Part 3
517. R. CARRICK--_After the Sortie._--This is a very large picture, hung so high that one cannot fully estimate it in detail. It represents a wounded knight borne up the winding castle-stairs by three of his retainers; his wife, with a horrible sinking of the heart, totters and clings about for support as she follows. It seems to be a strongly designed and carefully executed work, of very superior merit; the most important production of Mr. Carrick, and about the best.
524. H. W. B. DAVIS--_A Summer Forenoon._--A landscape and sheep-piece, warm, gentle, and genial. Landscape and the allied forms of art occupy a very small space, comparatively, in the present exhibition. There are nevertheless several works of this kind which call for examination and praise: their being left unnoticed in this pamphlet does not imply any indifference to their merits.
540. MISS M. E. FREER--_Red Roses._--Coquetry is the predominant spirit of this work. But it is not painted with the slightness which a coquettish picture from a fresh female hand might be expected to display. On the contrary, there is a good deal of careful realization, and an amount of general skill and force which places Miss Freer high among lady artists. No. 446, _Margaret Wilson_, by the same painter, hung too high to be scrutinized, seems to be equally good, or better.
585. MACLISE--_Madeline after Prayer._--The useful adage which Mr. Maclise will never lay to heart is that “Enough is as good as a feast.” We find Keats’s Madeline encumbered with items of furniture and ornamentation. Moreover, the painter’s decorative taste is anything but chastened; witness the horrible pattern which she has begun in her broidery frame. A graver objection is the want of any real luminosity in the moonlight which Keats has made so resplendent; the painted window itself is the very maximum of opacity, and the light (if light it can be called) seems to fall _upon_ it, not to be transmitted through its panes. Whatever his failings in execution, Mr. Maclise can depict light vastly better than this when he chooses. So much for objections. After any quantity of them, it remains that the picture is highly attractive, and the Madeline a very beautiful creature--perhaps the sweetest woman Mr. Maclise has painted. She is a personage _not_ made
“For human nature’s daily food,”
and yet she is sympathetic. To be that, she must be poetic also.
589. BURCHETT--_Measure for Measure._--Mr. Burchett follows up his remarkable work of last year with another of corresponding importance. Matured consideration, and strong powers of working and of development, have gone to the making of this picture; which represents the great crisis in the action of _Measure for Measure_, where the Duke of Vienna, disguised as a friar, is revealed by the unwitting Lucio to the eyes of the abashed Angelo and Escalus, and of the now almost hopeless Isabella and Mariana. The story is told with much judgment and penetration (so far as such a complicated story _can_ be told) by the Duke’s vacated chair of state, with coronet and sceptre laid upon it, between the seats of Escalus and Angelo; the young courtier, facing the just uncowled Duke, and recognising him on the instant, and raising his cap; the frothy bluster of Lucio dying out on his scared visage as he gasps to see whom he has been mauling and traducing; and other well-chosen and well-combined incidents. The countenance of the Duke is German and searching; that of Escalus true to the good-natured cynicism of the substantially upright old man; Isabella has much of the nun about her. Angelo is, I think, too much the burly insolent oppressor; for we must understand from the drama that he really looked and was an abstinent Pharisee, led on by temptation and opportunity into vilenesses quite unlike the man that all others and himself supposed him to be. There is much able and accurate painting in this work, though it would benefit by more breadth of general harmonizing.
600. PARSONS--_The Wayfarer._--A peculiar and delicate piece of subdued execution, deserving of inspection; _so_ peculiar in its granulated texture that it hardly proclaims itself to be oil-painting.
613. HICKS--_Escape of the Countess of Morton to Paris, with Henrietta, infant Daughter of Charles I._--The most important and best production of Mr. Hicks. Like Mr. Burchett’s picture, its incidents require to be analysed one by one: when that process has been gone through, one finds a great deal of ingenious skill standing to the painter’s credit.
614. PRINSEP--_A Study of a Girl Reading._--Mr. Prinsep deserves real thanks for this painting. The girl is an exquisite person, and the picture also may without flattery be called exquisite. It has a most charming sense of the womanly in the maidenly. The fair one is about to sit down to luncheon, but holds and reads her book up to the moment of drawing in her chair. Perhaps she will violate etiquette by persisting in “reading at meals:” and who will not forgive her?
