FINE ART, CHIEFLY CONTEMPORARY NOTICES RE-PRINTED, WITH REVISIONS, BY WILLIAM MICHAEL ROSSETTI. Verum ego non tarn aliis legem ponam quam legem vobis mese proprise mentis exponam : quam qui probaverit teneat, eui non placuerit abjiciat. Petrarca. Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you. Blake. LONDON AND CAMBRIDGE: MACMILLAN AND CO. 1867. CAMBRIDGE : — PRINTED BY JONATHAN PALMER. IN ALL FILIAL LOVE I DEDICATE THIS LITTLE BOOK OF CRITICISM TO MY MOTHER, WHOSE DEAR EXAMPLE OUGHT TO HAVE TAUGHT ME THE CRITICAL VIRTUES OF SOUND JUDGMENT, PERFECT MODESTY, AND INFALLIBLE TRUTH-TELLING. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/fineartchieflycoOOross PREFACE. The reader will perceive from my title-page that the articles comprised in this volume have all previously appeared in some other form ; and the table of contents will show him what are the publications which have been drawn upon, and the range of dates covered by the papers selected. If he takes any interest in the volume, he may perhaps think it due to him that the writer should explain himself on two points : ist, What degree of consistency there may have been in his opinions upon art between the terminal dates of 1850 and 1866 ; and, 2nd, Whether any and what amount of ex-post-facto consistency has been introduced into those opinions in the present reissue, by way of revision. It is chiefly for the purpose of satisfying on these points any reader who honours me by the enquiry that I write this preface. 1. A person who begins the work of criticising fine art before he is quite of age, and who continues the pro- Vlll PREFACE. cess for the sixteen years next ensuing, would but be 4 writing himself down an ass’ (unless indeed he could claim to be a prodigy) were he to say that his opinions have undergone no modification. He must have been immature in opinion at the age of twenty; and to be perfectly consistent ever since would be to be still immature, and now, by lapse of time, glaringly and inexcusably so. If therefore perchance I must ‘ write myself down an ass’ in some form or other, it shall at least not be thus con- sciously, nor in this form preferentially; I trust on the contrary that I have benefited to some extent by experience and reflection, and that my opinions are not now absolutely and stagnantly the same as they were in 1850. Most persons who take a serious interest in art appear to me to go more or less definitely through something of this mental progression. Their earlier chief homage is rendered to works of strong sentiment or expression, works which principally develop the dramatic or thoughtful ele- ments of art — or to some special phase of execution, as perhaps brilliancy of colour or precision of representation — or even to some peculiarity of artistic tendency. What is here meant by the term peculiarity may be illustrated in a moment by contrasting mediaeval art, which is in this sense peculiar, with Greek art, which is unpeculiar. Gradually such persons get more and more to perceive that all these qualities, important and attractive as they are, do not con- PREFACE. IX stitute the central requirement, which is simply this — that a work professedly of fine art shall above all things fulfil this profession, be primarily a work of art , and that fine art. Thus the first thing demanded of a picture or statue comes to be that it be an excellent work qua picture or qua statue — a concrete defensible and admirable by that one test, whatever other tests may yield neutral or negative results. In other words, the chief homage is by this time rendered to the total power of productive execution, including in especial such qualities as harmony, balance, and a certain spaciousness and (if the term may be allowed) compensatory or reconciling element of the artistic faculty. The entire decorative effect of the work is rated as of much more importance than erewhile; and this indeed agrees with what seems to be an almost constant rule — that the taste for directly decorative art, as contrasted with that other representative pictorial or sculptural art, grows conspicuously with advancing years. Such is the second riper stage of art connoisseurship or criticism. It is, I believe, essentially the final and right stage. But it tends to shade off into that lower term of connoisseurship which may be called dilettantism ; and the corrective to that is a reviving and re-growth of the earlier stage of feeling — a perception that one’s first love for the intellectual, dramatic, realistic, or individually partial forms of art, was, though not quite the innermost sort of love, still a high and a needful one, never X PREFACE. to be decried as merely juvenile, nor cancelled as merely preparatory. One must embrace art, indeed, as a beautiful body ; but a body actuated by a soul whose evidences and impulses one longs to trace with greater and greater clear- ness, and to find pointing to lofty and still loftier issues. I trust that this sort of consistent development of opinion may be not wholly untraceable in the writings of which the present volume is composed : if so, I shall willingly disclaim any rigid mechanical consistency, any obtuseness to new impressions or fresh lights. I do not feel that I have ever thrown overboard my original cargo of merchantable critical wares; but hope that occasional interchanges and additions of stock have enriched them, and that the whole bulk has rather improved in the course of the voyage, and more than recouped its wear and tear. In my old opinions I find not much positively to recant, but several items which have changed their relative im- portance in my estimation. 2. The articles here reproduced have undergone sub- stantial revision, and especially a good deal of piecing together. Here and there I have altered an expression which seemed crude or extreme ; but I have not changed anything essential, not substituted new lamps for old ones. Probably the articles which might have benefited most, in one sense, by a more extensive process of overhauling, are those which relate to the Praeraphaelite movement and PREFACE. XI artists. But it has appeared to me that, if I may without presumption suppose any interest to attach to what I have written on these matters, that interest is at least as much in the way of record or history as otherwise, and that the genuineness of the record should not be in any important respect tampered with. The Praeraphaelite movement, beginning in 1848 — 9, was indisputably a considerable one, and one which has had a marked result in the British school of art. I happened to be mixed up from the first with the movement and its organization, though only in tae subordinate capacity of a non-artistic member ; and the aricles which I wrote regarding it, while strictly and enirely my own, and in no way prompted by any of the artists concerned, may nevertheless be taken to represent with some degree of exactness and authority the aims and aspirations of the originators of the school. They are tie only articles then written which do so even ap- pioxinately. This disposes me to fancy that these papers, wiether viewed as sound or unsound, sensible or weak, may b< looked upon, by some of the curious in art, as not quite mworthy of being rescued from oblivion, and brought once rare into the light with an avowed authorship ; and, if tbs is done at all, nothing of any material bearing in them sbuld be changed. The object would be to re-exhibit th professions of Prseraphaelitism in its growing and tetative period; scarcely to explain whether or not the PREFACE. xii humblest of its then promoters would be prepared, after some lapse of years, to testify in the same strain. The articles here more directly referred to are (besides the one on ‘ Praeraphaelitism’) those on the pictures of Mr. Holman Hunt, and on the earlier pictures of Mr. Millais. Regarding the tone of these articles, which may seem to a reader of the present day somewhat jubilar t t and unmeasured, I would beg to submit an observation or two. I am not conscious of having ever written h the temper of a mere partisan— that is, of a person whc, to subserve some ulterior end, purposely puts forward everything advantageous to one side, and purposely sup- presses everything disadvantageous, though he is awire that this also ought to be stated in order to a fair present- ation of the facts. So far from that, I could appek to these very articles to show that considerations per mtra were not concealed, nor treated as of no account. But I feel that there is a certain weakness in the notices, khen taken solely on their own showing, dependent partly on tie fact that they were written more or less combatively, to repl vehement onslaughts upon the works in question, and party upon the fact that the standard of comparison kept in vie r , according to which these works are declared ‘admirablf, 4 unequalled,’ or what not, is mainly the standard of ex- temporary British painting, or of an Academy exhibition, rtt that of art great in the abstract, or those masterpieces t>f PREFACE. Xlll the past which represent to us what highest summits it is given to man to attain in that line of effort. It would no doubt redound to the benefit of the present volume could it have been made to contain a greater bulk of papers regarding the art of the past ; but it never fell in my way to write about those phases of art to any extent proportion- ate to the art of the present, and chiefly of our own country. Messrs. Millais and Hunt, and, so far as he belongs to the school, Mr. Madox Brown, are the painters of the Prseraphaelite body criticised in these pages. I have not thought it advisable to republish any entire review of an Academy or other such exhibition, but rather to extract, from various reviews of that sort, the notices of a very small number of painters, and place these in consecutive order. The reader who is at all familiar with the subject will recollect that there is another leader of the Prse- raphaelite movement, my brother Dante Rossetti, and may perhaps be surprised at finding no notices of him included in the volume. On this point I desire to speak with entire unreserve. I am very far from thinking my brother a less important painter than those here reviewed, or less materially concerned in starting and guiding the movement termed Praeraphaelite. On the contrary, I believe and know that, whatever primacy in some particular phase or condition of the movement may be claimed by each of XIV PREFACE. the three painters Messrs. Brown, Millais, and Hunt, and by the sculptor Mr. Woolner, no one can assert a larger share than my brother in the ‘ brains’ of the movement, its intellectual impulse and originating vis; and, as a matter of critical opinion, I fully consider that he has produced works whose artistic vitality is both as rich and as tenacious as that of any of his colleagues’ works. Neither would any feeling of mauvaise honte , or fear of misconstruction, have withheld me from republishing with my name such notices of my brother’s works as I might have written anonymously ; the fact being that I never do write anony- mously when the option is offered me, and that I even feel more free to express my full and frank opinion of friend or relative on the avowed than on the anonymous system. The real and only reason why I do not here republish any reviews of my brother is simply that he never has been to any moderate extent an exhibiting artist, and that consequently I never have had an opportunity of criticising his works ; except in two or three instances, when the works exhibited were of secondary importance, and the reviews were correspondingly slight. As I have thus no adequate notices of my brother’s productions to reissue, I prefer not to reissue any at all. A few words concerning the system of anonymous criticism may not unaptly conclude this preface. That system appears to me to be really advantageous to two PREFACE. XV sorts of writers, and only two : those whose names are, and are destined to remain, too insignificant to reflect any credit upon their writings, and those who have some personal or private motive (possibly unobjectionable, or possibly bad) for wishing to diffuse opinions among the public without publicly admitting that they themselves entertain those opinions. Now the interest chiefly worth consulting in this case is that of the public. To the best of my perception, it does not promote the public interest to read the writings of really insignificant persons, un- identified as such, and lit up by the prestige of some great journal or potent editor; nor to be indoctrinated by writers who — be they right or wrong in substance, and blameless or not in their secretiveness— do not exhibit ‘ le courage de leurs opinions .’ On the other hand, the avowed system enables the public to judge whether the writer who ad- dresses them is worth hearing for his own sake, or only for his subject-matter’s; what deductions must be made for personal or partisan bias ; what credit is due to an opinion which mere private interests, had they been consulted, would perhaps have led the writer to keep to himself. Exceptions may, and no doubt do, exist : but, as a general rule, I should say that a person who does not choose to stand up openly and stoutly for his opinions, and to take all consequences, is not exactly the sort of person from the pondering and reception of whose opinions the public XVI PREFACE. benefits. When one is vaccinated, one likes to have reasonable assurance that the virus came out of a cow, not possibly out of a dog in a mangy or hydrophobic condition. W. M. ROSSETTI. CONTENTS. PAGE I. Style, Subject-Matter, and Successes in Art ( apropos of the Academy Exhibitions of 1861 — 4), 1861 ....... I 1862 ....... 