, of a portrait of H.R.H. the Princess Alice of Albany (exhibited by command of her Majesty the Queen), by Mr. George W. Joy. This is a pink- faced baby, sitting up against a red background, and staring placidly at the spettator, not very remarkable as a work of art, but still interesting to the ordinary visitor to the Academy from loyal and patriotic motives. Why, however, the Queen should desire to exhibit so indifferent a painting of her grand- daughter, is a little curious ; perhaps it is only to give the Royal sanction to the prevailing Academic practice of painting dressed- up babies. Anyhow, here is an infant Princess on the line, evidently wondering very much at finding herself in such a prominent position. As an example of what English painting may one day come to if our young men continue to form them- selves upon French artists, the little picture by Mr. Sherwood Calvert, called " A Spring Idyll," should be noticed. It repre- sents a girl in a meadow with two or three sheep. But it is of the treatment rather than the subject of the picture that we are speaking. There is a certain amount of clever arrangement in the work, and beyond this all qualities of fine art are absent. It is not only that the actual result is so feeble, but that it is feeble in a line which can lead to nothing. This method of Art is a cal de sac, and leads nowhither.
Look, for an example of the reverse style of painting, at Miss Alice Havers's picture of " The Faithful Shepherdess," in which every colour is over-emphasised both in the figure and in the landscape. Miss Havers has plenty of ability, and has done several clever pieces of painting, but this present work of hers is little less than abominable, in its conventionality, its coarse- ness, and its exaggeration. We should like to contrast with this Mr. Arthur Lemon's cool picture—a little deficient in colour, perhaps, but full of sobriety, good drawing, and that quality of style which is so hard to define—which he entitles "Threshing with Horses: Tuscany." Mr. Arthur Lemon's work is of a kind which is very likely-to be overlooked in an exhibi- tion. His pictures have none of that smart, "hit-you-in-the-eye" quality which arrests the attention of the visitor to a gallery. They seem rather, indeed, to withdraw themselves from notice, and though he has been for some years an exhibitor both at the Grosvenor Gallery and the Academy, and always an exhibitor of good work, his pictures have been but little noticed by the Press, and less still, we are afraid, by the general public. And yet he is one of those artists by whom we may truly say that the Art of England lives, since he is one of those content to do to the very utmost of his power, subjects which he believes to be beautiful, without regard to popular applause, or subservience to pecuniary reward,—not a great artist, perhaps, but a true and dignified one. These and other pictures of his are refreshing amidst the clamour and exaggeration of the pictures round them, and if for that reason only, deserve our gratitude.
There is a picture by Mr. Langton Barnard, which we should have introduced in our last article, called" Chobham Common." It hangs rather high up in the eighth gallery, and represents a group of Scotch firs and some withered bracken growing at their feet, and a stormy sky behind. The work is that of a young man, and leaves a good deal to be desired on tech- nical grounds. But there is undoubtedly considerable poetical feeling in the composition, and an absence of meretricious effect somewhat rare at the present day. If we might venture to give Mr. Barnard a word of advice, it would be that he should not be too easily satisfied, or in too great a haste to complete his pictures. At present he is rather in danger of leaving off his work where its difficulties begin to trouble him. By the way, the best of Mr. Hook's pictures, or, at all events, the
happiest in its general effect, is in the next gallery to this, and is called "An Undergraduate," a fishing-girl lying amidst the rocks on the seashore, reading, or rather not reading, an open book. But the one important work of this portion of the Ex- hibition, and, indeed, in some ways, the most remarkable portrait- ' picture in the Academy, is M. Fantin's " Antour du Piano," a group of Frenchmen in black clothes standing round one of their number, who is seated playing. It is a large picture, and the figures life-size, and painted in M. Fantin's well-known manner, in deep, almost grim, tones of grey and black, unrelieved by a single spot of pare colour; but it is a master's work beyond a doubt. The gestures and grouping of the five or six people are easy and natural. The whole realisa- tion of each individual is remarkable in its clearness, and the apparent simplicity of the means by which it is obtained. The impression given by the whole work is almost purely an impression of reality such as one might gain from looking at the actual scene. We should like our readers to notice at what a different pole of Art this is from the brilliant, mirror-like painting of Mr. Logsdail, which we criticised last week. For, on looking at M. Fantin's work more closely, we see that this impression of truth is by no means gained from a slavish repetition and emphasis of each detail of the scene, but from the painter's grasp of the situation as a whole, and from his perfect mastery in subduing each portion of it into harmony with all the rest ; for—and this is the gist of the matter—this picture is essentially a work of art, as well as a work of truth. No one but an artist could possibly have rendered the scene in this way. It is not the work of a human camera, but the work of a painter who thinks and feels, as well as sees. All of this is tolerably evident to any one who has the slightest knowledge of painting. But it may be remarked—for these things always should be remarked and insisted upon, though it is somewhat wearisome to do it—that the Royal Academy have, as usual, when they get a really fine work by an outsider, hung it above the line in one of the last rooms of the Exhibition. It may be worth while to remark here, that out of the two or three hundred por- traits at the Academy, there are only three which are really notable, and of these the two which are most important, and both of which are by Frenchmen, are hung above the line in the later rooms of the Exhibition ; whilst the one which is by an Academician is, naturally enough, on the line in the large gallery. We do not complain of the latter fact ; we do complain of the former. As we said in our third notice, we say again here, that it is ridiculous and unjust to hang M. Carolus Duran badly in an exhibition like the present—and, perhaps, even more unjust (since he is an artist whose fame is not assured) to bang this great picture by M. Fantin anywhere except upon the line in a prominent position.