621. A. MOORE--_Azaleas._--This will be remembered as one of the _illustrations_ (as the French phrase it) of the Exhibition of 1868. It presents, in life size, a Grecian lady (or at any rate Grecian-robed), at a pot of azaleas, some of which she plucks and drops into a basin. Whether or not azaleas were known to Grecian ladies, whether or not they came from America, are questions not difficult of solution, but of sublime indifference to Mr. Moore. (The flowers in Mr. Watts’s Grecian picture, No. 323, are also, I apprehend, azaleas.) The study of the blossom-loaded plant is most delicate and lovely; and the lady has elevated classic grace, though her face hardly sustains comparison with the rest of the picture. For a sense of beauty in disposition of form, and double-distilled refinement in colour, this work may allow a wide margin to any competitors in the gallery, and still be the winner. On the other hand, it is proper to remember that such a painting as this presupposes certain _data_ in art, which _data_ some people not wholly unworthy of a hearing demur to: chiefly, it presupposes once for all that that innermost artistic problem of how to reconcile realization with abstraction deserves to be given up. How much could be said on this question from differing points of view, I need not here indicate. You linger long to look at Mr. Moore’s picture, and return to it again and again: and that justifies him in taking, individually, the benefit of one of those points of view. He unites with singular subtlety of grace a phase of the evanescent to a phase of the permanent: colour and handling which withdraw themselves from the eye with a suggestion (or, as one might say, with a whisper), to statuesque languor and repose of form.
624. BRETT--_Christmas Morning, 1866._--In scale combined with subject, this is far the most important picture Mr. Brett has produced. We see a manned boat and a wrecking ship upon the immense ocean, with its swirling drift blown across like a tongue of tormented flame; and huge volumes of grey cloud over the horizon, walling out from the sea the gorgeous dawn of a new day, on fire with the blaze of sunlight. The painting of the vast sea-surface is a very great effort of knowledge and mastery, and a very successful one.
629. A. GOODWIN--_The Dead Woodman._--A picture of highly remarkable effect, and poetic perception. A blue-grey bloom of sunset broods luminously over all. The work has a kind of intellectual analogy to the _Dead Stonebreaker_ which Mr. Wallis painted years ago: but in all points of externals it is entirely different.
632. MILLAIS--_Souvenir of Velasquez_ (_Diploma-work deposited in the Academy on his election as an Academician_).--It is not for an outsider to surmise whether or not the Academicians court the deposit of diploma-pictures which may have cost their painters, working with the quick-handedness of a Millais, perhaps a couple of days’ labour. However this may be, they have here got a diploma-picture of that description, and an admirable one in its way it certainly is. The resemblance to Velasquez is hardly such as to justify the title.
685. WATTS--_A. Panizzi, Esq._--That this is about the finest portrait of the year need scarcely be specified, Mr. Watts being its author. It was presented to Mr. Panizzi by the Officers of the British Museum, on his retirement; and happily expresses, in the sitter, great powers of work, long in active exercise, and now in well-earned repose. A sketch-plan of the Museum reading-room forms an appropriate and not undecorative device in the right-hand upper corner.
735. SANDYS--_Study of a Head._--We have now got out of the oil-pictures, and have come to the drawings. This is an excellent study of a wilful, tameless-spirited beauty, who bites her hair in her gathering mood. Further on (816) is an equally well-done head of _George Critchett, Esq._, a head that seems to teem with defined calculation. It will be known to many besides myself that Mr. Sandys sent to the Academy an oil-picture of Medea in an act of incantation, not only worthy, but more than worthy, of his highly disciplined powers and determined accomplishment. It has dropped out of the Exhibition when the pictures came to be actually hung; leaving some food for pondering to those who care for the higher and completer forms of pictorial work. They may feel--and the feeling would be only enhanced by some other things they may have heard, and a great deal of what they see on the Academy walls--that an off-hand style of painting, now predominant, has interests of its own clashing with those of some graver phases of art; and that judicial equity in adjusting these interests may sometimes be in default. Sir Francis Grant, detailing after-dinner statistics, may fancy that the whole question is settled by saying that there is space for so many pictures only, and that so many more were sent in; but this is far from being the _dernier mot_. Efficiency No. 1 and semi-efficiency No. 2 may be contending for a residue of space, and the admission of either is obviously the exclusion of the other; but he would be a very innocent President, non-academician artist, or private and unprofessional person, who should thence conclude that the Pompey and the Cæsar have coequal claims, especially the Pompey. Anybody, who has experienced, written, read, heard, or seen, even a little of this ever-recurrent hanging controversy, loathes its very atmosphere, and gladly retreats from it, seldom without a sense of protest, and a chafing at injustice.