15 1863 . . . . . . .21 1864 . . . . . .28 [from Fraser' s Magazine , 1861 — 4]. II. The Externals of Sacred Art . . .40 [from the Edinburgh 'Weekly Review, 1857]. III. The Epochs of Art as represented in the Crystal Palace . . . , . . 51 Egypt ....... 54 Greece . . . . . . -59 Assyria . . . . . . .72 The Moresque . . . . . 76 The Byzantine-Romanesque . . . *79 The Gothic . . . . . .82 The Renaissance . . . . . .87 [from the Spectator , 1 854 ; the Reader , 1 864]. IV. The International Exhibitions of Art. Paris, 1855 ...... 93 London, 1862 ...... 127 [from the Spectator , 1855 — 6 ; the Saturday Review, 1858 ; Fraser's Magazine, 1862; the London Review, 1862; the Fine Arts Quarterly Review, 1864]. XV111 CONTENTS. PAGE V. PRiERAPHAELITISM ...... 168 [from the Spectator, 1851]. VI. Critiques on Contemporary Painters and Designers. Madox Brown. The Exhibition of Mr. Brown’s Collected works, 1865 . 178 Millais. Christ in the House of His Parents, ‘The Carpenter’s Shop,’ 1850 ...... 202 Ferdinand Lured by Ariel, 1850 . . . 205 The Woodman’s Daughter, 1851 . . . 205 The Return of the Dove to the Ark, 1851 . . 207 Mariana in the Moated Grange, 1851 . . . 207 A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, refusing to shelter himself from danger by wearing the Roman- catholic Badge, 1852 .... 208 Ophelia, 1852 . . . . . .210 The Order of Release, 1853 .... 211 The Proscribed Royalist, 1853 .... 213 The Rescue, 1855 ..... 214 Peace Concluded, 1856 . . . . .217 Autumn Leaves, 1856 . . . . .217 L’ Enfant du Regiment, 1856 . . .218 The Blind Girl, 1856 . . . . .219 A Dream of the Past, Sir Isumbras at the Ford, 1857 . 221 The Escape of a Heretic (1559), 1857 . . . 222 The Ransom, 1862 ..... 223 ‘Trust me,’ 1862 ..... 224 The Parable of the Woman seeking for a piece of Money, 1862 ....... 226 The Eve of St. Agnes, 1863 .... 226 The Wolf’s Den : — My First Sermon, 1863 . . 229 My Second Sermon, 1864 .... 230 Leisure Moments, 1864 ..... 230 Charlie is my Darling, 1864 . . . .231 Lillie, Daughter of J. Noble Esq., 1864 . *231 The Romans leaving Britain, 1865 . . . 232 CONTENTS. XIX PAGE Holman Hunt. A converted British Family sheltering a Christian Mission- ary from the Persecution of the Druids, 1850 . . 233 The Hireling Shepherd, 1852 . . . 234 Claudio and Isabella, 1853 . . . . 236 Our English Coasts, 1853 .... 237 The Light of the World, 1854 . . . . 238 The Awakening Conscience, 1854 . . . 240 The Scapegoat, 1856 . . . . 242 Fairlight Downs — Sunlight on the Sea, 1858 . . 244 Maclise. The Meeting of Wellington and Bliicher on the Field of Waterloo after the Victory, 1862 . . . 245 Leighton. Cimabue’s Madonna carried through Florence, 1855 . 254 The Triumph of Music, 1856 . . . 255 Reminiscence of Algiers, a Negro Fete, 1858 . . 256 Paris, on his wedding-morning, finds Juliet apparently lifeless : — The Fisherman and the Siren — 1858 . 257 An Odalisque, 1862 ..... 259 The Star of Bethlehem, 1862 .... 259 Michael Angelo nursing his dying Servant, 1862 . 260 Helen of Troy, 1865 ..... 261 Frith. Life at the Seaside, Ramsgate Sands, 1854 . . 262 The Derby Day, 1858 ..... 263 The Railway Station, 1862 .... 265 Whistler. Etchings, 1863 . . . . .272 The Lange Lize of the 4 Six Marks’ : — Wapping, 1864 . 273 The Little White Girl, &c., 1865 . . . 274 Humouristic Designers. Cruikshank. The Exhibition of Mr. Cruikshank’s Collected Works, 1862 ....... 277 XX CONTENTS. PAGE Leech. Pictures of Life and Character from the Collection of Mr. Punch, 1854 Mr. Leech’s Exhibition, 1862 . 282 . 284 Doyle. Brown, Jones, and Robinson, 1853 . 289 [from Fraser’s Magazine , 1862 — 5 ; the Pall Mall Gazette , 1865; the Critic , 1850; the Spectator , 1851 — 8; the Liverpool Post , 1857; the London Review , 1862; the Saturday Review , 1858; the Reader, 1863]. VII. Turner’s Life and Genius (in a Review of Mr. Thornbury’s Book, 1861) . . . . .291 [from Weldon’s Register, 1861 — 2; the Spectator, 1851 — 2]. VIII. Mr. Palgraye and Unprofessional Criticisms on Art ....... 324 [from the Fine Arts Quarterly Review, 1866]. IX. British Sculpture, its Position and Prospects, 1861 ... 335 [from Fraser’s Magazine, 1861]. X. Japanese Woodcuts ..... 363 [from the Reader, 1863]. E RRAT A. Page 152, line 3, for “ loom,” read 4 4 looms. ” ” 261, „ 13, „ 4 ‘moonlight,” ,, “noonlight.” I. STYLE, SUBJECT-MATTER, AND SUCCESSES IN ART (apropos of the Academy Exhibitions of 1861 — 4). A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.- — Blake. [l86l]. The Academy Exhibition of the present year has been by no means a specially interesting one to the general public. It did not rivet attention by great or attractive subjects, or by notable artistic achievements ; yet it was, as a whole, the best exhibition which we have seen in Trafalgar Square, whether for style, treatment, or capacity. The cream of the collection was to be found in the chaste and noble portrait- art of Mr. Watts ; the oriental truth and strength of Mr. Holman Hunt ; the passionate poetry of Mr. Leighton ; the rich pictorial study-heads and domestic life by Mr. Wells and by his wife (the best painter that ever handled a brush with a female hand, and a truly deplorable loss in her early death); the English sea-love and colour of Mr. Hook; the unrefined but striking historic drama of Mr. Ward; the home love and grace of Mr. Hughes ; the splendid land- scape-art of Mr. Anthony and Mr. William Linnell ; and the great deer-fight of Sir Edwin Landseer. The increase of B 2 STYLE, SUBJECT-MATTER, AND power and seriousness in Mr. Thomas Faed, and his hold upon the popular sympathy, go some way towards adding him to the list.* The season, however, has been a remarkably bad one for art-patronage ; bad, not only in its general character of thriftiness, but in its exceptional character of prodigality as well. The commission given by the picture-dealer, Mr. Flatou, to Mr. Frith, for a picture at the price of ^9187. 10 s., “Life at a Railway Station,” and the purchase (if truly reported, or near the truth) of Mr. Phillip’s pictures produced in his late tour in Spain, some dozen in number, by two dealers for ^20,000, hint of something rotten in the public taste.f For the qualities which make Mr. Frith and Mr. Phillip conspicuous and admired, and so beyond parallel successful by the money-test, are the very qualities which keep them rigidly second or third rate in the true college of art. We desire to do' every justice to these gentlemen ; and admit without stint the sharpness, cleverness, and nicety, of Mr. Frith, and the executive ease and force of Mr. Phillip. But cleverness which is intrinsically of the surface, and force * The principal pictures here referred to are — by Watts, Miss Alice Prinsep, The Window Seat; by Hunt, A Street-Scene in Cairo, the Lantern-maker’s Courtship ; by Leighton, Paolo and Francesca, Lieder ohne Worte ; by Wells, A Portrait, An Italian; by Mrs. Wells, The Veneziana, Heather-gatherer, Peep-bo ; by Hook, Leaving Cornwall for the Whitby Fishing, Sea Urchins ; by Ward, Antechamber at Whitehall during the dying moments of Charles II. ; by Hughes, Home from Work ; by Anthony, Sunset ; by W. Linn ell, Collecting the Flocks, evening; by Landseer, Fatal Duel; by Faed, From Dawn to Sunset. f Since this book was placed in the printer’s hands has occurred the deservedly lamented death of Mr. Phillip. My first impulse was to cancel the passage rating his artistic performances lower than his thorough admirers rate them ; but on the whole I have come to the conclusion that an honest and not overcharged expression of critical opinion, in a book of criticism, ought not to be suppressed because the person affected by it has passed immeasurably beyond its petty range, leaving behind him the works to- which, and not to the person of the worker, the opinion applies. SUCCESSES IN ART. 3 which is intrinsically ad captandum , can only produce after their kind; and that kind is for ever heartless, jaded, and forced — the antipodes of great or even of fine art. How- ever, we must not grudge these painters or any other public favourites their acceptance and success. The race is not always to the swift; or rather the race in which the truly and permanently swift are worsted is not the sort of race for which they have knit their solid sinews, and made up their victorious minds. The advance which the Academy Exhibition indicated in artistic style, or the pictorial treatment of the subjects, is a point which invites some further development. There is a considerable difference between what we imply by the abstract term ‘ style’ in art, and the meaning of the same word as applied to literature. It is incom- parably more important in the former case than in the latter, and for this reason — that, in art, the means of signify- ing a thing is the actual representation, image, or partial realization, of it; whereas, in literature or speech, it is a mere conventional symbol, having no intrinsic resemblance whatever to the thing signified. The word ‘man,’ for in- stance, is nothing beyond three letters and a sound ; but the picture man is a real man in form and colour. Or we might make the practice of picture-writing serve as our illustration. The excellence of literary style in picture- writing would consist simply in clearness and conciseness : but the excellence of artistic style (supposing it to be aimed at here as in an ordinary picture) would present a real and fine image of the thing itself. Now the difference between the most slovenly and diffuse and the most emphatic and concise style of picture-writing, as read off into words, would be extremely small compared with the difference between the meanest and the finest pictured form, considered as 4 STYLE, SUBJECT-MATTER, AND real representations. The worst distinctive picture-word for King Sesostris would still read £ King Sesostris’ very nearly as well as the best ; but fancy the difference between the worst distinctive and the highest characteristic or ideal portraiture of King Sesostris, as a work of art ! This of course is an extreme illustration of our position, but it is not a false one. Of course, too, style is important in literature ; but it is not so important, nor does the term there, in its widest acceptation, imply nearly so much as, in its narrowest, it does in art. For, in art, you cannot have a fine, a noble, a bold, or a timid style, without having therein a fine, noble, bold, or timid representation, or achtal image , of the thing signified. In fact, style in art may be said to include everything beyond the choice and conception of the subject itself, and the mere accuracy or otherwise of its embodiment. It is thus a third of the whole battle, being, in one word, the artist’s embodied perceptive (as distinct from his conceptive) faculty ; and no school can be great in style without being ipso facto great in art. That Michael Angelo chose noble subjects, and conceived or thought them out greatly, was not a matter of style, nor yet that he drew or coloured them accurately (when he did so); but that lie represented them nobly was a matter of style. That term includes all the rest of his performance in art. In like manner, the whole difference between the early Italian, the French, and the British schools, is difference in subject and conception, in accuracy, and in style. If a Frenchman and an Englishman both choose one domestic subject, and both paint it accurately, one might at the first blush assume that the two pictures would be greatly alike ; but they would not prove so — the styles would be sure to be extremely diverse. It will be observed that we are not here speaking of the minor differences of style, or what is SUCCESSES IN ART. 5 more properly termed 6 manner,’ between artist and artist, but of the dominant way of looking at things, and of ex- pressing them — of style as a many-phased but permanent element in all art According to this view of style, and of its high function in fine art, we can award no greater praise to a school of painting than to say that it is excellent in style, nor is there any symptom so promising as that of an advance in style. It implies that the painters are getting to see how their subjects are to be treated so as to produce good pictures — which is, in truth, the essence and acme of pictorial art. Noble subjects, great inventions or conceptions of subjects, may be nobler things than good art, but they are not such essential elements of art. If you have good style, you have simply and entirely good art ; whereas, if you have the best of subjects, and the finest conception and invention of subjects, you are indeed sure of having a thoughtful and admirable mind at work, but it may not (though of course it equally well may) be an artistic mind and faculty. Ac- curacy also, or simple truth-telling, is a lower stage than style : it is the first and the indispensable stage, but only a preparatory one ; the sum-total of transcription, but only the beginning of art. Good style will make a good picture out of the most ignoble subject. If Murillo had had as great a style, or, in other words, had been as great an artist, as Paul Veronese, his picture of a boy catching the fleas or lice which infest him would, merely as a specimen of art, have been as good as Veronese’s ‘Supper at Emmaus’ in the Louvre ; and, if that ‘ Supper at Emmaus’ had been a noble rendering of its great nominal subject, instead of what it is — a Venetian family, with children fondling a dog, and the sacred group unsatisfactorily presented in the back- ground — it could not be a finer piece of art than now, 6 STYLE, SUBJECT-MATTER, AND though, of course, a vastly finer conception. On the other hand, German religious or historic art of the present day embodies elevated ideas, and gives accuracy of form and so on; but it fails almost wholly in pictorial style, and remains therefore a real failure as art. The gist of the whole matter is this : — That pictorial art is a representation of visual objects in form and colour, demanding firstly accuracy, and secondly style, or the right way of combining the materials into a picture ; that, if you get the first, you are right as far as you go ; and, if you get both, you are right as an artist ‘ to the top of the compass.’ If you apply both to a subject finely chosen, felt, and invented, you are not only an artist, but a thinker and creator as well. There can be no dispute that the advance in style which the British school now presents is mainly due to the stern and true discipline of Praeraphaelitism. This has taught painters how to exhibit facts : they are now practising how to combine realized facts into pictures. It is not a super- seding of Prseraphaelitism, but the second and forecast stage of it — the one it contemplated and prepared. Of subject and invention we have still very little. These we can only obtain from inventors or men of genius — not a bespeakable class by any manner of means. Whenever they show them- selves, we welcome them; but they can do little for less gifted men by way of models. The latter must stick to their own accuracy, and work for their style, and guard against borrowing anything from their betters, except en- thusiasm, to raise their feelings and their conception of what art is able to do. Of subjects recommendable to our school as a body — excluding from consideration the men of genius, to whom there is no rule and no recommendation — the best, we SUCCESSES IN ART. 7 think, are clearly those of our own day. But there is a distinction here. Mere domestic art, as mostly understood and practised, is a very meagre affair. It has passed through two main phases — the Dutch and the British. The first was mostly low, ugly, and inhuman; debauches of boors, senseless and heartless conversation or costume pieces. The second has come to be miserably small ; boys playing games, girls listening to organ-grinders, cottagers smoking quiet pipes, or preparing homely dinners. Or we have a touch of the most poverty-stricken religious feeling— a grace before meat, or a girl at a tombstone, with an angel (and such an angel !) in the sky. Such art as this is strictly analogous to the juvenile tale or the religious tract ; and it would be just as sensible to exhort our men of letters to . disport themselves in those mildest fields of literature as to inspirit our painters to corresponding relaxations in art. Modern art, to be worthy of the name, must deal with very different matter ; with passion, multiform character, real business and action, incident, historic fact. We are by no means destitute of pioneers in these directions. We have had Millais’s 6 Rescue’ of a family from the flames ; Hunt’s 5 Awakening Conscience;’ Madox Brown’s ‘ Last of England,’ the emigrants on their voyage ; Wallis’s ‘Dead Stonebreaker;’ Paton’s ‘Scene from the Indian Mutiny.’ The range of possible subject is as endless as the range of life and of society : the art which deals with it must have the thrill, the impulse, the meaning and inexhaustibleness, of life as well. It must rely equally upon strong facts, strong conceptions, and solid portrait-like actuality; having as little as need be to do with insignificant aspects of society high or low, such as express nothing and lead to nothing, or with points of light comedy or sentimental drama. Of moral bearing as much or as little as you will ; — much, if 8 STYLE, SUBJECT-MATTER, AND really and spontaneously involved in a subject of true pictorial interest, none at all if not naturally there, and never with a prepensely didactic or pulpit-pounding air about it. If we go back to the beginning of our English school, we shall find a model of the vital modern art ready to our hands. Our great Hogarth led the van of all modern-life art worthy of the name. In seriousness and solidity of purpose, in lively, various, dramatic, and terrible invention, in intellect and insight, and adaptation of means to ends, no one can hope to get beyond him. Nor is it needful at the present time of day to insist upon the fact that Hogarth was very far from being wholly a grotesque or caricature artist, far from destitute of the feeling of beauty, and by no means wanting in proficiency as an executant. It is on these points, however, that the painter of our own actual life must add something to what Hogarth can teach him : he must be more chary of caricature subjects or treatment, more resolute to make beauty a main and fixed quality of his work, and more predominantly devoted to the pictorial side of the art — not pursued to the weakening of its inventive or expressional power, but to the enforcement and artistic balance of this. We would add that the living artist is by no means bound to be the pictorial moralist that Hogarth was : that point, as we have already indicated, may be left to take care of itself. He may raise his work into greater dignity and loftier service by the directly moral element ; or he may leave this on one hand, and do what he feels the personal call for doing, without concerning himself with the correction or castigation of his age, and yet be none the less excellent and acceptable to all true men as a painter. His work must live with its own life, and teach its own lesson — of beauty, character, passion, or what else, — or morals, if SUCCESSES IN ART. 9 these are any part of his* function, but not otherwise. Hogarth was a painter, and he was likewise a moralist. It cannot be contested that his greatest moral works are his greatest pictorial works also ; but they furnish in this respect no necessary standard to other men, only an admirable one. Indeed, we would say that, in any painter less exceptional and sui generis than Hogarth, the amount of morals which he imported into works of art would overweight and deaden them : it would be too direct and intrusive, and we should beg the painter to spare us his homilies, and attend to his brush and palette. The art which deals with his own day is especially that which the painter is qualified and called upon to execute. It is what he knows most about, can do best, and can make of the most interest and value both to the bulk of his contemporaries and to all the generations which come after him. It is that record which he alone can write in living and indisputable characters. What Holbein or Ho- garth of the nineteenth century (were such forthcoming) could do for the sixteenth and the eighteenth what the actual Holbein and Hogarth did ? — and where will be the man of the twentieth or thirtieth to do for the nineteenth that which its own painters might do if they chose, and which would be incalculably prized by those distant inheritors of their life and labour? Yet we would be far from saying that historic art of past time is to be abandoned by the present : there may be as much pedantry in the exclusion as in the exaggerated cultivation and estimation of it. After all that (in a natural, and mainly right and healthy, reaction) has of late been said against the treatment of past historic or other subjects, the fact remains that these present a sphere full of interest and opportunity for the capable painter, and in many respects more fertile of beauty IO STYLE, SUBJECT-MATTER, AND and pictorial material than the life of our own day. The mistake appears to be that of imagining that there is any intrinsic and radical distinction between the two things, and between the true modes of treatment for both. Historic art of the past upon stilts is a bad thing ; dummies flaunting and attitudinizing in costume are bad ; but not the historic art itself, nor men and women in costume. When we have once got well to understand that the art of our own time is as serious and dignified as that of the past, we shall equally understand that that of the past holds its own face to face with the present, and that the two must be vitalized in exactly the same way. It is just as possible to give a human and living representation of the past in art as in literature ; and whether this latter is possible we may ask of Shakspeare. Shakspeare is as much at home in Henry the Fourth’s time, King John’s, Julius Caesar’s, or Agamem- non’s, as in Queen Elizabeth’s : the year of the world or of grace is a very small matter to him. And why? Because life still is life all the world over, and all the centuries through : and he will give you life under as many phases, and dynasties, and historic cycles, as you please, — and with London mechanics acting before Theseus, and fire-arms going off before they were invented, into the bargain. That is the only way, in the long run, in which we either can or may conceive history and historic art. Preposterous as it would be to propose Shakspeare as the measure for other men’s attainment, it is quite practicable to study in him what is the right thing to attain, and the way to set about it. At the present day, indeed, we need not have the cannons fired off by a soldier in chain-mail, simply because we are all too well informed, and the proceeding would disconcert us, and raise questions instead of silencing them ; but we must still have inside the chain-mail a man SUCCESSES IN ART. 1 1 of the same flesh and blood as an artilleryman, if we are to Relieve in him and his mail. Another writer who may be proposed to the artist as an example of historic treatment is Meinhold, the author of the Amber Witch and Sidonia the Sorceress. To do in art what he has done in literature is of course a less hopeless task than with a Shakspeare for model, and is indeed an altogether achievable one. Meinhold, too, is quite on the opposite tack from Shakspeare as regards accuracy of costuming and detail. He is peculiarly painter- like in this respect ; presenting the outer aspect of a past century, not certainly in lengthy and laboured description, but with all the precision and exact keeping of a contem- porary portrait or character-group. He gives it in action, in minutiae of incident and manner, and in all those number- less small points of externals which made the same thing done in the past look differently from what it does in the present. That is exactly what the painter of historical genre wants to do. But, if he would attain it with a success corresponding to that of Meinhold, he must work upon Meinhold’s principle. With him the externals are not the essentials; they only invest the essentials, which are life, character, and the play of feeling, opinion, and event. These he makes true of the past, because they are in them- selves truly conceived, and would be equally so, with mere difference of form, in the present. And that is what the art of the past has equally to do : it must rely upon the man first, and conceive of him as genuinely as of a man of our own time; and upon the costume and accessories, only as externals of the man. It must have life, real palpitating life, at its centre ; not a make-believe of historic pompous- ness and second-hand antiquarianism. Its 6 clothes-philo- sophy’ must be that of Herr Teufelsdrockh ; which advances from the mere palpable outer integument to the whole 12 STYLE, SUBJECT-MATTER, AND visible and invisible habit of the man and of the world. 6 Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment ?’ The French painter, Millet, one of the most genuine artists of our time, had a curious little picture in the Paris Exhibition of the current year. It was old Tobit and his wife, dressed exactly like plain country folk of the present day, with their modern house, and cat, and roadside scenery. This is one mode of bringing home to us a subject of the past, and has ‘ heart of grace’ too in its odd, pungent way. Yet it is not to be recommended now for imitation. We have got beyond it; and it costs the spectator a greater effort to find out that the blind old countryman with his walking-stick is meant for Tobit, and to perceive that he really does represent Tobit pretty well after all, than it would cost the artist to put him into a reasonable resem- blance to Tobit’s real clothes and environments. We can- not compel people to be as ignorant, or as passive to these matter-of-fact solecisms, as they were in the middle ages ; nor treat them in mere simplicity of purpose as if they were. The naivete of the fifteenth century in such matters has be- come ingenuity and prepense theory in the nineteenth. All we can do in perfect good faith is to concentrate the spec- tator’s attention upon the fact that Tobit was very like another blind old man when you came to scrutinize him; leaving the costume and so on to be cared for much as they happen to come, but not intentionally making them wrong when we can make them partially right. While on the subject of the current French art, we may be allowed in the briefest terms to recommend it to the serious attention of British painters. They will find in it very valuable discipline in the fundamental rudiments of art; and that habit of regarding a picture as a picture which, inducing unity, vividness, straightforwardness, and SUCCESSES IN ART. J 3 breadth, results in real pictorial style — the quality on whose importance we have already insisted. These characteristics hold good of a very large section of the actual French art, and were displayed in force in this year’s Parisian Exhi- bition ; though no doubt there are other phases of that art neither to be admired in themselves nor to be upheld as examples to others. One department of art in which the French, and they only, excel, is that of military or battle pictures ; less pro- minently evinced this year than on some previous occasions, numerous as were the large canvasses devoted to the Italian and Crimean campaigns. We observe that a movement has been started this season in London for promoting the pro- duction and purchase of pictures illustrating the naval and military achievements of Great Britain, and of which Mr. Desanges’s Victoria Cross Gallery is fixed upon to serve as the nucleus. If this could be regarded as the beginning of a serious movement on a large scale, it were scarcely by pos- sibility capable of success. The military is one of the most hopeless and barren phases of art, and British painters have always shown themselves peculiarly abroad in it. Art can hardly thwart its own best purposes more than by dealing with masses of red coats and pipe-clay, bayonet-thrusts, gashes and blood, agonized and distorted features, and wide-spread slaughter. Yet these are the essentials of the subject; anything short of them is a mere trifling with it, half-hearted and self-condemnatory. British painters have never fully grappled with military art ; they have only hovered about its outskirts, touching and trimming. They have been unsuccessful, necessarily unsuccessful, in these attempts ; and there is every reason to infer that they would be the same if they were to go in for the thing with a more thorough and practical aim. Besides, it is better they 14 STYLE, SUBJECT-MATTER, AND should be so, even were the prospect otherwise. The French, as we have said, have really from time to time done something notable in the way of military art : yet there are few greater mistakes in art, and few more unsatisfying and wearisome exhibitions, than the vast series of the military glories of France at Versailles. We hope and fully believe that our countrymen will not attempt to produce such another eyesore ; and are very sure moreover that, if they do so, they will find it a far greater eyesore than that at Versailles, and their canvasses and painters pigmies and bunglers in comparison. The question of the range of subjects proper for fine art becomes year by year more needful of solution as photo- graphy advances. To us it seems pretty clear that, for everything in the way of mere transcript, photography is the thing; it is easier, more certain, more ample, and in almost every respect, as far as this object is concerned, more beautiful, and, to crown all, incomparably cheaper. It has already made huge inroads upon this field of art, and is morally sure to monopolize it at no distant day. What photography cannot do is to colour and to invent. To say that it will never be able to colour would be ex- tremely rash; some glimmerings of that power in photo- graphy have already been bruited, and there is no knowing where this or any other human conquest of the forces of nature will stop. All we can affirm is that for the present the sublime and delicious province of colour lies exclusively at the command of man. Of invention photography has already, in its nature and practice, a certain very limited property. The power of invention is the conceiving how a thing, or a combination of things, which does not materially exist, would be and would look if it did exist; and the photographer who arranges and takes fancy groups produces, SUCCESSES IN ART. 15 in a sort of way, a result similar to the artist who, with or without models, represents a subject conceived in his mind. But this is, as an almost constant rule, bad invention and futile photography ; it cannot possibly compete with, though it does in some degree shadow forth, the power of artistic invention. The imminent condition of fine art appears therefore to be the limitation to invention and colour; transcription and record of mere fact of every order being handed over bodily to photography. This does not, how- ever, include human portraiture, which, in its higher walks, has a large measure of invention. There is nothing to irritate or alarm us in the prospect. We shall have the best possible transcripts, and the only possible inventions worthy of contemplation. An enormous quantity of art pursued at a ruinous sacrifice of time and labour will find a painless extinction, and the public be thereby delivered from shoals of inefficient trumpery or useless essays ; the true and great art will survive, the artist know and work out his own inalienable function. [1862]. In speaking of the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1861, we named a decided advance in style as the most prominent merit of that exhibition, and as a merit of paramount im- portance in itself. We addressed ourselves to showing that style in art is only another term for the method of represent- ing objects, facts, or conceptions, in art ; that a fine style is the same thing as a fine representation, and therefore the same thing, as excellent art — neither more nor less ; mere accuracy being comprehended in right style, and the con- x6 STYLE, SUBJECT-MATTER, AND ception of subjects being a thing apart, not properly per se an element of fine art. It is, however, a concomitant in the greatest works, and, we may add, the only adequate basis whereon to build up the highest developments of art. This point of view, if a true one, is sure to be a con- venient one as well from which to regard the subject of art as a whole ; and we think it may be found serviceable in enabling people to c clear their mind of cant’ notably in one direction. Not a little embarrassment has been in- troduced into the estimate of fine art, both critical and popular, by a confusion between the provinces of thought or conception, and of art (or style, or embodied perception, as we may call it), in the works of fine art. On the one hand, we have critics upholding what they term High Art, or the choice and concepiaon of great subjects; and we have a half-hearted, yet unresisting and cowed, acquiescence in this view of the matter by the public. On the other hand, we have the real popular sympathy engaged by level, matter-of-fact, and often puny conceptions and treatment, such as form the staple of domestic art. If we apply the test of style, we shall come to a determinate, and it may be hoped a true, conclusion upon both subjects. We shall find that a work of so-called High Art is not properly such in virtue of its subject and conception, but only of the co-equal excellence of its representation. If there is a great conception, and a corresponding greatness of representation, the work is a work both of mind and of art, — the highest possible. If there is only a great conception without the representation to correspond, it is not a work of excellent art at all, but only the indication of a capacious or ambitious mind. Similarly, the domestic picture, or other transcript of fact, may be a work of truly fine art, if the style is fine ; while, failing this, it will sink at best into the class of simple SUCCESSES IN ART. 17 accuracy of treatment, or may even lack that, and only amuse the popular eye because it is something with whose subject-matter the spectator is familiar and sympathetic. We may thus free ourselves finally from any admiration or toleration of so-called High Art practised by small artists, and from any depreciation of Low Art practised by able artists ; at the same time that we shall in no wise confound the real and large distinction which exists between the forms of art, but shall recognise that the greatly choosing, conceiving, and representing artist is a man of essentially higher calibre than the one who makes a small choice, and conceives and represents his subject with even the utmost excellence of which it is susceptible. The advocate of High Art may answer : ‘ I admit all that, as far as it goes ; but I adhere to my opinion that a work of High Art, though but imperfectly realized, is a better thing than a successful work of Low Art. I maintain the dignity of mind ; and, if you do not agree with me, you degrade mind below handiwork.’ Here we join issue with the advocate of High Art. We acknowledge with him that the mind is nobler than the hand; but we assert that the choice of a great subject, without the power of representing it greatly, is not only a failure in result, but is an attempt having no relation to fine art ; for, according to our defini- tion, the style or mode of representation is the very art of the work. A man who chooses as his subject (suppose) the Baptist preaching in the Wilderness has assuredly made a noble choice, and is almost certain (in these enlightened days, at least) to conceive his subject with some degree of adequacy. He cannot well help conceiving John as earnest, impassioned, and austere ; a great and dramatic variety of character and emotion in the auditors, — some convinced, penitent, and humiliated, some obdurate or actively hostile 1 8 STYLE, SUBJECT-MATTER, AND in inertness or pride of soul. And he may carry his subject suggestively forward, as by introducing Christ in the dis- tance, or in some way indicating the preparation for super- seding a religion of types and forms by a fulfilled and spiritual religion. But all this is mere thought : it carries with it no tittle of art, which resides solely in the power of realizing. The representation may be accurate, and so far right ; or noble, and so consummately true and great. In default of this, the conceiver of the subject may have in him the faculty of a thinker, writer, or preacher, but he has given no evidence of the faculty of an artist. On the other hand, the painter might even have conceived his subject ignobly; he might have made John a sulky savage, and the hearers so many beards, turbans, and cloaks ; and yet, if he had realized these baser elements of the subject with real insight into their opportunities and admirable power of representation, his picture would be fine, and might even be great, art. Instances from Rembrandt, among other men, might be cited in support of this posi- tion ; or let the questioner see, in the Louvre, how Titian treats a conclave as the back view of so many bishops’ mitres, and what sort of art he makes of that. We would understand and accept in this sense the axiom laid down by Mr. Ruskin in his first volume, that the greatest artist is he who conveys the greatest number of the greatest ideas. Yes, who conveys; not who merely possesses or attempts to express them. And we would add —so despotic is the art in the work of art — that the greatest ideas for the artist’s purpose are not those which would be greatest for the theorist, the religionist, or the historian, but ideas of beauty, character, and expression ; beauty of form, colour, and action, the material beauty which lies open to perception. He must see, and live in, and interpret, this ; SUCCESSES IN ART. 19 must see rather than think, though we shall be grateful to him for thinking as well, when it is once certain beyond dispute that he sees. Phidias, Giorgione, Titian, Veronese, Velasquez, saw and invented within the domain of percep- tion : if they thought otherwise, it makes on the whole little appearance in their works, and counts for not much in our estimate of it. The same may be said, somewhat less strongly, of such men as Giotto, Tintoret, Masaccio, and Turner. The test of style may help us to solve another con- tinually vexed question. The debate is always on and off whether the artist or the public is the true appraiser of works of art, by whose verdict we must walk. The question of popularity, though not of enduring repute, is of course settled by the public, and need not occupy us. The further question has two sides ; that of general intellectual power in works of art, and that of ultimate artistic excellence. The former may be determined quite as readily by the public, and with some greater freedom from bias, as they are so little swayed by the bearings of the latter question. The latter belongs almost solely to the artists (among whom we would for the immediate purpose include the small number of men who, without being artists in practice, are such in the study of works of art, and of nature with a view to art). They alone know the ultimate artistic excellence of the work, because they alone are conscious of the things needed to be done in art, and the means of doing them. In other words, they have a practical knowledge of style, which is art ; and therefore they must inevitably appraise art, as such, with incomparably more knowledge and judg- ment than the public can. We cannot certainly say that every artist will decide better than any outsider : some artists are bad ones, others prejudiced, capricious, or disin- 20 STYLE, SUBJECT-MATTER, AND genuous ; but, in the long run, the verdict of their body- will carry it. And we may thus be well assured that, in any collection, such as our National Gallery, which is mainly a museum wherein the examples of art can be studied for their own sake (as specimens of zoology, minerals, and so on, elsewhere), an artist, and not a £ nobleman or gentle- man,’ is the right director. To attempt to define good style is no part of our in- tention; to succeed in doing so, greatly beyond our ex- pectation. It is one of the intangible things which one recognises by a combination of instinct, knowledge, and habit, and which appear the less easily definable the readier one grows at discerning them. To say that it comprises force, breadth, delicacy, &c., is no definition, but only a catalogue of qualities at which one might go on to one’s heart’s content. Good style is practically the quality which makes good pictures, sculptures, and so on, out of whatever subjects the artist chooses to treat. Most persons, though not all, can, with attention and experience, recognise style in this sense : in any more precise or theoretic one we, at any rate, confess our inability to expound it. As Dante says in the Vita Nova , ‘It may be that a more subtle person would find for this thing a reason of greater subtlety : but such is the reason that I find, and that liketh me best.’ In the collection of 1862 at the Royal Academy, the prevalent feature, as in 1861, has been the development and advance of style. Though not of conspicuous popular or individual interest, this collection has amply confirmed the evidence which the previous year supplied of increasing power, and clearness of views of art, in our school, and must, in the eyes of artists themselves, hold a position of very high comparative value. SUCCESSES IN ART. 21 [1863]. It has often been said, and is always true — There is no stopping short in art. Stopping short, whether for a school or for an individual, soon ceases to be stopping short, and becomes retrogression. Even such a school of art as the ancient Egyptian, with its changeless mystery of calm, is not a true exception to this rule. It took centuries to deteriorate, where other schools of art would only take years ; but it did deteriorate at last. The character and the aims remained the same, the means appeared to be equally capable of producing the finest results of which that form of art admitted ; yet they failed to produce them in the end, — Egyptian art, which would not change or advance, languished and waned. But this, with the Chinese and Byzantine forms of art, is an extreme instance of longevity, obeying indeed an uniform law, yet protracting its operation almost indefinitely. Other such forms exhibit the symptoms of its working at a much earlier date. The art which stops short cannot, after a brief term of grace, help bearing the manifest signs of exhaustion and decay — self- repetition, loss of interest in its own professed ideal, in- capability of impressing that ideal upon the spectator with anything approaching to its first force and completeness. And so, or still more prominently, with the individual artist. His mind, so to speak, crusts over and contracts mould ; his hand is guided by iteration, not by impulse ; his work becomes stale and dragging, and, if it exhibits any gleam of novelty, this can only be obtained by caprice or overdoing. In art, a point reached is a point to be passed ; a school formed is a school to be modified. Not in either 22 STYLE, SUBJECT-MATTER, AND case by jerks, or violence, or a craving after mere novelty for its own sake ; but by the natural process of develop- ment which converts a frail sapling into a stately tree, and by which blossoms succeed to buds, and fruit to blossoms — each in its way as fitting to be prized as the other, but inevitably destined to be superseded. It is undoubtedly a healthy symptom and high point of attainment in the art of a country or a period when it assumes so generic and definite a character as to constitute what can be called a school. All vigorous and harmoni- ously-natured art tends in this direction. We find the condition constant, though shifting, in the past sound periods of art, and at the present day better developed and producing worthier results in the French than in other nations. The practical benefits of a well-defined school of art are substantial and direct, in the clearness of purpose which it fosters in the artists concerned, and the command of means with which it supplies them, at comparatively little waste of attempt and experiment. The school elicits all the good and the gist of the artistic idea and motive upon which it is founded ; and, having done this, will, in so far as it is a living school, undergo modification, and take to developing something else as its main object. Its danger is that it should not be content with eliciting and developing, but should pursue the process even to exhaustion ; should become fixed and rooted — no longer a living school, but a pedantry, no longer a body animated by its purpose, but a corpse haunted by the ghost thereof. From this danger a less fully organized artistic community is less liable to suffer : such has been, and to some extent is, the English, in which the tendencies of the artists are more personal and scattered, less reducible to the common standard of a school. But this condition also has its drawbacks, and those more SUCCESSES IN ART. 23 serious and less likely to be corrected than in the other case. The changes which pass over the practice of a school are mainly of two kinds. The first is rather development than change, although it may extend so far that the final stage can scarcely be recognizably traced to the first, save by knowledge of the various intermediate gradations. This development is the natural course which any motive or movement in art runs when left to itself. It includes the connected sequence of modifications which take place spontaneously in the practice of the leaders of the school, and more especially the reflex action of their principles and practice upon the works of the bulk of minor men. The second kind of change is change properly so called. It interrupts the connected sequence, changes the current of thought and practice, and introduces a new element into the case. This occurs when an original genius makes his appearance, startles those who had comfortably settled down into an accepted method, and the more timid of the neophytes, rouses the enthusiasm of the more energetic, obtains a following, and carries — as he is sure to cany — a good deal before him. In a living and growing school of art, both these influences are continually at work ; without them, it would stagnate, and slowly perhaps, but surely, die out in the end. A third change in a school might in a certain sense be said to take place according to fashion ; and this, regarded merely on its own showing, as a fancy loosely taken up and as loosely laid aside again, can do the school no good, but only unqualified harm. In fact, how- ever, fashion is generally the satellite and the trumpeter at once of some new turn given to art by a man of talent or genius whose own performances deserve a welcome, noxious as their influence often becomes when mixed up with the 24 STYLE, SUBJECT-MATTER, AND blind, fussy, and motiveless entetement which is of the essence of fashion. The change effected by fashion may therefore be fairly resolved into a special phase, or condition of degeneracy, common to the other two changes of which we have been speaking; and fashion need not- — unless in some exceptional cases — be considered as a distinct and independent influence affecting the arts. The British school of painting exhibits at the present day two or three leading influences. Firstly, there are some, not very many, of our older painters who adhere to the styles which they were practising fifteen years or more ago, and who keep outside of the more recent movement to which the great majority of new-comers belong in a more or less decisive manner. It would be superfluous to enter here into any accurate analysis of the aims and methods of these well-known exhibitors. Secondly, there is the influence which has been paramount among us for the last fourteen years — that of Praeraphaelitism. The three leaders of the Prseraphaelite movement (we might term them four by in- cluding Mr. Madox Brown, though in fact his great artistic powers had been developed a few years before the move- ment began), united as they were in a common aim and principle, had nevertheless very distinct powers and ten- dencies of their own, each by each; and each has had a distinct position and following. Praeraphaelitism has made a radical difference in the school generally, and has itself resulted in works very diverse in some respects from those which marked the movement at its outset. Its development during these fourteen years has exemplified the first of the two changes which pass, as we have just represented, over the practice of a school. Since that process began, the British painter of special faculty who has come forward with the most decided novelty of aim is SUCCESSES IN ART. 25 Mr. Leighton. He also has produced a certain effect upon our art, though not one which counts for much in the general reckoning. The time, however, has come for a new influence to make its way amid and athwart those previously at work ; and it cannot, we think, be disputed that a considerable tincture of foreign, and especially French, views and methods of art is now to be traced among us. The tendency may properly be called French in the main ; although, in the present Academy Exhibition, it indicates, in two or three instances, a more special re- lation to the great Belgian painter, Leys. Not indeed that there is a single picture which can, with any show of truth, be said to resemble a picture by Leys in the same sense in which the Belgian Joseph Lies, and the Frenchman Tissot, resemble him ; but those who are acquainted with the style of Leys (as who is not that saw his magnificent display in the International Exhibition ?) will have little difficulty in saying that Mr. Calderon, Mr. Hodgson, Mr. Prinsep, and Mr. Yeames, are also acquainted with it. To return to our starting-point — there is no stopping short in art. In reviewing the last two Academy Exhibi- tions, we noted the advance in pictorial style as their lead- ing and highly encouraging characteristic. We observe the same thing this year; but it does not afford us equal satisfaction, for we do not perceive that it has as yet gone appreciably further. It cannot be in reality less; but it seems less, because it is not more. The point of advance already attained by our artists, though not inconsiderable, is not a point to be paused at. Each year inherits from its predecessor, and must use its inheritance as an onward means, not . hoard or vaunt it as a possession. The best tribute payable to the deserts of 1862 would have been to throw them into the shade in 1863. 26 STYLE, SUBJECT-MAXTER, AND In the present stage of our art, perhaps, next after powerful pictorial style, the point most needful to be at- tained, and most certain, if attained, to carry the school further forward, is a dignified and thoughtful choice of subject. The reader will understand that we are here considering a question of art. Were it a question of general intellectual faculty, we might have to put the choice of subject first and paramount; but, being a question of art, we rate powerful pictorial style as the primary requirement. Pictorial style and subject, though not so linked together as that a poor subject entails a poor style, and vice versa , are nevertheless closely related. Given a certain amount of power in style, this amount will not fail to be indefinitely enhanced in value by a consistently worthy choice of subj ect — curtailed and depreciated by a mean one. The art will appeal to the nobler class of minds, will flourish and pro- gress, partly in proportion to the dignity of its subjects : it will become the toy of the vulgar, and will maunder and decline, partly in proportion to their insignificance. Though there have been several painters of fine style who treated unimportant subjects habitually or occasionally, there has never yet been a school of art addicted to such subjects which did not run a rapid course towards impotence and extinction. In British art the want of ambition and elevated purpose, as regards subject, has long been one of its principal drawbacks and stigmas ; and there can be little doubt that poverty of subject and poverty of drawing have been in great measure interdependent. In the former respect there have been gleams of an improved tendency for some time past, though they could only be looked upon as individual gleams of small effect upon the dusky area of the school : this year they are perhaps a trifle more numerous, and look a little more as if they would eventually converge, and SUCCESSES IN ART. 27 afford a degree of general lumour. The pictures of the year are undoubtedly those of Mr. Millais (far ahead of all competition) and Messrs. Prinsep and Hodgson ; next to whom may be named Messrs. Calderon and Leighton, and, among the landscape painters, Messrs. Linnell senior, and Hook (who is, as usual, as much a painter of coast life as of coast scenery). Omitting the latter two gentlemen, we find that all these exhibitors, the prominent men of the season, contribute works important in subject : first, a rich poetic subject; next, one of concentrated and deep-working passion ; then, two well selected and invented historical incidents; and, last, one from the Bible than which none could be found more ominous and overwhelming in its mental drama.