ART.
THE WATER-COLOUR SOCIETY.
SOME changes have taken place since the last exhibition of the Water-Colour Society. It has lost, by death, a worthy associate, Mr. Deane, from whose hand, however, there are still a few beauti- ful studies of colour in this year's collection ; it has received a valuable reinforcement in the figure department by the election of Mr. Alma Tadema, and it has added to its constituent parts a body of honorary members. One only of the latter has exercised his privilege of exhibiting, namely, Mr. Prescott Hewett, who sends two modest, but refined little holiday studies of Poole waters re- posing in a silvery light. Mr. Tadema exhibits one of his favourite subjects of a classic studio, with connoisseurs examining a picture. It is painted in cool, neutral tones, and contains less of architec- tural ornament and close imitation of texture than is usual in his oil pictures, the interest being chiefly derived from the well-con- treated expression of the two critics, one looking closely and with satisfaction at the detail of the picture on the easel, the other disposed to be less content with the general effect as seen from a greater distance. Except these, there are no absolutely novel features in the exhibition. But a few of the older members have sent works of more than usual importance, and some of the younger ones have made a creditable advance. A large picture by Carl Haag and a chef d'ceuvre by Pinwell are the most conspicuous examples. The former has all the powerful and solid drawing and workmanship that we are accustomed to in Haag's very best pictures. The grouping is peculiarly good, and the picture has more than wonted animation and force of expression. It represents a huge vulture, "the swooping terror of the desert" (68), threaten- ing an Arab family with its approach. The man takes aim at it with a long gun from behind a kneeling and affrighted camel, while the wife and two children follow at a short distance in fear and trembling. Mr. Pinwell's picture, which is on a larger scale than usual with him, represents a medieval lady, a "Great Lady" (123), as he calla her, walking along a village street, followed by a page who carries her dog, and observed with expressions of interest and deference due to her rank by about half - a - dozen persons of both sexes, who are either shopping or loitering in the street. It equals, if not surpasses, in grace and expression, anything that we have seen of Mr. Pinwell's, and it certainly is much more evenly and solidly painted. Sir John Gilbert and Messrs. Alfred Fripp, Topham, Walter Goodall, and E. K. Johnson are all present with figure pictures of importance, but Messrs. Marks and Houghton send nothing. Mr. Walker's only contribution is a small drawing called "The Village" (230), which, notwithstanding a very lovely group of rustic foreground figures on a bridge, is chiefly interest- ing as a landscape. It might easily be passed over, but it should be looked at well, for in its quite perfect finish and completeness, its aspect of reality and subtle aerial perspective, there is nothing that we can see to be compared with it in the Exhibition.
It is, we think, fair evidence of progress among the rising painters of landscape, that the decorative, drawing-master work of certain members of the Water-Colour Society seems to become year by year less true to nature. We do not believe that it really is so, but being in its essence finite and stationary, it must be continually getting further and further removed from the work of painters who are always drawing fresh inspiration from nature, and so bringing us constantly nearer to a due sense of her inex- haustible beauty. There is, in fact, no finality in art, and least of all in landscape painting. "It is a difficult business," said old David Cox. "No one has ever done learning at it. After all the years I have been working at it, I only know very little."
But there seems to us to be a hopeful sign of vitality in the wide divergence which here exists between painters of equal earnestness in following out their own special motives. What, for example, can be more different as interpretations of nature than the work of Samuel Palmer and that of G. P. Boyce? The one is almost the only painter of ideal landscape that we possess. The other is a realist to the backbone. Yet the solemn inspiration of Mr. Palmer's classic composition, "Lycidas" (112), is probably as much derived from sympathy with nature as Mr. Boyce's "Old Houses in Ludlow Churchyard" (118), which hangs near it. No one has a truer eye for colour, and no one can modify the local tints of near objects with a more just perception of the quality of the light under which they are seen, than Mr. Boyce ; but he nearly always fails to command general appreciation, for the want of a little of the language of art. He paints what he sees with far more than photographic truth, but he never tells you why he chose his subject, or what there was in it that took his fancy ; nor does he take the trouble to separate what is beautiful from what is unsightly ; and we can trace little or no sense of the grace of form or the grandeur of line in his works, even where such beauty exists, as in his " Teme at Ludlow" (97) under "morning sunlight." Still, he is a representative painter, with original power. Mr. Palmer is a bold selector of his subject, and excels in composition ; and be is one of the greatest of our painters of light. What he seeks to represent is the light itself, rather than the objects which light illuminates. The effects he generally chooses are those in which the distinguishing tints of such objects are either lost in the general richness of the shade, or overwhelmed ins flood of gorgeous sunshine. Upon the dazzling view of Rome (79), which he calls, fitly enough, "A Golden City," he sheds a blaze of light that fairly seizes on the earth and all that it con- tains and makes them its own, overpowering or assimilating the local colour. This is not, however, a mere poetic dream, but a possible sunset, and the picture is in some respects positively
