Part 4 (2/2)

Can we point to any such fresh, beautiful red as the scarf that the ”Princesse des Pays de la Porcelaine” wears about that grey which would have broken Chardin's heart with envy? Can we point to any blue in Mr Watts' as fresh and as beautiful as the blue carpet under the Princess's feet?

With what Mr Watts paints it is impossible to say On one side an unpleasant reddish brown, scrubbed till it looks like a rey, like the rind of a Stilton cheese The nude figure in the reeds--the picture purchased for the Chantrey Fund collection--will serve for illustration It is clearly the work of a reat in his soul, but why should so beautiful a material as oil paint be transfor else but the rind of a Stilton cheese Mr Watts and Mr Burne-Jones seeinative work can only be expressed in ork and gue theory, for which I find no authority, even if I extend na and Botticelli True, that the hts are narrowed, and the shadows broadened; nevertheless, their handling of oil colour is nearer to titian's than either Mr Watts' or Mr Burne-Jones'

It is one of the platitudes of art criticisth of the necks of Rossetti's women, and thereby to infer that the painter could not draw True, Rossetti was not a skilful draughts The relation between good drawing and , without which drawing does not exist, is an individual seeing of the object This Rossetti an and ended But the question lies rather with handling than with drawing, and Rossetti sometimes handled paint very skilfully The face and hair of the half-length Venus surrounded with roses is excellent in quality; the roses and the honeysuckle are quite beautiful in quality; they are fresh and bright, pure in colour, as if they had just coarden The ”Annunciation” in the National Gallery is a little sandy, but it cannot be said to be bad in quality, as Mr Watts' and Mr Jones' pictures are bad Every Rossetti is at least clearly recognisable as an oil painting

In the same roo the Account of his Caather from my notes the trace of the disappointe canvas The secretary sits on the right at a small table He looks up, his face turned towards Napoleon, who stands on the left in thethe reat sis, and all the points of character insisted on, with the view of awakening the spectator's curiosity From first to last a vicious desire to narrate an anecdote It is strange that a man of Mr

Orchardson's talent should participate so fully in the supreme vice ofas a scene in a play The whole picture conceived and executed in that pale yellow tint which seems to be the habitual colour of Mr Orchardson's mind”

A pity, indeed it is that Mr Orchardson should waste very real talent in narratives, for he is a great portrait painter I remember very well that beautiful portrait of his wife and child, and will take this opportunity to recall it It is the finest thing he has done; finer than the portrait of Mr Gilbey Here, in a feords, is the subject of the picture An old-fashi+oned cane sofa stretches right across the canvas A lady in black is seated on the right; she bends forward, her left ar over the back of the sofa; she holds in her hand a japanese hand-screen The fine and graceful English profile is ar roundness, _un beau modele a plat_; and the black hair is heavy and loose, one lock slipping over the forehead

The painter has told the exact character of the hair as he has told the character of the hand, and the age of the hand and hair is evident She is a woman of five-and-thirty, she is interested in her baby, her first baby, as a wo and cushi+on, just beneath the mother's eyes; the colour of both is a reddish yellow He holds up his hands for the hand-screen that the round about the yellow cane-work is grey-green; there is a vase of dried ferns and grasses on the left, and the whole picture is filled and penetrated with the affection and charured with any touch of vulgar or commonplace sentimentality The baby's face is so in the picture The picture is wanting in that totality which we find in the greatest masters--for instance, in that exquisite portrait of a mother and child by Sir Joshua Reynolds, exhibited this year in the Guildhall--that beautiful portrait of the th above her knee

Roo the Anchor” Mr Stanhope Forbes is the last-elected Academician, and the e Perhaps the most instructive article that could be written on the Academy would be one in which the writer would confine his examination to this and Mr

Clausen's picture of ”Mowers”, co the two pictures at every point, shohere they diverge, and tracing their artistic history back to its ultihly would be to write the history of the artistic land for the last thirty years; and I one back to first principles, whereas Mr Stanhope Forbes still continues at the point where Bastien-Lepage began to curtail, deforinal inspiration Mr Clausen, I said, overcaeneralisation Mr Stanhope Forbes copied the trousers seaarment bores you in the picture, exactly as it would in nature And the same criticism applies equally well to the faces, the hands, the leather aprons, the loose iron, the hammers, the pincers, the smoked walls I should not be surprised to learn that Mr Stanhope Forbes had had a forge built up in his studio, and had copied it all as it stood A handful of dry facts instead of a passionate iestion