* Nor is the tale of more than commonly excellent subjects exhausted by naming these specially prominent works. There is still a tolerable sprinkling of others, t most of them also prominent, some meritorious. No doubt, even our present muster-roll tells but faintly, in point of numbers, amid the mass of staleness and platitude of subject from which it can be culled : yet we incline to think that it * The pictures here referred to are — by Millais, The Eve of St. Agnes; by Prinsep, ‘Whispering tongues can poison Truth 5 ; by Hodgson, The first sight of the Armada, lighting the beacon ; by Calderon, The British Embassy in Paris on the day of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; by Leighton, ‘Jezebel and Ahab, having caused Naboth to be put to death, go down to take possession of his vineyard —they are met at the entrance by Elijah the Tishbite.’ f Notably — by Marcus Stone, Napoleon ‘on the road from Waterloo to Paris’ ; by Fisk, The Old Noblesse in the Conciergerie during the first French Revolution ; by G. D. Leslie, The War Summons, 1485, ‘To my well-beloved John Paston’ ; by Ward, La Toilette des Morts, and ‘Hogarth’s Studio, 1739, Holiday Visit of Foundlings to view the portrait of Captain Coram’ ; by Marks, ‘How Shakspeare studied’; by Heaphy, Kepler accosted in Venice as a Fortune-Teller; by Archer, The Sancgreall, King Arthur healed of his grievous wound in the island- valley of Avalon. 28 STYLE, SUBJECT-MATTER, AND would be found to exceed, for inventiveness and gravity combined, anything which could be cited from the pre- ceding exhibitions of recent years. And now let us commend to the reader’s meditation a not insignificant saying of the great ideal designer Blake ; an assertion, by this most imaginative and least merely imitative of painters, that invention in art is not a simple fancy of the mind, but a certain portion of the practical realizing power. It coincides very nearly, in its reference to Michael Angelo, with a preceding remark of our own. c To generalize is to be an idiot: to particularize is the great distinction of merit. Execution is the chariot of genius. Invention depends altogether upon execution or organization : as that is right or wrong, so is the invention perfect or imperfect. Michael Angelo’s art depends on Michael Angelo’s execution altogether. Grandeur of ideas is founded on precision of ideas.’ [1864 The condition of a school of art is not to be tested solely by the aspect which it may present to a spectator coming perfectly new to it, and ready to be impressed merely according as it shews itself in one particular coup d'ceil. To form a right estimate we must understand its state with regard to advance or retrogression, its prospects of improve- ment or stagnancy; and this can only be attained by a knowledge of what has preceded the actual stage of the school’s growth. Without entering here into any lengthened consideration or analysis of facts bearing upon the history of the British school, we shall simply recur to our last year’s SUCCESSES IN ART. 2 9 remarks upon it ; as a wayfarer along a steep and straight road might look back from one milestone to another, though he has no chance of seeing the whole series of those which have measured out his path. The topics before us are those of foreign influence upon our school, and of the relation of subject-matter to artistic treatment and develop- ment. 1. The influence of foreign schools of art upon our own remains at much the same ratio as before; and, if any- thing, whether through our having become familiarized with it, or through its gradual tendency to reabsorption within the general sturdiness of self-assertion proper to John Bull, and within the broad and extensive level of the British in art, this influence comes upon us somewhat less forcibly than before. Naturally, it does not distinguish any of our senior artists, nor is it traceable among the most prominent men of middle standing in point of age and length of professional practice, but who are foremost as fine repre- sentatives of British art, such as Millais, Watts, and Holman Hunt. The foreign influence is apparent chiefly among the younger men. Mr. Leighton may be held to have given the first impulse to it when he began exhibiting about ten years ago. However, his style is more especially an in- dividual one, modified, indeed, by his foreign course of study, but not directly foreign in itself. It is upon a knot of genre or semi-historical painters that this influence has descended in greatest force; men of varying degrees of talent and natural gift for art, but all possessed of good general artistic capacity not (or scarcely in any case) a- mounting to positive artistic genius ; of ready execution stopping short of really powerful style ; of some versatility, considerable perseverance, and resolution both to do justice to their own talents and to succeed with the public; and 3 o STYLE, SUBJECT-MATTER, AND notably furnished with a sense of when they have done enough according to their particular endowments, and had better leave the thing as it stands. We do not mean that these painters always do as much as might fittingly be wished for; but that their rule — perhaps their instinct — is to carry their works up to a certain point where the several qualities of expression, grouping, colour, couleur-locale , , surface- handling and so on, have reached and will preserve a balance highly satisfactory to the exhibition-goer, and by no means to be underrated by the artistic sense. In short, these painters have attained the quality of good c keeping,’ one of the primary requisites, though far from the summit, of good style. In this characteristic respect more especially, as well as in the particular quality of broad surfaces of unforced and mostly agreeable half-tone, they exhibit the distinct foreign influence ; for these are qualities very familiar to a foreign painter of average merit and practice — far from equally so to the Briton of correspondent stand- ing, one of whose besetting sins is insistency. Now an insistent Holman Hunt or Inchbold is in many respects an admirable, and in all a condonable, artistic phenomenon ; but the case is quite different when it comes to an insistent Rankley or Fisk. Mr. Cope, a proficient painter of fine qualities, cankered by the blemish in question, is as strong a case as could well be cited. The principal artists who exhibit the foreign influence (and to most of whom we have already referred on the same ground) are Messrs. Calderon, Yeames, Hodgson, Marks, and, in a somewhat diverse yet distinct phase, Prinsep. All these are men of note by this time. In native pictorial gift we rate Mr. Prinsep highest ; in purpose and calibre of mind, of which fine things may be expected, Mr. Plodgson, and not far from him Mr. Yeames, who is at SUCCESSES IN ART. 31 present a surer executant : Mr. Calderon stands first of all in aplomb and discipline; Mr. Marks in sprightliness and character-painting. But there is another sense in which the foreign element plays an important part both in British contemporary art in general and in the present exhibition in particular. Pa- triotism might be inclined to suppress the fact ; but a fact it is that, setting Sir Edwin Landseer, and possibly Mr. Lewis, aside, the three best exhibitors are either simply foreigners, or not absolutely British : we mean M. Legros, Mr. Whistler, and Mr. Millais. M. Legros’s 6 Ex Voto’ is one of the largest pictures in the gallery, and, to our think- ing, incontestably the greatest : he is a Frenchman, and one of those sons of France whom the noble mother will be in no hurry to disclaim. Mr. Whistler is an American, and owes his art-training chiefly to Paris. Mr. Millais belongs to a Jersey family. Proceeding beyond these peculiarly eminent exhibitors, we find others of more than ordinary mark in M. Lehmann, a German of French training; M. Tissot, a French follower of Leys ; Herr Tidemand, the eminent Norwegian painter; M. Fan tin, a Frenchman; and Madame Jerichau, a Dane. In sculpture, the Frenchman M. Poitevin, and the German Herr Bohm, take first-class positions ; Baron Marochetti is, as everybody knows, an Italian ; and three other foreigners, MM. Vanlinden, Wiener, and Megret, all show to some advantage in the sculpture- room. The fine bust-sculptor whom we miss this year and henceforth, Behnes, was semi-Hanoverian. Mr. Calderon — to return to the painters — is of Spanish descent ; Mr, Simeon Solomon, an artist always interesting and uncommon, is a Jew. There would be no difficulty in prolonging the list ; and we may readily think of one painter of distinguished genius, never represented in the Academy, who is three- 32 STYLE, SUBJECT-MATTER, AND fourths Italian in blood : but we have here named those foreigners and semi-foreigners who most modify the general tone of the present exhibition, and we have said enough to show that the foreign element is by no means null therein, even irrespectively of the influence which foreign principles and practice may be exercising upon prominent native artists. In this there is nothing new. Fuseli and Zoffany count in England as English artists ; not to go back so far as to Yandyck and Holbein, for whom some Britons seem to consider themselves entitled to a degree of credit. 2. The importance of the subjects taken in hand by artists this year is perhaps inferior to what it was last year ; at any rate there is, unfortunately, no ground for any special self-gratulation on this score. The proportion of figure- subjects, whether including portraits or not, to subjects of all other classes, strikes us, however, as on the increase : certainly landscape and the minor forms of art make no great show on these Academy walls. Some years ago land- scape was a branch of painting in which Englishmen fondly imagined that they had no rivals, and hardly a competitor. There was no small degree of exaggeration or wilful obtuse- ness in this view : yet landscape might then be fairly con- sidered a highly prominent and distinctive department of the British school. Now, strange to think of, there is not a single landscape-painter amid the* younger blood of the Academy, the Associates ; and, among the full Academicians, since the retirement of the veteran Witherington, only five professed landscape-painters, Messrs. Stanfield, Roberts, Lee, Creswic.k, and Cooke, to whom a sixth may be added in the person of Mr. Redgrave, who paints landscape as frequently now as figure-subjects, though he is more pro- fessedly a figure-painter. Mr. Hook, whose works combine human and landscape interest in pretty equal balance, may SUCCESSES IN ART. 33 in some sense be regarded as a seventh. Of these gentle- men, all are Academicians of long standing, except Mr. Hook and Mr. Cooke, the latter promoted from the Associate list within the current year. This great preponderance of honour conferred upon figure-painters, consequent as it is upon their increase and more cogent claims, cannot be con- sidered wrong. Yet neither is it wholly right while land- scape-painters of so much power and gift as Mr. Anthony, Mr. William Davis, and Mr. Inchbold, remain unrecognised, and worse, by the Academy. The decrease of landscape- painting may be ascribed partly to a change of tendency in the school, clearly a laudable one in the main ; partly to the development of photography, so destructive to any level of landscape-art save the highest, and which, indeed, is no doubt potently operative in the very change of tendency under consideration. The result, however, is one very contrary to what appeared to be impending some few years after the first advent of Prseraphaelitism : a movement which, initiated by figure-painters, and mainly in the interests of the higher order of figure-subjects, produced a rapid crop of pictures — or more properly scraps and studies in most instances — of landscape, and seemed to the timid as if it were likely to stagnate into that form of work more decidedly than any other. In this respect, Praeraphaelitism has, in the long run, been true to its first impulse. It has changed the face of our school, and has itself undergone consider- able modification : but it has not deserted the man for the stone, the living and emotional for the merely vegetative, the expression of thought and character for the copyism of detail. What between the predominance of figure-subjects and the ability with which both these and other themes are treated, the average of the present Academy exhibition D 34 STYLE, SUBJECT-MATTER, AND must be pronounced high, comparatively speaking. We have reached the point at which we are not compelled to blush, to bleat out apologies, or to shrink into our shoes, at the sight of a foreigner cultivated or critical in art. It has become the more essentially incumbent upon our men of genius and of power to put forth their energies, and do nothing short of their best. If they do this, there is capacity enough in the school at large to receive the afflatus, and work upon it to some result. If, on the contrary, our best men palter with their strength, the school need not indeed recede from the level it has reached ; but it would run great risk of remaining an unprofitable school with dormant capacities, instead of what it was some fifteen years ago, an unprofitable school into which the very capacities had yet to be infused — instead of what it might now become from year to year, a profitable school using its capacities aright. Our greatest desideratum , more especially for the last half- century, has been in respect