There is in the remainder of the Exhibition but little else upon which we care to dwell at length ; for the water-colour room, although it has much average work, has but little which is notable ; and the black-and-white room, which includes etchings, drawings, and engravings, is rather beneath its usual average. The etching honours herein are borne off almost entirely by Mr. R. Macbeth, the Associate who has, indeed, become almost wholly an etcher, instead of a painter. We confess we grudge him a little this restriction of his powers, for he is an artist of genuine and original impulse, and might have taken in some ways the place which Fred Walker left vacant. Not, perhaps, in the whole of England, is there so English a painter as Mr. Macbeth was in his earlier days, and as he might be again if he chose. Such pictures as " A Lincolnshire Gang," " The Potato Harvest," " The Reed-cutters in the Fens," and the " Coming from St. Ives Market," are genuinely national in a very peculiar way. But when Mr. Macbeth painted these works, he was either skied or rejected by the Academy,—not one of these, if we remember rightly, being hung upon the line ; and since he has been elected to that august body, his work has become much less powerful, and he seems to have been taken with a desire to make his work as pretty as possible, irre- spective of truth. Partly, no doubt, as we have said, this comes from the painter's having the major part of his time taken up with the reproduction of other artists' works. You cannot do half-a-dozen big copper-plates in a year or two, from Pinwell, Walker, and Mason, and paint great pictures in the interval. So Mr. Macbeth has given up trying to paint great pictures altogether. As we have said, we regret the fact. But this is one of the special drawbacks to the present state of Art in England, that the fine-art publishers almost invariably succeed in getting hold of the best men, and making them do more or less perfunctory work, just because of its marketable value. Sir John Millais for the last six years has thus been producing picture after picture of little girls in sentimental attitudes for reproduction. Herkomer has exhausted himself in the eudeavonr to combine the production of large etchings, and mezzotints for the publishers, with his original oil-painting ; and now, having discovered that Mr. Macbeth can etch Walker better than any man that lives, or any man that ever will live, the fine-art publishers are insisting upon his producing plate after plate from this artist's works.
Let us now say a few words in summary of this present Academy Exhibition, though the subject is scarcely a pleasant one. It does not matter much that one Academy should be less interesting than another, or even that the best men should be unrepresented, or represented by inferior work. But it does matter a great deal that English painting should show no definite aims and no assured methods, but should be wandering about, as far as subject goes, in search of the cheapest sentiment and the thinnest drama, and should be fumbling for its effects by all manner of tricky methods, rather than seeking to obtain them by true and careful painting. It is in this respect that the action of the Academy is, and has been for many years, so blameworthy. It is inconceivable that a body that puts its official imprimatur on such brushwork as Mr. Colin Hunter's, Mr. Macwhirter's, and Mr. Pettie's, can really care, even if it knows, in what good painting consists ; and the mere fact of such paint- ings being considered worthy of Academic recognition, is the strongest possible temptation to young painters to do their work in the same fashion, and to attain by audacity and slap-dash, the effects which they see held up before them as examples on the Academy walls. If it were not for this, it would matter but little that A, B, C, or D were or were not in the Academy. No body is perfect, certainly no large corporate body which has many personal and diverse interests ; and the Academy might well be pardoned for electing B and not electing C, and so on, in individual cases. But from its very position, the one duty which it is called upon, above all others, to perform, is that of keeping up the standard of painting ; and if this is not done by the Academy, it can be done by no other body in Eng- land, and the standard must fall ; and what is more, not only must the standard fall, but it has fallen, and in some respects, bad as was the art of forty to fifty years ago, the brushwork, the actual painting of the pictures, was frequently preferable, because, however blundering, it was a genuine attempt at excellence.
On walking round the Academy, this is the fact that strikes our attention most vividly,—that there is no English school represented there at all, that no English school of painting is actually in existence at the present day. We have the Antwerp Englishmen, and the Paris Englishmen, and the Dusseldorf and the Roman Englishmen, and so on, and we have a few examples of what may be called the old-Academy Englishman ; but all these various schools are at loggerheads with each other, and with all the rest, and the Academy does nothing whatever to reconcile their differences. Nor is it possible to gain from a survey of the works of Academicians and Associates any knowledge of what that body considers good painting. How on earth a student of Art who goes to Burlington House, seeking for a guide, can possibly reconcile in his mind, or adopt in his own practice, such diverse views of painting as are exemplified by Mr. Leslie and Mr. Colin Hunter, Mr. Burne Jones and Mr. McWhirter, Mr. Eyre Crowe and Sir Frederick Leighton, is inconceivable ; and such contrasts might be easily multiplied. But yet the Academy professes to be a teaching body, as well as an exhibiting one, and to be the authoritative guide to good art in England. Suppose a professor of literature were to hold up to his students George Eliot and Carlyle as examples of good writing, and in the next breath were to shove the Police News before them for a similar purpose. There is no exaggeration really in saying that this is almost literally what the Academy does, and the effect produced thereby upon young painters, is exactly similar to that which would be produced on the literary students by the above process. However, we must not dilate upon this theme at the end of an article. Suffice it to note here that the want is very great in England at the present time of some real teaching in Art—some teaching which shall be national, consistent, and sincere—and some recognition of the fact that if good painting is to be admired, bad painting is to be detested, and not to be put by the authorities side by side with good work, equally honoured and sanctioned.
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