On the whole perhaps the portraits have the best of it, if we except the class of perfunctory official portraits of chairmen of boards and institutions, or gentlemen whose chief title to a portrait is the ability to pay for it; productions which might surely be allowed to find their way to their ultimate destination without being passed through an Academy exhibition where no one wants them. Mr. Shannon's large group portrait of three sisters is a noble work both in color and composition; in this class of painting he is beginning to run Mr. Sargent hard; and his portrait of Mr. Leyland Prinsep is a remarkable example of the combination of realistic portraiture with artistic effect in color and composition. But the portrait of the year, though it has less of pictorial charm, is Mr. Sargent's of the Earl of Wemyss. Mr. Shannon's portraits are essentially pictures; so have Mr. Sargent's been in many cases. His Lord Wemyss is simply a portrait, with no attempt at pictorial effect, but it presents that kind of summary of character which we used to see in Millais' portraits of public men, and which perhaps is a higher intellectual quality in portrait-painting than the achievement of pictorial effect. Among other portraits Mr. Melton Fisher's group of three girls is a charmingly composed picture, but two out of the three heads are not made out with sufficient decision for portraiture. Mr. Bacon has had a good idea in painting the portraits of three ladies in a box, under the title At the Play; but the faces hardly realize what the situation demands the expression of strong but varied interest in the play; more might certainly have been made of the situation. In a group of three children seated on the floor, painted under the title Us, Mr. Keith Henderson has made a notable success; nothing more charming and lifelike in the way of child character and expression has been seen at the Academy for some time. Three other portraits challenge attention from their manner of execution. In Signor Mancini's portrait of a little girl the face may obtain an added delicacy by contrast with a treatment which makes all the rest of the picture look as if the canvas had been injured in some way, but it is an affectation. Mrs. Swynnerton's portrait of a lady is a tour de force of strong and brilliant color carried off by a surface texture which removes all effect of hardness; but the defiant color and equally defiant exposure of the bust combine to make it, as a portrait of a lady painted by a lady, what one might call unladylike. It is impossible to overlook it, but it is not an agreeable picture, and it is a relief to turn from it to Mr. Sims's beautiful and spirituel portrait in Gallery VIII. of a lady walking quickly through the picture, her figure relieved against that fleecy lightly touched evanescent sky which this artist has learned the secret of; a beautiful and original style of portrait, and Mr. Sims's best work of the year: his more ideal subject, in illustration of Herrick's To Julia, suffers (oddly enough) exactly from the want of that lightness of hand; the "shooting stars" and the "elves" are too materialized. Apart from portraits there are not many figure pictures which appeal very strongly either to the imagination or to the sense of pictorial composition, the two strongest appeals that representations of the human figure in painting can make to us. Mere execution is something, no doubt; but that, after all, is a superior sleight of hand (a very superior one, we will admit) rather than art in the intellectual meaning of the word. In regard to imaginative subjects, the worst of it is that painters will paint them (in England more especially) without bringing any imagination to bear on them. There are two Lamias in the Academy, but they are tame and harmless sorceresses, Mr. Draper's is the best; there is a certain mixture of weariness and malice in the face, which reflects in some degree Keats's fantasy. There is a Thisbe who is but a figure study amid archaic Greek ornaments; and a Circe who is only a rather hard nude study; and a certain painter of various large religious "machines" (as the French would call them) has turned Pagan this year, and painted a piece of Paganism as clap-trap and as devoid of sincerity as his former religious moralities. And what is this mermaid taken up with the appearance of "a land baby" on the shore what is she but a modern lady rising from the water, with her hair carefully done up, but whose figure unaccountably desinit in piscem? painters will handle mermaids, can no one ever attempt to give us a convincing mermaid, with a figure that has "suffered a sea-change"? To be sure, the drops of water that roll down the lady's fair skin have been most carefully painted, each with its little sparkle of light-reflection, and the painter has his reward, for they are the delight of the children in the exhibition. If Of figure-subjects which are really pictures in the highest sense, perhaps Mr. Stott's small circular picture, Two Mothers, deserves to rank highest. It is a real composition, in which (according to Millet's dictum) nothing is introduced which does not assist the subject: there is a unity of conception about it, not interfered with by some charming and delicate detail in the foreground foliage, lightly put in so as not to obtrude on the eye. Another work which is truly pictorial is Mrs. Stanhope Forbes's The Half Holiday. Nothing in the subject but a lad in shirt and drawers who lies on the bank of a brook amid a broadly painted wooded landscape; a happy moment of life translated into artistic form. This is one of the kind of pictures that the crowd pass over. The crowd (the English crowd at least) must have a subject, something that tells a story, and this has none; but it is a work every artist will appreciate. Mr. Cadogan Cowper's Venetian Ladies listening to a Serenade has no story either, and is mainly a study of rich costumes in a lighted balcony, with the deep blue of the night sky behind. A fine piece of color the whole is. One of the ladies combs out her luxuriant hair: Dear dead women-with such hair too; what's become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms? But the heads