to productions of a monumental character. W e have had the slenderest allowance of works executed on a great scale, or for permanent location in situ , and the slenderest proportion of painters capable of execut- ing or with a style adapted for such works, had there been any fair amount of public demand for them. The case is now somewhat bettered in this regard. The severer discipline which our school has been undergoing for the last fifteen years, its more thorough study of facts and growing power of style, have produced some effect. The modicum of encouragement held out to monumental art in connexion with the new Houses of Parliament proved on the whole abortive. Something indeed remains to be shown for it in the works of Messrs. Maclise, Dyce, Cope, and Herbert ; but, in most cases, it has produced merely large works of genre- painting, like magnified exhibition pictures, by painters SUCCESSES IN ART. 35 essentially related to that class of work, such as Mr. Ward and some others employed in Parliament. Qualified men offered for employment in the persons of Messrs. Madox Brown, Watts, David and W. B. Scott, Cross, and perhaps two or three others ; but they received no employment, or none adequate to the occasion. It is to different influences that we must look for the slight tendency towards monu- mental art which now appears here and there in the British school, and which has already produced works worthy to be cited in the fresco by Mr. Watts at Lincoln’s Inn, the Wallington Northumbrian series by Mr. W. B. Scott, the painting of the Union Club-room in Oxford by Mr. Dante Rossetti and his coadjutors, Mr. Armitage’s fresco in the Roman Catholic church at Islington, Lady Waterford’s decoration of the schoolroom at Ford, and some other works sparsely discernible over the country. In the present Academy exhibition we find ten British painters more or less qualified to undertake monumental work; some of them, indeed, not likely to find their proper sphere, or to bring out such power as is within them, unless work of that class comes in their way. These are Messrs. Millais, Armitage, Phillip, Sandys, Leighton, Watts, Albert Moore, Simeon Solomon, Prinsep, and Stanhope. In this list there are great differences both of general ability and of special aptitude. Mr. Millais, for instance — though his truly ex- traordinary executive gifts would qualify him to shine in any method of art, and therefore in some respects to shine the more according as he might have the wider field of display — might prove defective in intellectual weight, and in an adequate sense of scale and pitch. At any rate he is so well suited with the form of art which he practises at present that, if he remains wedded to it, we are not called upon to speculate far upon what the art and the country 36 STYLE, SUBJECT-MATTER, AND lose in consequence. Mr. Armitage, well-grounded and clear-headed, is also comparatively academic and limited; Mr. Phillip, addicted to bravura , though bold, striking, and capable ; Mr. Sandys, somewhat voluminous and unyielding in detail, excellent as he is in vigorous draughtsmanship, and in other high-class qualifications to which that is naturally allied. More versatile than intense in aim and feeling, more harmonious in his conception of colour than he always is in its actual employment, Mr. Leigh- ton has nevertheless so much ambition, and his acute sense for beauty and grace is so closely related to large- ness and uniformity of impression, that we do not question his distinct aptitude for monumental work, or the com- pleter development which his gifts would receive thereby. The other painters whom we have named would all benefit by being allowed their ample elbow-room. On Mr. Watts’s qualifications we need not dilate. Mr. Moore proves his capacity by his fresco, hung in the sculpture-room, of the Four Seasons. Mr. Solomon, though he paints for the most part on a more than commonly small scale, is evidently qualified, by natural inclination, for a large one ; he selects subjects that have a sort of typical suggestiveness without much direct incident, and paints them in a tone of colour which, in large dimensions, would rise, from being marked and significant, into full appropriateness and even grandeur. As for the two remaining painters on our list, Messrs. Prinsep and Stanhope, their 4 proclivities’ towards monu- mental work are obvious. Both, especially Mr. Stanhope, would need, in order to a full success in such work, sterner discipline in drawing than they as yet possess. Mr. Prinsep already indulges himself in large canvasses and figures when he can get the opportunity. Mr. Stanhope has, in his oil-pictures, always confined himself to very moderate SUCCESSES IN ART. 37 dimensions ; but the distinguishing quality which, spite of many deficiencies, ranks them among the fine work of our exhibitions, is that certain combination of breadth and amenity which so peculiarly pertains to and characterizes large or monumental work, and the same may be said of Mr. Prinsep, without implying any more positive resemblance between his productions and Mr. Stanhope’s than really exists. In speaking of painters whose style qualifies them for monumental work, we must not forget, although un- represented on the Academy walls, Mr. Burne Jones, to whom the Water-colour Society owes it that their exhibition of the present year will count in future record less as the last appearance of one admirable painter, William Hunt, than as the first appearance of another not less admirable. There are many different plans of testing the merits of a work of art : imagination, conception, style, expression, beauty, composition, design, draughtsmanship, chiaroscuro, texture, colour, execution, or mere isolated points of treat- ment or handling — all these may be used as tests. Each, however, is but a partial test; while all seriatim would constitute a laborious one, and a test so sure to be made up and balanced of contraries — a blemish here eked out by a grace there — that the result must combine uncertainty of general impression with possible accuracy in the items. The reader is perhaps disconcerted or bored by the pro- cess : the artist and the true critic see their way to and through it ; but, along with it, they see, almost at the first glance, the outcome of the whole. By a sort of instinct, based upon original sympathy and continual habit, they see, first of all, whether the work is on the whole a success, or less than a success ; whether it constitutes a homogeneous work of art, — a thing achieved ; or an affair of shreds and patches, — a thing attempted, but missed. This original 38 STYLE, SUBJECT-MATTER, AND impression is one which scarcely ever betrays the man of practice. It may, indeed, be a wrong impression : the connoisseur may depreciate as a failure a work which the archangels know to be a success, or vice versa . But, so far as the connoisseur is personally concerned, the impression is a genuine and a final one : it is the impulsive judgment which he pronounces at first, and the best judgment which, according to the ratio of his feeling for and knowledge of art, he could pronounce were he to consider of it for days. There may be no end of things to study and find out in connexion with the work of art ; the details require careful examination ; the influence of the work deepens or wanes in proportion to the solidity or weakness of its author ; but the one integral impression — success or non-success — is received once for all, and there remains;' to the critic, the standard of the artist’s ultimate merit; to the critic’s critics, the standard of the critic’s own qualifications. It follows that, in the case of a really qualified man, the most thorough test which he can apply to the work of art, the most com- prehensive and decisive opinion which he can deliver, is even this same — success, or non-success. Who is qualified to apply the test ? — and, when the test yields different results in different hands, how is the much- patronized public or reader to know whom to believe? The question is a very difficult one to answer ; and, to ourselves in especial, ticklish as well as difficult. We are the first to concede to any objector that, whether an un- professsional opinion is in fact right or wrong, there is no reason why the reader or public should yield any prompt or implicit credence to it : that is a deference due only to a professional opinion — the witness of a man who can do the sort of thing he is talking about, and do it well. The answer therefore is that professional people, as a class, — SUCCESSES IN ART. 39 and some unprofessional people as well, — are qualified to apply the test : but that the professional are always to be believed in preference, when the verdicts differ; though it is just consistent with possibility that the unprofessional are in fact right, and will be so proved in the long run. II. THE EXTERNALS OF SACRED ART. There is a vast question which Ruskin has mooted — How far Fine Art has, in all or any of the ages of the world, been conducive to the religious life. With his characteristic fairness (or, to adopt the popular critical terminology, in his usual spirit of paradox) he declines in any way to prejudge the question, in accordance to his own sympathies, by pro- nouncing in favour of Art, and shadows forth the enormous dimensions which the enquiry must assume in order to any- thing like a satisfactory solution of it. The foremost branch of this question would of course concern itself with art professedly religious. The decision on that head would govern the decision on the whole ques- tion, and would of itself necessitate one of the largest and most intricate historical investigations which any man or body of men could undertake. The thing might perhaps be eventually achieved by the concerted labours of various enquirers, each taking up a distinct period or people ; and the result would be of a historic value, and even a present practical importance, such as amply to justify any amount of toil expended in its attainment. We preface with these remarks the considerations which we purpose offering upon a collateral and very subordinate THE EXTERNALS OF SACRED ART. 41 branch of the great subject, not through any intention of taking part in the larger enquiry, but lest it should be sup- posed that we are unmindful of that while our immediate attention is directed to minor points. Our theme is the Externals of Sacred Art : and the utmost which we propose summarily to consider is whether the artistic feelings and sympathies of a Protestant people of the nineteenth century are best met by a typical or by a narrative expression of religious subjects ; and whether, in the narrative expression, strict accuracy of national type and accessory should be adhered to. It is to be observed at starting that, although, writing artistically, we do not profess to speak of the religious but simply of the 4 artistic feelings and sympathies’ engaged in this question, these latter cannot, in point of fact, be trenchantly and absolutely severed from the former. The artistic feelings are only a part of the general tone of mind, and must, in reference to such a subject, involve an exercise of the religious feelings as well. It would be impossible for a believer to be in thorough artistic sympathy with a work which he felt to be an inferior religious expression of a common faith ; unless, indeed, his artistic preferences were reduced to the mere question of arrangements of form and colour, which is at best only half of the matter. Again, the general body of artists of a particular age or country must represent, to a great extent, the tendencies of that age or country, mental and moral; and if we find among the artists a decided prevalence of feeling towards one form of treatment of an important range of subjects, it will be a strong symptom, so far, that that is the treatment which harmonizes with the public feeling. Now we have had within the last two years an oppor- tunity of ascertaining, on a large scale and unitedly, the 42 THE EXTERNALS OF SACRED ART. predominant tendency of the existing schools of art. The Paris Universal Exhibition furnished the opportunity. Its showing may be taken as conclusive; the consentaneous tendency of all the living art of the time is towards natural- ism — a more systematic, more downright, and more thorough naturalism than has ever before been sought or professed by art. Naturalism, in connexion with sacred art, of course implies and prescribes a prevalence of direct or narrative over typical representations ; and such is actually the case — a well-known section of German artists constituting per- haps the only class which addicts itself, with anything like a systematic impulse, to the typical. Here, then, we have a strong symptom that the narrative form of sacred art is in conformity with the feeling of the time. The symptom, to take it at the lowest, is that of ‘ demand and supply’; but we would rather go a step higher, and say, as before, that the artist, himself a part of the time, abides by that narrative form, of his own accord and preference. Our special enquiry, however, was as to the light in which the question presents itself to a Protestant people of the nineteenth century. Now the two most distinctive characteristics of protestantism may perhaps be defined as the assertion of the right of private judgment (or, more strictly, the irresponsibility for private judgment save to God alone), and reverence for the Bible. These