ART.

PAINTER-ETCHERS AND OTHERS.

ON a first visit to the exhibition of the Painter•-Etchers, the work of Mr. William Strang is likely to blot out other im- pressions. At short intervals round the walls, amid the picturesque of common day in architecture and landscape, the fantastic dream of this artist intrudes itself and arrests the eye, whether to vex or delight. When a consummate master renders the material of common day, the art of rendering can hold its own with the art of imagination; but there is nothing here of that order that can quite challenge these works with their stamp of creation, creation as of the troubled night. At first sight there is also a stamp of collection : old clothes from Dutch Jewry, the top-hat

of the Latin Quarter, gnarled peasants from Barbizon, and stark, starving paupers of the Slade school, are some of the material with which the etcher's imagination plays. But he gives it all an accent of his own, a nightmare accent. Forms as lank, a gaze as compelling, as an Ancient Mariner's, seem burdened with a story as aimless-tragic. In one scene, certain " Castaways," who might be Galilean fishermen but for the sou'wester on the helmsman, bend over a pallid boy : a madman, lashed to the mast, extends his arms and howls against the waves and the night. In another, called Worship, the nude figure of a woman is seated on a kind of model's throne. A little group of worshippers stands about, —a grave citizen, who might buy her; a greybeard scholar, who offers her a book she will not look at and would not under- stand; a fat religious person, whose eyes ought to be turned away, but are hypnotically fixed ; an artist, who ought only to look at her, but who is kissing her hand. From the opposite wall the severed head of a former victim completes the circle. A reading like this may be fallacious enough ; but what tempts to read is the merit of expressiveness in the figures drawn. The thought and the irony might be more clearly put in literature, but not the queer, languid, lascivious pose of her, or the character and concentration of the others. Or take, for an example of the same power of expressive drawing, the figure with head thrown back and outspread arms on one of the card designs (108), where no clue to the scene is given ; or the woman leaning against a bank in the Boccaccio (94). In The Sick Tinker, again (164), there is quaint pathos in the scene, but in the effect there is an extraordinary chain of stooping figures that makes the poor tinker's accident an admirable design. In the Drowned, once more (85), the haggard and desperate glimpse of landscape behind the landing-stage and the smoke-stack is finely imagined for a mise-en-scene. Expressiveness is often the note of Mr. Strang's drawing rather than rendering of a model, but the standing figure in the Women Bathing (105) shows what he can do when the facts of an object before him are what he wants to express. The only other exhibitor who can be named after Mr. Strang for invention in figure subjects is Mr. Charles Holroyd. There is promise of a designer in the Death of Icarus (76), and the same quality comes out in the choice group of tree-stems called A Study from Nature (149).

Mr. Frank Short, with his keen eye for subjects that depend on delicate line, has found two lovely bits of riverside timber work—An Old Pier (103), and Quiet Ferry over the Blyth (250) —and an effect of piled-up planks and ship's deck in the Timber-Ship, Conway (63). His Mersey subjects are some- thing of a variation in his technique, and charming designs.

Mr. D. Y. Cameron has hunted the Thames-side in the tracks of Mr. Whistler, and in his black Berwick (131), his Tweedside (244), his Loafers (123), and Perth (195), there is force and artistic feeling. Mr. Oliver Hall's Study of Trees (147) is good work in a good tradition ; indeed, all his sketches have the merit of largeness and style,—see especially the Burdock Leaves (79), Colonel Goff's happiest piece this year is his Brighton Sands (5) ; Mr. Jacomb Hood's, the dry-point Head of a Woman (40); and Mr. Van Gravesande has a bright effect of sea dotted with boats, The Meuse of Dordrecht (211). Of familiar architectural draughtsmen, Mr. Haig has a very curious interior of what seems to be a drinking-shop, fitted like a church with high, sculptured pew-ends and other furniture ecclesiastic, and with what might be votive models of ships, (the Flying Dutchmen' of the title P),—depending from the roof (207). Of new recruits in the same line of work, Mr. F. Inigo Thomas is prolific and capable.

The Old Master chosen for illustration this year is Turner. A most interesting series of states of the " Liber Studiorum " plates has been got together by the kindness of the principal collectors ; and the plates are separately grouped which were both etched and mezzotinted by their author. There is often room for debate whether the last state of the plate in the final proofs is so good as the second last ; the added touches of light on clouds and other objects destroy at times the greater matters of breadth and repose. The beautiful unpublished numbers are given as well as the published, and also six of the anonymous series of twelve found among Turner's posses- sions at his death. One of these, the Boston Tower, might make a good case for being the most solemn and beautiful thing Turner ever did in black-and-white ; and here, again, the earlier proof is surely not bettered by the spotty lights in the sky of the later, and the making out of the foreground vegetation.

An artist whose name is familiar at the Painter-Etchers', Mr. 0. J. Watson, exhibits at Dunthorne's galleries a series of water-colours, called Through Normandy. Mr. Watson is, to begin with, a skilful draughtsman of architecture ; the pencil foundation of his work is capital. As an artist, he halts a little between the topographical " view " of a place or building

with picturesque accessories, and the picture proper. A work like his etching of last year at Campden, in Gloucestershir,,

was a success in which both aims were attained ; it was at once a portrait and a picture. The present exhibition shows him in colour also halting between two ideals, the one of pleasant, more or less conventional tinting of architectural

drawings, the other of a colour subject treated for itself.. Once or twice in this pursuit, he throws over his architecture

and develops the little market groups of flower-sellers. We hope he will pursue this other art further, and apply it more fully to the architecture too, The habit of seeing architec ture in a painter-like way, cannot but react with advantage on the practice of an artist in black-and-white.

At the Fine Art Society, the original drawings for Miss. Kate Greenaway's children's books are on view. The engravings

so closely follow the fiat tints and outlines of the originals;

that there is little that is new to be said about the latter, except to recognise once more the fancy and the prim, timid•

grace of the design, and the resolute adherence to a con- vention by which this lady has made the most of her talent. As if to show the value of such a limit, some water-colour drawings are exhibited which show the artist attempting to realise further, and only spoiling her pretty puppets in the attempt. Her real triumphs are in her wreaths and rows of dancing and playing doll-children, with their quaintly con- ceived clothes and hats. The colour, it mny be remarked, is a good deal taken down by the black-ink outlines.

At Mr. McLean's gallery in the Haymarket, some pictures are on view by the French Romantic school of landscaps.•

There are the hoary stems of Diaz (1); a, remarkable Glade in the Forest (12), by Troyon, where the effect tried for is simply the height and green glimmer of the wood, the background of trees being in drawing mere scrabbled symbols. No. 15, La Mare, is a lovely work by the same painter, figures dark against a high evening horizon. With Corot, it is often a toss-up. whether one is most struck with the conventionality of the notation, or with its amazing suggestiveness and beauty ; a spot more or less sets us dreaming, not of the woods, but of china plates. But with some of the examples here, there can be no danger of that disillusion,—for instance, the faint salmon-- coloured sky, fretted by trees, over an old man wading in a woodland pool. Barbizon seems to be invading the strong places of the Ancient Briton, and in time may reach Trafalgar Square itself.

Besides the exhibition at Messrs. Vokins', which we called attention to in a recent article as a useful supplement to the

water-colour collection at the Academy, there is another now open at Messrs. Agnew's, where those interested in the con- troversy as to the merits of the older English water-colourists will find a good many documents to their hand.