are hardly equal in interest to the costumes. Mr. Hornel's The Chase (of a butterfly) is one of the pictures that interest us as presenting a special method: the children's faces are charming, the foliage and other surroundings are not like nature; they are a method of translating nature into pigment. In his earlier works Mr. Hornel's manner suggested that his pictures were composed of a mosaic of shells, flints, and pebbles; but the crudity of the effect is modified now, and we see the result as a very interesting work of pure art, of a kind that is painted for artists rather than for the public. A few years ago a picture so hors ligne in style would hardly have found a place on the walls of the Academy; now it is in a central position; so do times change. In the next room we have an example of the opposite kind of painting-the picture with a mora!, in the shape of Mr. Dollman's Am I My Brother's Keeper? a study of London outcasts on a bench in the foreground, with the well-lighted windows of the wealthy in the background. Well, there is no reason why painting should not be used to point a moral, if it is done with sincere intent and not merely as a cheap appeal to our emotions; and this impresses one as sincere; it is at any rate, powerfully put. In those which we may call idyllic pictures, in which figures and landscape are blended in one conception, Mr. Wetherbee keeps his place, but his smaller picture, A Pastoral, is the better and more complete of the two; it nearly repeats, by the way, a previous composition of his. Mr. Arthur Hacker's The Gloaming-a cow and its keeper trudging across the picture in the twilight-is another quiet and pleasing pastoral, recalling Milton's What time the labor'd ox In his loose traces from the furrow came, though with a difference; and Mr. La Thangue's apple orchards are still flecked with joyous sunlight. This class of picture affords the transition to landscape proper. We have charming landscapes, but no great ones. The strongest achievement is perhaps Mr. Hughes-Stanton's St. Jean, near Avignon: the foreground of this is the most forcible piece of work of the kind in the Academy, and the whole painting has that built-up appearance which a landscape composition should have. There seems to be an uncertainty among English painters as to the object of landscape-painting; there is no school of landscape in England, but everyone does what is right in his own eyes. There are those who seem to think-and a large portion of the public manifestly think with them (if they think at all)-that the most careful imitation of Nature is the end of landscape-painting; hence we have such a work as Mr. Leader's There is Sunlight in the Valley, which carries realism, we will not say as far as it can be carried (remembering Didier-Pouget and Biva at the Salon), but as far as English painting ever carries it. yet the effect is weak; the eye is not cheated after all, and the spirit misses something undefinable but which we cannot dispense with. And there is And an extraordinary want of composition sometimes. Mr. Murray's Home Moorings, for instance, is not a picture at all: there is literally no composition in it; it is a collection of "common objects at the seaside," as-item, a beach with flotsam and jetsam; item, an old jetty; item, a ship; but they are merely thrown together, not composed. A landscape needs to be as carefully constructed as a building. Granting this element of composition, what we need is, not the imitation of facts (though that is of course the basis of it), but the spirit of the scene as felt by the artist; not "I saw certain trees and hills, and I have painted them," but "I had a certain impression on my mind from this scene, and I have endeavored to convey that." Mr. Adrian Stokes sees the beauty of Sunlight in the Birches, and we feel it with him; Mr. Aumonier has been struck by the solemn gloom of The Castle Valley, Tintagel, in evening light, and conveys to us the impression of it. These are good landscapes. Mr. East's Lavingdon Water is probably the most popular of his pictures of the year but it looks a little ragged, though the trees have been carefully designed; Amberley Bridge is his best work-a real landscape composition. Near it is a fine Bavarian winter landscape by Mr. Gardner Symons, very solidly painted, and interesting as a scene of special and unfamiliar character. Mr. Black's Cornwall: a December Afternoon has a fine effect of atmosphere and rather recalls the style of the late David Farquharson. Mr. B. Eastlake Leader gives high promise in his Moonlit Common. There is too much light for moonlight (English moonlight at all events), as there almost always is in moonlight pictures, but it is a work with a character of its own. Mr. Reid's Porto Maurizio, Northern Italy, must class as landscape, though it is mostly buildings, a fine clear painting of a city and its churches set on a hill in Italian light. Then there is Mr. Bertram Priestman's Valley of the Wharfe, with a real element of grandeur in the dark mass of rock and trees piled up in the centre of the composition; perhaps as a whole the most striking landscape in the exhibition. Sculpture during the last few years, has generally been the best element in the Academy exhibitions but it is rather weak this year. Mr. Brock's Justice, a half-size model of one of the groups for the Victoria Memorial, has a fine easy sway in its lines; and Mr. Toft's seated figure, forming part of a Welsh national war memorial, with an architectural background, has a classic dignity of style. But the Octagon Room is made terrible by two of those colossal figures in boots and frock-coats which sculptors have to produce, apparently from time to time (oportet rivere), but which are sad sights in a sculpture gallery. What hath sculpture to do with colossal boots? Why cannot we adopt the French expedient of confining the likeness to a bust, and grouping ideal figures with it, as in Guillaume's beautiful monument to Regnault at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts? The life size nudes in the Lecture Room are not very ideal either. This plump female, with rather short legs, Atalanta the swift racer? Believe it not. As the