753. J. F. LEWIS--_Bedouin Arabs._--One of the very finest studies of the kind produced by a hand unrivalled in its own way.
943. MUNRO--_The Sisters._--We are now in the Sculpture Room. Mr. Munro has earned great popularity and a defined position by works of this class, in which groups of children are treated with some graceful incident and execution, and very genuinely graceful feeling. The present group counts among the best of them.
948. WOOLNER--_Elaine with the Shield of Sir Launcelot._--The maiden loves and muses, and pines as she muses; but as yet her doom only hovers over her pityingly. The feeling of reserve and purity, of the new experience of love timidly entertained, and yet already permeating her whole life, and absorbing all her forces into its own surging and resistless current, is predominant in this figure. Along with this, and with much simplicity of pose and motive, one readily perceives that the whole thing is uncommonly treated--_uncommonly_ rather than _unusually_. The face has more of personal individuality, the turn of the figure more shades of variety within unity, the execution throughout more distinction, than British sculpture accustoms us to. So also with the hands and feet: their peculiarities are all significant and forecast, though to my eye they do not sufficiently partake of the beauty of delicacy. Compare--or contrast would be the word--this statuette with
981. J. S. WESTMACOTT--_Elaine._
984. ARMSTEAD--_Astronomy._--A bronze colossal figure, destined for the Prince-Consort memorial in Hyde Park. It has a good decorative look, and adequate grandeur of pose and line. It might fairly (so far as one can judge before it is placed _in situ_) be termed a _proportional_ work; one, that is, in which the conception, treatment, and general force of impression, have relation to its scale, and to its destination as one in a series of impersonating figures.
987. LEIFCHILD--_The Dawn._--The sentiment of this figure is well expressed in two lines from the MS. quotation:--
“The Dawn, whose splendour is a promise still, Heralding more than Day can e’er fulfil.”
It is the sentiment of an ushering-in, an announcement, something to come. Mr. Leifchild has produced several sculptural works eminent for thoughtfulness in concentration. The present figure belongs to a different order of work, yet something of the same spirit can be traced in it.
1007. WOOLNER--_Thomas Carlyle._--The strong, emphatic, penetrating style of Mr. Woolner, who searches under the surface of his sitter’s face, and records on its surface what he has found beneath, gave him the best of rights to deal with such a magnificent head as Carlyle’s--marked as that is by a most powerful dominating expression, with abundant points of subordinate detail and individuality. Mr. Woolner had, indeed, done a medallion of the great writer many years ago; now we get a bust worthily recording so memorable a man.
1027. WOOLNER--_Reliefs from the Iliad_ (_pedestal of the Bust of the Right Honourable W. E. Gladstone_).--Here are three subjects executed on a small scale, with a singular amount of original force. The third, _Thetis consoling Achilles_, does not appear to me, in composition and suggestion, so remarkable as the other two. _Pallas and Achilles at the Trenches_, where the hero shouts to the Greeks a superhuman cry, while Pallas overshadows him with her ægis, is a most vigorous and admirable composition; indeed, but for its small size, one would be minded to call it the finest thing Mr. Woolner has yet exhibited. _Thetis praying to Zeus on behalf of Achilles_ is hardly second to it. The sea-goddess rises on tiptoe to stroke the beard of the omnipotent cloud-compeller; and no single touch perhaps could have given the amplitude and primitiveness of the Homeric Pantheon more keenly than this. It is not exactly _naïveté_, and still less exactly humour, but something happily between both.
1053. WATTS--_Clytie_; _Marble Bust, unfinished._--This is an experiment in sculpture by our distinguished painter. I find it a very interesting one, and (_pace_ the professional sculptors) a remarkable success. The head reverts over the right shoulder with a graceful and energetic turn; and these qualities, especially that of energy, are preserved in all points of view. The modelling of the bust and arms is pulpy and creased--more comparable in tendency to that of the Elgin Marbles than of later Greek sculpture. Indeed, I should surmise that the thoughts of Mr. Watts, as he worked, were mostly shared between Phidias and Michael Angelo. The spectator who finds some parts lumpy or rude should bear in mind that the work is avowedly “unfinished”--even if he does not deem the general conditions under which the experiment has been made sufficient to abate the picking of holes.