Realism, that is to say the desire to compete with nature, to be nature, is the disease from which art has suffered most in the last twenty years The disease is noane, and e happen upon a canvas of the period like ”Labourers after Dinner”, we cry out, ”What madness! e ever as mad as that?” The impressionists have been often accused of a desire to dispense with the element of beauty, but the accusation has always seeroundless, and even memory of a certain portrait by Mr Walter Sickert does not cause me to falter in this opinion Until I saw Mr Clausen's ”Labourers” I did not fully realise how terrible a thing art becoestion It would be difficult to say where and how this picture differs froraph; it seenified Having spoken so plainly, it is necessary that I should explain roup of field labourers finishi+ng their mid-day dinner in the shade of soht, exactly as they were; the picture is one long explanation; it is as clear as a newspaper, and it reads like one We can tell how round has worn those dreadful hobnailed boots; we can count the nails, and we notice that two or three areabout his legs for so liness of these labourers' faces and the solid earthiness of their lives are there; nothing has been oy We see that the years have brought the old ed ed wo but the daily hardshi+p of living, and the vacuous face of their son tells how completely the life of his forefathers has descended upon hiaiety of Teniers' peasants nor the vicious animality of Brouwers'; and it is hardly necessary to say that the painter has seen nothing of the legendary patriarchal beauty and solemnity which lends so holy a char but the sordid and the mean, and his execution in this picture is as sordid and as esture expressive of weariness nor an attitude expressive of resignation Mr

Clausen seeo lower than the others; I will seekhis very real talent, Mr Clausen has not found art where art is not, where art never has been found, where art never will be found

Looking at this picture, the ordinary liness as that exists, I don't want to see it Why paint such subjects?” And at least the first part of this criticisine no valid reason for the portrayal of sothe unquestioned htest precedent for the blank realisliness seeht, and I only join issue with him when he says, ”Why paint such subjects?” Why not? For all subjects contain eleliness does not exist for the eye that sees beautifully, and meanness vanishes if the sensation is a noble one Have not the very subjects which Mr Clausen sees so rades below the level even of the photograph, been seen nobly, and have they not been rendered incoust, by----Well, the whole world knows by whom But it will be said that Mr, Clausen painted these people as he saw them I dare say he did; but if he could not see these field-folk differently, he should have abstained fro them

The reat work--I will go even further, I know no even tolerable work--in literature or in painting in which the element of beauty does not inform the intention Art is surely but a series of conventions which enable us to express our special sense of beauty--for beauty is everywhere, and abounds in subtle ly in themselves become beautiful by association; or perhaps I should say that they becohtest insistance in a line will redeeliest face Look at Degas' ballet-girls, and say if, artistically, they are not beautiful

I defy you to say that they are ht and shade will create beautiful pictures as that ever were run up by the jerry-builder See the violet suburb stretching into the golden sunset How exquisite it has becoestion and fairy tale! A picturesque shadoill redeeht of the little kitchen where the red-petticoated housewife is sweeping lare of the brick yard where the neighbour stands in parley, leaning against the doorpost, that the humble life of the place is transformed and poetised This was the ABC of Dutch art; it was the Dutchht and shade the meanest and most commonplace incidents of every-day life could be made the subjects of pictures

There are no h ht seem to be a literary criticism, it is in truth a strictly technical criticislected the adht us two hundred years ago; he has neglected to avail himself of those principles of chiaroscuro which they perfected, and which would have enabled hiliness, the one further, in abject realiserated It is not probable that those peasants would look so ugly in a photograph as they do in his picture For had they been photographed, the chances are that so, and a chance gleaht have concentrated the attention on some particular spot Nine times out of ten the exposure of the plate would not have taken place in a ht

But it is the theory of Mr Clausen and his school that it is right and proper to take a six-foot canvas into the open, and paint the entire picture fro, it is not possible to paint for more than an hour--an hour and a half at most

At the end of that time the shadows have rey day it is possible to paint on the same picture for four or five hours Hence the preference shown by this school for grey days Then the whole subject is seen clearly, like a newspaper; and the artist, if he is a realist, copies every patch on the trousers, and does not oreat clay-stained boots Pre-Raphaelitiss, when the subjects of the pictures are Virgins and angels, and the accessories are old enwoven robes and vestraven metals, pearls, velvets and silks, and when the object of the painter is to convey a sensation of the beauty of these materials by the luxury and beauty of the workmanshi+p The common workaday world, with accessories of tin pots and pans, corduroy breeches and clay-pipes, can be only depicted by a series of ellipses through a ht and shade