sporting folk say, she is carrying too much flesh. Probably Atalanta was but a name to dignify a life-study. And the author of this pain-contorted, struggling Prometheus has assuredly never made the acquaintance of Shelley's Titan. Two heads, Mr. Mackennal's Bust of a Lady and Mr. Leslie's The Muse of Theocritus, are the best bits of marble in the Lecture Room. Mr. Reynolds-Stephen's Memorial for the Grave of One who Loved his Fellow-men, with its bronze angel at each end, is original, and decorative in effect, and as such would be re marked anywhere; but it is hardly sculpture in the full sense of the word; and the best of the nude figures would pass but for second best at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, however patriotism may wish it otherwise. It is not merely the difference of execution, but the difference in intellectual interest that strikes one, in the French sculpture especially. The vast spaces of the Salon are typical of a certain largeness in the conception of art. And even the quantity of work is amazing. All this is the product of one year's artistic work: it is an annual wonder, a testimony to the immense vitality of the French artistic world. Even in out-of-the-way corners one comes on things that cannot be passed over; even the crowd of small works, statuettes and other minor fancies, on the dais at the end of the central hall, is full of things of exceptional talent. As far as the paintings are concerned, it may be true that the proportion of good things is larger at the Academy than at the Salon; that there are crude and vulgar works there-occasionally very vulgar -that would not find place in the Academy. But it would be easy to pick out fifty pictures (I have more than sixty down in my note-book, after passing over many works of average excellence) any one of which would make a certain sensation at the Academy, some of them a great sensation. The apologetic and condescending tone adopted by English newspapers towards the Salon exhibitions is ab surd. With whatever faults-rather faults of aim than of execution-it is a great spectacle. The large room, No. 1, at the top of the stairs, does not present this year one of those vast pictures, intended for the decoration of a Mairie or other public institution, which one often finds there; indeed, decorative paint ing is not at its highest this year. M. Henri Martin, the foremost master in this class of art, does not exhibit; and the largest decorative painting of the year, M. Grau's scene for the Hôtel de Ville of Tourcoing, is not decorative, but merely an easel picture on a gigantic scale. But Gallery I. contains two large decorative uprights: M. Gorguet's cartoon intended for a Gobelins tapestry for the Parliament House at Rennes, which shows how well the French understand tapestry design and its symbolical rather than pictorial treatment; and M. Devambez' painting for the Sorbonne, intended to commemorate the fusion of the Ecole Normale and the Sorbonne. This, again, is a large realistic easel picture, but the force of effect obtained by the contrast between the dark-clad mass of the Ecole Normale crowd below and the bright robes of the Sorbonne professionals above, divided by the white stonework of the staircase, is very striking. In the same gallery is M. Tavernier's ceiling for the Salle des Fêtes of the Mairie of Saint-Mandé; the figures float here as figures in a ceiling-painting should, only it is a little marred by the attempted illusion of columns seen in upward perspective a superstition of ceiling-painting which some French painters still cling to. For the real type of decorative ceiling-painting, imaginative and not too precise in definition, we must go to Gallery 22, where M. Paul Steck exhibits his two circular ceiling panels, Rêre-Pensée and Essor-Vérité, for the Hôtel de Ville of Saint-Brieuc. The former is especially fine; two seated, draped figures falling into beautiful lines of composition, gazing into a starlight sky; the figures are just indicated in a visionary manner, not materialized. This is the true poetry of ceiling-painting. Of figure-pictures of the year the most important is M. Gervais' Jardin LIVING AGE. VOL. XLIV. 2290 des Hespérides (33),' an immense canvas ostensibly divided into a triptych by two vertical bands, though the composition is really continuous. It is a picture in a grand style of drawing and composition, somewhat subdued in color and his nude nymphs are rather solid in their proportions; but there is a glamor of the antique world about it and it will rank as one of the best and most serious of the compositions of this fine artist, almost unknown in England, who combines poetry of conception with unsurpassed mastery in drawing. After this perhaps the three pictures that leave most impression on the memory are those of MM. Paul Chabas, Joseph Bail, and Tattegrain. M. Chabas' L'Algue (18) is only inferior to his last year's work in that it is less of a composition; it shows a young girl knee-deep in the sea, dragging up a large frond of seaweed, the glistening green of which forms the darkest color in the piece; the face is turned away from the spectator, so that we lose one element of interest, but the painting of the nude body and of the sea is perfect-real without realism. If anyone wants to understand the meaning of style in painting-that quality indefinable in words-there it is for him. That brilliant but unequal painter M. Tattegrain makes one of his successes this year in Attendant Marée Basse (7), a figure of a fine healthful Normandy shrimp-girl, lying prone on the shore in her humble patched garments, and playing with the sand running out of her hands, while she waits for low tide to begin her work. It is a beautiful moment out of real life. M. Bail paints, on a larger scale than is usual with him, Les Communiantes (17), four 1 The figures in brackets after the titles give the number of the room in which the painting is to be found, which may be of use to any reader visiting the Salon, as the preposterous French system of an alphabetical catalogue with no indication of the placing of the pictures renders it impossible to find any special picture except by a process of hunting. |