realistic. The stone pines in the foreground are grandly drawn,. with a fine feeling of growth and of the texture of their stems. We have another devout worshipper of the sun in Mr. Alfred' Hunt, but he seems to feel its influence on earth and ak- in a different way. In his exquisite little view of Durham (210) and its environs, the unclouded light of day per- vades the whole scene, interweaving golden threads in the carpet of the earth, embedding her jewelled surface in its own rich setting, giving a sparkling lustre to her intricate mosaic, and seeming to feed each earthly hue from the storehouse of the sun with its own proper prismatic food. Mr. Hunt calls this_ picture "misty with colliery smoke." He makes artistic use of this smoke, which hangs in blue wreathes about the city, to give more value to the golden sunshine that lights up the cathedral towers ; thus provoking the same sort of contrast of colour that seetus to be the chief motive in his other sunny picture, " Kepier, near Durham " (245), where the running water over a weir is delici- ously expressed by clear blue reflections of the sky. In their delicate detail, these drawings of Mr. Hunt's seem to us to be a model of high finish of the right kind, a thing entirely opposed to what we find in the work, for example, of Mr. Birket Foster (10). or Mr. Collingwood Smith (13), which ordinary eyesight can soon resolve into its ultimate lines and dots. You never can so resolve that- higher kind of manipulation which tells you that the artist feels- and enters into the infinite mystery of nature's detail. Every painter must come sooner or later to an end of mere imitation ; and to be only skilful in painting with a finer point than other- people is, after all, but a poor object of ambition. In all first-rate work, on whatever scale, it is impossible to draw a line, and point out where imitation ends and where suggestion begins. It is comparatively easy to impart this mystery to a rough sketch, where a great deal is left to the imagination ; but the more minute the workmanship, the harder it would seem to be to make the one glide into the other. Mr. Hunt appears to us to partake in this. respect of the same sort of subtlety that so greatly distinguished the water-colour drawing of Turner. But there is the same sugges- tive quality, without the actual representation being carried nearly so far, in the Whitby drawings of Mr. Dodgson, who seems to see- and tell you of far more detail than he puts upon his paper. "Storm Clearing Off" (270) and "On the Yorkshire Coast" (253) are good examples of his work. The larger drawing,. "Whitby Scaur " (20), perhaps the most powerful of all, is, we think, a little injured by the too blue reflection of the foreground pool. There is a rather large drawing by Mr. North, one of the younger Associates, which possesses this quality of suggestiveness. of detail in a marked degree. It is called " Rushes" (140), and conveys a singularly true impression of leafless underwood. But- to see it properly one must hide the chief figure, a girl gathering rushes, which attracts the eye too much, and is besides ill drawn. No one that we know of can paint a tangled' foreground like this better than Mr. North. But we have not yet done with Mr. Hunt, whose largest and most. important drawing is one of great and poetic beauty, called "Working Late" (120), a Welsh mountain scene, with evening sunshine resting on a ridge just bordered with a wreath of mist. that melts into the sky, while the moon rises full, and in the broad. shade that gathers in the valley below may be deciphered some haymakers getting in their crop, a rustic bridge and stream, and cows returning home. Not less poetic, and more striking in its individuality, is the marine subject, "Off the Mores" (278), a. rollingground-sea, on which three weird-looking vessels float away towards the horizon, with dark, outstretched sails against. the clear sky, as a long, lurid cloud rolls off above them to the east, their hulls just catching green reflections of the evening light. A little drawing of " Loch Torridon " (232) is not only a finely— rendered effect of light, but a very clever treatment of a great, square, unmanageable mountain form, behind which the sum is just setting, so as to divide it diagonally into glow and. gloom. Mr. Powell adopts another and more simple device,. well known in landscape art, to soften away the too pro- nonce' outline of a pointed peak, in his admirable sea-piece of moving, sunny waves, " Off the Island of Eig " (75). He repeats and carries off the troublesome shape by giving the same slope and angle to the sails of his fishing boats. These may seem trivial matters, but they are part of the rhetoric of art, and_ the greatest landscape painters are always the last t) slight their importance. Look, for example, at the well-considered value of every spot and speck of light and dark in George Fripp's- charming little picture called " Ploughing " (250) ; see how the- one bird flying on the right was exactly the thing wanted at that very point of its passage to complete the composition ; and them
look at the top-heavy effect of the two gulls flapping in the air in Mr. North's "Early Workers" (164). We much regret that the public are allowed to see so little of the recent work of George Fripp, whom everybody knows to be still one of the most persistent of our students of nature. There is, however, among a few other drawings, one singularly delicious view on the Thames (220), bearing date 1872, with a newly risen sun, and a pure and pearly effect of morning, which shows his serene sense of light to be as delicate and refined as ever. Mr. Hale is one of the younger Associates, whose works often betray Mr. Hunt's influence, but it would be unfair to attribute to anything but original observation so fresh and lovely a realisation of a placid "Afternoon in Spring" as his misty mountain drawing (169) under that name. His " Glen Grudie, Ross-shire" (175), has a charming quality of light, but wants crispness and movement in the running water ; and some of his drawings (65, 194) a-e defi- cient in force and breadth. Mr. Danby's "Dines Stream" (14) is remarkable for its fresh morning light, but his "Merionethshire" (127) is wanting in interest for so extensive a view. Mr. Whaite's drawings scarcely come up to the promise of his first appearance here, and there is a curious want of keeping in some of his colour. The trunks and branches in his " Phyldia and the Herdman " (83) look like charcoal laid on to the drawing by way of experiment. Mr. Basil Bradley does not obtain the effect of sunshine which he seems to aim at, by painting all his shadows in an uniform tint of golden brown (50). Mr. Goodwin's roseate sunset on the range of Mont Blanc, to which he gives the name, "The Shadow of the Earth" (84), should not be passed over, though it is hung near the ground. Mr. Duncan's large "Swansea Bay : Oyster Dred- gers getting under Weigh "(29), is a pleasing picture, painted in an agreeable, warm tone, though rather conventionally put together. Mr. Naftel has made a much nearer approach to nature since he took to Scotch scenery, and left off painting bright body-colour studies of the Channel Islands. No doubt there are other draw- ings as well worthy to be mentioned as those we have spoken of, but we must stop somewhere.
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