* * * * *
Possibly some readers of this pamphlet may use it to be referred to as they range through the Academy rooms, examining their contents. If this is the case, I should regret to pass over without a word of mention several works which, according to the scope and limitations of the pamphlet, I have not found an opportunity of reviewing in any detail in their proper order. After all, a great number of works against whose skilfulness and merit I neither raise nor suggest any imputation will be remaining totally unnamed. Meanwhile, a simple numerical list of contributions may be added to which I would rather direct attention thus barely than not at all. Some of them are productions of leading importance: others have modest graces which should not pass unobserved. The visitor must form his own opinion of whether and why they deserved specification.
28. SWINTON--_The Earl Bathurst._ 29. T. S. COOPER--_Descending from the Rock Grazing, East Cumberland._ 49. MAC WHIRTER--_Old Edinburgh, Night._ 67. GRANT--_Miss Grant._ 68. FLEUSS--_G. Makgill, Esq._ 120. GRACE--_The Curfew tolls the Knell of parting Day._ 124. GRANT--_The Earl of Bradford._ 158. EDEN--_On the Thames near Pangbourne._ 160. HARVEYMORE--_The Point, near Walton on the Naze._ 168. J. B. BURGESS--_A Portrait._ 170. H. MOORE--_Ebb-tide, Squall coming on._ 176. CATHELINAU--_The Nurse._ 184. HALLE--_Miss Jessie._ 199. E. GILL--_Storm and Shipwreck on a Rocky Coast._ 205. ELMORE--“_Two Women shall be grinding at the Mill._” 206. ZUCCOLI--_Wine Gratis._ 208. Ditto--_Preparing to cook Indian Corn._ 222. YEAMES--_The Chimney-Corner._ 241. LEHMANN--_Portrait of a Gentleman._ 251. NICOL--_A China Merchant._ 267. GOODALL--_Mater Purissima._ 272. ARCHER--_Burial of Guinevere._ 290. WATTS--_The Meeting of Jacob and Esau._ 298. V. COLE--_Sunlight Lingering on the Autumn Woods._ 303. WELLS--_James Stansfeld, Esq., of Halifax._ 321. POTT--_The Minuet._ 322. G. D. LESLIE--_Mrs. Charles Dickens, Jun._ 327. PRINSEP--_A Portrait._ 340. FRITH--_Scene from “She Stoops to Conquer.”_ 344. PERUGINI--_Daphne._ 345. MRS. ROBBINSON--_The Firstborn._ 346. RADFORD--_“No Man that Warreth” &c._ 348. LUCY--_The Forced Abdication of Mary Stuart._ 367. MISS A. THORNYCROFT--_Study of a Head._ 378. BOUGHTON--_A Breton Pastoral._ 387. WYLLIE--_Dover Castle and Town._ 390. CALTHROP--_The Last Song of the Girondins, 1793._ 400. ORCHARDSON--_Scene from “King Henry IV.”_ 403. STANHOPE--_The Footsteps of the Flock._ 416. WHAITE--_Harvest on the Mountains._ 420. WADE--_A Stitch in Time._ 452. H. MOORE--_Weather Moderating after a Gale._ 467. MRS. WARD--_Sion House, 1553._ 474. CROWE--_A Chiffonnier._ 478. WELLS--_The Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne._ 490. E. FRÈRE--_La Sortie de l’Ecole des Filles._ 503. HEMY--_By the River Side, Antwerp._ 504. NICOL--_Waiting at the Cross-roads._ 520. ARMITAGE--_Herod’s Birthday Feast._ 521. LIDDERDALE--_The Exiled Jacobite._ 523. PRINSEP--_A Greek Widow at a Tomb._ 529. HILLINGFORD--_Before the Tournament._ 531. ARMSTRONG--_Daffodils._ 532. OPIE--_The Musical Genius._ 542. HAYLLAR--_Midsummer, Parham Hall, Suffolk._ 551. GALE--_Nazareth._ 552. GOLDIE--_A Child Martyr borne across the Roman Campagna to one of the Catacombs._ 571. MISS SANDYS--_Enid._ 579. CALDERON--_Whither?