Beauty of some sort there must be in a work of art, and the very conditions under which Mr Clausen painted precluded any beauty fro into his picture But this year Mr Clausen seems to have shaken himself free from his early education, and he exhibits a picture, conceived in an entirely different spirit, in this Acade tothree ; the third, a little to the left, sharpens his scythe The sky is deep and lowering--a sultry summer day, a little unpleasant in colour, but true At the end of the leam The earth is wrapped in a hot h it the sun sheds a somewhat diffused and oven-like heat There are heavy clouds overhead, for the gleam that passes over the three white shi+rts is transitory and uncertain The handling is woolly and unpleasant, but handling can be overlooked when a canvas exhales a deep sensation of life The --I should have said movements, for the men mow differently; one is older than the other--is adh placed in the iround, is in and not out of the atmosphere The difficulty of the trousers has been overcoarment has not been copied patch by patch The distribution of light is admirable; nowhere does it escape from the frame J F Millet has painted many a worse picture”

Mr Soloy for the subjects of their pictures And the beautiful and touching legends of Orpheus, and the Annunciation, have been treated by them with the indifference of ”our special artist”, who places the fire house in the middle of the picture These pictures are therefore typical of a great deal of historical painting of our tiiveto treat a page of history or legend, the painter should cooal which he desires to obtain There are but two

Either the legend passes unperceived in pon, or the picture is a visible interpretation of the legend The Venetians were able to disregard the legend, but in centuries less richly endoith pictorial genius painters are inclined to support their failing art with the psychological interest their iinative interpretation should not be confused with bald illustration The Acade Beatrice in a Dream”, we should vilify Mr

Fildes' ”Doctor” In both cases a story is told, in neither case is the execution excellent Why then should one be a picture and the other no more than a bald illustration? The question is a vexed one, and the only conclusion that we can draw seerades, wit altogether ruins; only great thought may enter into art Rossetti is a painter we admire, and we place hiinative We condone his lack of pictorial power, because he could think, and we appreciate his Annunciation--the ”Ecce Ancilla Domini!” in the National Gallery, principally because he has looked deep into the legend, and revealed its true and hunificance

It is a small picture, about three feet by two, and is destitute of all technical accomplishment, or even habit It is painted in white and blue, and the streak of red in the foreground, the red of a screen on which is embroidered the lily--emblem of purity--adds to the chill and coldness Drawn up upon her white bed the Virgin crouches, silent with expectation, listening to the mystic dreae blue eyes glea in her The mouth and chin tell no tale, but the eyes are deep pools of light, and mirror the soul that is on fire within The red hair falls about her, a symbol of the soul In the drawn-up knees, faintly outlined beneath the white sheet, the painter hints at her body's beauty One arm is cast forward, the hand not clenched but stricken Behind her a blue curtain hangs straight from iron rods set on either side of the bed Above the curtain a lahted by the pallor of the dawn A dead, faint sky--the faint ashen sky which precedes the first rose tint; the circularis filled with it, and the paling blue of the sky's colour contrasts with the deep blue of the bed's curtain, on which the Virgin's red hair is painted

The angel stands by the side of the white bed--I should say floats, his fair feet hanging out of a few pale fla the arht hand he holds a lily all in blosso Brown-gold hair grows thick about the angel's neck; the shadowed profile is outlined against the hard, sad sky; the expression of the face is deep and sphinx-like; he has coht, where uncertainty and doubt are unknown The Dove passes by hi in her white bed, her knees drawn to her bosom, her deep blue eyes--her dawn-tinted eyes--filled with ache, dream, and expectation The shadows of dawn are on wall and floor--strange, blue shadows!--the Virgin's shadow lies on the wall, the angel's shadow falls across the coverlet

Here, at least, there is drahest form of drama--spiritual drahest forestion Rossetti has revealed the essence of this intensely human story--a story that, whenever we look below the surface, which is nise as a story of to-day, of yesterday, of all tiirl thralled by thevisions

Mr Hacker's telling of the legend is to Rossetti's what a story in the _London Journal_ is to a story by Balzac The Virgin has apparently wandered outside the town She is dressed in a long white garhtdress, or a piece of conventional drapery? On the right there is a long, silly tree, which looks as if it had been evolved out of a ball of green ith knitting-needles, and above her floats an angel attired in a wisp of blue gauze Rossetti, we knoas, in the strict sense of the word, hardly a painter at all, but he had so, as we can in literature, with faulty expression, if there is so behind it What is most intolerable in art is scholastic rodomontade And what else is Mr Hacker's execution? In every transenerate, and in this picture it seeinal crispness is lost, and, complicated with _la peinture claire_, it see whatsoever There is no variety of tone in that white sheet, there is nobody inside it, and the angel is as insincere and frivolous as any sketch in a young lady's album