_ 580. MASON--_Netley Moor._ 615. HODGSON--_Off the Downs in the Days of the Cæsars._ 616. A. HAYWARD--_The Haunted House._ 636. J. E. WILLIAMS--_The Bishop of Gloucester._ 646. ARCHER--_Bringing home Fern, Evening._ 648. MCCALLUM--_Near the Buck Gates, Sherwood Forest._ 656. TOURRIER--_The Cloisters._ 657. G. D. LESLIE--_The Empty Sleeve._ 671. BRENNAN--_Via della Vita, Rome._ 673. CROWE--_Mary Stuart, February 8th, 1586._ 683. A. HUGHES--_Mrs. Edward Rhodes._ 689. LOBLEY--_Fancies in the Fire._ 727. R. DOYLE--_The Enchanted Tree._ 754. A. C. H. LUXMOORE--_Searching for Treason._ 763. J. F. LEWIS--_Camels._ 764. COUNT G. V. ROSEN--_A Street in Cairo._ 833. HARDWICK--_The Woods in Early Spring._ 908. E. EDWARDS--_Four Etchings, Wells, &c._ 915. C. N. LUXMOORE--_Pen and Ink Sketches from Nature._ 1001. WOOLNER--_Hon. W. E. Frere, late of Bombay._ 1029. Ditto--_The late Robert Leslie Ellis._ 1040. BÖHM--_Miss Cumberbatch._ 1052. AP GRIFFITH--_Cain preparing his Sacrifice._ 1106. G. A. LAWSON--_The Maiden’s Secret._ 1164. TUPPER--_Dr. Hyde Salter._ 1169. G. MORGAN--_Study of a Head._ 1194. LEIFCHILD--_The Rev. Thomas Jones._
_PART II._
BY ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.
I have been asked to note down at random my impressions of some few among this year’s pictures. These I am aware will have no weight or value but that which a sincere and studious love of the art can give; so much I claim for them, and so much only. To pass judgment or tender counsel is beyond my aim or my desire.
Returning from the Academy I find two pictures impressed on my memory more deeply and distinctly than the rest. First of these--first of all, it seems to me, for depth and nobility of feeling and meaning--is Mr. Watts’ “Wife of Pygmalion.” The soft severity of perfect beauty might serve alike for woman or statue, flesh or marble; but the eyes have opened already upon love, with a tender and grave wonder; her curving ripples of hair seem just warm from the touch and the breath of the goddess, moulded and quickened by lips and hands diviner than her sculptor’s. So it seems a Greek painter must have painted women, when Greece had mortal pictures fit to match her imperishable statues. Her shapeliness and state, her sweet majesty and amorous chastity, recall the supreme Venus of Melos. In this “translation” of a Greek statue into an English picture, no less than in the bust of Clytie, we see how in the hands of a great artist painting and sculpture may become as sister arts indeed, yet without invasion or confusion; how, without any forced alliance of form and colour, a picture may share the gracious grandeur of a statue, a statue may catch something of the subtle bloom of beauty proper to a picture.
The other picture of which I would speak, unlike enough to this in sentiment or in tone, has in common with it the loftiest quality of beauty pure and simple. Indeed, of all the few great or the many good painters now at work among us, no one has so keen and clear a sense of this absolute beauty as Mr. Albert Moore. His painting is to artists what the verse of Théophile Gautier is to poets; the faultless and secure expression of an exclusive worship of things formally beautiful. That contents them; they leave to others the labours and the joys of thought or passion. The outlines of their work are pure, decisive, distinct; its colour is of the full sunlight. This picture of “Azaleas” is as good a type as need be of their manner of work. A woman delicately draped, but showing well the gentle mould of her fine limbs through the thin soft raiment; pale small leaves and bright white blossoms about her and above, a few rose-red petals fallen on the pale marble and faint-coloured woven mat before her feet; a strange and splendid vessel, inlaid with designs of Eastern colour; another--clasped by one long slender hand and filled from it with flowers--of soft white, touched here and there into blossom of blue: this is enough. The melody of colour, the symphony of form is complete: one more beautiful thing is achieved, one more delight is born into the world; and its meaning is beauty; and its reason for being is to be.