two quali- ties in combination naturally predispose the mind to receive gladly any conscientious and heartfelt representation of scriptural history, in which the aim is to adhere strictly to the recorded fact, merely transferring it from verbal ex- pression to form, and depending for its impressive enforce- ment upon the fidelity of the transfer. This neither adds aught to the Bible nor diminishes from it, and makes no sort of demand upon the beholder’s private judgment in THE EXTERNALS OF SACRED ART. 43 dependence upon the artist’s. The direct Bible narrative is the arbiter appealed to by both; and, if the artist shall have ventured in any way to depart from or enlarge upon it, the beholder is in a position, without further ado or mis- giving, to reject the addition as extraneous, and lay it at once to the account of the artist. But the case is different with a typical treatment. Here the artist has to select and combine his own symbols. He aims, it may be, at the expression of some religious idea which the beholder is not disposed to receive ; or, even if they are at one regarding the idea* he has embodied it under a form, and with a use of means, for which he is individually responsible. He has asserted in the process his own protestantism, or right of private judgment ; and the more definitely and more origi- nally the assertion is made, the less avenue has he opened for himself towards the convictions and the acceptance of others. Still further does this show itself to be the fact when we come to consider that it is of Protestants of the nineteenth century that we are speaking. The tendencies of the century are — we will not say material, but eminently positive. Men like to see a proposition put into a concrete form, and to have a truth enforced rather by example than by precept. Dogmatic subtleties and the theology of the schoolmen exercise comparatively little influence ; religion is considered more a matter of conduct and of the inner life than a thing expressible in a formula or a proposition. We are far from hazarding an assertion so bold, and so much beyond our present scope, as that there is more of vital religion in the present age than in time past : what we have limited our- selves to saying is that the religious life, where one finds it, is less sure than of old to unite outward form and observ- ance with the worship in spirit and in truth. This positivism 44 THE externals of sacred art. and this unformalism enhance the alienation from a typical presentment of religious subject. Indeed, we may put it to the suffrage of most readers whether they are not themselves cold to typical art of the present day, and whether they know, unless as exceptional cases, any persons who are the reverse. It is to be carefully noted, however, in qualification of the general conclusion towards which we are tending, that these exceptional cases will mainly be the persons who most intensely dwell upon and feel religious art, whether typical or narrative, and that they will be apt to delight as much in the first as in the second. And further that the coldness of the mass of men is due partly to the hastiness of the age, which will not give itself time to think out the meaning of the types presented, and partly to the fact that typical art, in its present decadence, has ceased to form any broadly considered and recognizable system. But this fact is itself an element of protestantism; it has broken from tradition, and asserts the individual. Here, then, we may quit this first section of our enquiry, concluding that the artist of our day who works with the aim of impressing the mass of his contemporaries — who seeks to Heaven the whole lump’ — will find it his wisdom to leave the type, and hold to the direct fact; to under- stand a narrative, and translate it into form, rather than to symbolize a conception for translation by others. The second section of our enquiry is whether, in the narrative form of sacred art, strict accuracy of national type and accessory should be adhered to. Is our Madonna to be a J ewess, our biblical costume oriental, our scenery that of the Holy Land ? The question presents itself under two several aspects ; firstly, as it affects the artists whom we may call for the nonce, and for the sake of brevity, ‘tradi- tionalists’; and, secondly, as it affects the naturalists. THE EXTERNALS OF SACRED ART. 45 Before proceeding, however, to consider the case so far in detail, we must lay down the broad principle that sacred art has utterly failed unless it produces a sacred impression ; that it must be attempted in that conviction and with that object only; and that no question of literal truth, in ethno- logy, chronology, costume, or what not, has any business to be so much as taken into account except as wholly sub- ordinate and conducive to the sacred impression. If the most absolute falsification of these subordinates is the safe means to that impression, falsify to your heart’s content; only, do not falsify in mere sluggishness of heart and brain, in order that you may just ‘ follow your leader.’ What we have to enquire is whether falsification is the means. The most usual or most accepted model of the tradition- alist is Raphael, in such compositions as the cartoons. The traditionalist dresses his figures in blankets which were never worn, puts a bit of Judaism here for the ‘ character- istic’ heads, a bit of Anglicism there (supposing him to be a Briton), a bit of classicism, and an entirety of nothingism. His whole composition becomes a subject such as never could have been in being, and which does not even ask to be genuinely credited. A professed fact, to be received with any cordiality upon that particular footing, must be like a fact, and the artist, after availing himself of every aid for strengthening and vivifying his conception of the subject, must represent its visible embodying form as that is or was. We can therefore have no hesitation in pronouncing that the traditionalist who purports to be painting facts entirely misses his mark as regards the means. In that respect the whole thing is dead, and worse than useless. He is neither true to any vital con- ception of the fact, nor true to Judaism, nor to Anglicism, nor useful, even were he true, to classicism. His means 4 6 THE EXTERNALS OF SACRED ART. command no sympathy, and awaken no associations save of the artistic (not to say artificial) kind. We do not say that they command no respect, only no sympathy. It is but too true that the great body of the public, unused to anything more real or more significant, come prepared for the traditional treatment, and are rather put out by any other; they repeat to themselves, from mouth to mouth, that the former ‘must be all right,’ and fancy that such is their own opinion. Still less do we say that the tradition- alist is absolutely precluded, by his use of means, from pro- ducing a work having some savour of vitality. He may be a man of genius or of intense feeling, and no means can obstruct him ; but those means do mournfully obstruct even such a man, and deaden to an unascertained but too certain extent the energies and aspirations of hundreds of others. So much, then, for the traditionalist; the worst we wish him is that he may soon become a tradition. The naturalist has no model except nature; but he has a choice, and in each of its alternatives a prototype. It is on something actually seen in nature that he bases himself, and he has to decide whether he will abide unreservedly by the nature of his own time and clime, or whether he will aim at realizing his subject according to the authentic details properly belonging to that. The prototypes for the former principle are of course the schools of prse-Raphaelite art, which very generally made their scriptural personages, from anno mundi to anno domini , Florentines or Frenchmen of the fourteenth, Flemings or Venetians of the fifteenth century, according simply to the artist’s own circumstances. The result was a living art. The artist thoroughly felt the reality of his subject, and realized it thoroughly to others. A distinguished writer who has the unaccommodating THE EXTERNALS OF SACRED ART. 47 habit of following out his principles always to their ultimate results is understood to have implied in his writings, and to have expressly declared by word of mouth, that this is the only admissible form of treatment; and that the British nineteenth century must not hope to have a living sacred art until, acting out the same principle to the uttermost, it shall dress its apostles in coats and trowsers, and its cen- turions in the uniform of the th regiment. The sapient public grins consumedly at such strange doctrine. We shall not swell the cachinnation, because we recognise that there is a truth at the bottom of the axiom. The premises we believe to be sound, viz. that the sacred art in which that principle was adopted is the truest we have yet seen, and that there is always some insincerity, some truckling, or some compromise, in the art which seeks to throw itself out of its own period. But we entirely dissent from the ex- treme conclusion, and shall briefly state some reasons for the dissent. The motive is everything, the form comparatively nothing. The mediaeval artist worked wholly without arriere pensee . Very possibly, to many, it never so much as occurred that the men whom they painted had dressed differently, and lived m>der different conditions; and, even if it did, the artist neither knew nor cared what the difference verily amounted to. Now the case is quite the reverse. It would not be an act of good faith, but the opposite, for the artist to paint St. Peter’s costume from a Newhaven fisherman’s, or St. Joseph’s from that of his easel-maker. The learning of the age may be a benefit to its art, or a misfortune ; but it is a fact, and cannot be ignored. And the whole question of costume and accessory may be a very unimportant one in comparison with the life-blood of the subject (for this just consideration has much to do with 48 THE EXTERNALS OF SACRED ART. the position we are combating) ; but some costume and accessory there must be, and some exercise of discretion in the painting of them. The position appears still less tenable from the para- mount point of view of what the effect of the work of art shall be on the spectator. If the mediaeval artist murdered chronology with a complacent conscience — (and we fully recognise that he was right in doing so) — the mediaeval spectator had still less feeling of foul play; the modern spectator, on the contrary, would resent the 4 slovenly un- handsome corse.’ Or, to leave our metaphor, the modern spectator would be so offended at the anachronism as to be seriously impeded, if not wholly stopped, from estimating aright the essentials of the subject across the inaccuracy of its details. This again might be right or wrong, and would assuredly be wrong in a great measure ; but it places the question on a wholly different ground, and is to our judg- ment conclusive against the notion of such a treatment. For the opposite form of naturalistic treatment — that which approaches as near as possible to the veritable reality of detail — the prototype is the art of Vernet and his fol- lowers, who have painted a number of biblical subjects as true studies of Arabian, Egyptian, or Hebrew life. These men mostly miss religious feeling and conception, but as far as the form goes they are a sufficient prototype ; and we hope soon to see works of similar form and nobler spirit The principle of the naturalistic artist binds him to take the closest accessible natural models. He is not required to reject a great range of subjects merely because he cannot realize them absolutely from the fact ; and, if his opportu- nities allow of nothing else, he will be true to his principle in representing the nature of his own country with such resources of costume and accessory as he may find available THE EXTERNALS OF SACRED ART. 49 from study and research, and which may preserve his work from an incongruity palpable and distasteful to the ordinary spectator. If, on the other hand, he has the opportunity of coming closer to the reality — and the closest possible is the life and the scenery and detail of the biblical regions at the present day — his principle will prescribe these as his material. However, there is an important limitation to their use. It still remains for the artist to consider and ascertain whether he is thoroughly in sympathy with the alien nature. If he can only use its details without fully assimilating its character and essence, if he can but copy with the hand, and apply with the rational faculty, the palm- tree and the desert sand, the bronze face, the majestic robes, and the eastern gravity, while his seeing eye and his under- standing heart are still for English nature, and that only, the truer naturalism is to stand fast by that. For other- wise he will but be using the naturalism of detail, and missing the naturalism of essence, which is no better than pseudo-naturalism ; and the conflict of the two will in- evitably be stamped with incongruity, which is anti-natural- ism downright. This difficulty is weighty, but we do not believe it in- surmountable. We believe, on the contrary, that a great imaginative naturalist will, in the present day, seek for the very reality of his sacred theme with genuine devotion to truth, and love of its power ; and that, diligently husbanding his faculties, he will, with this devotion and this love, enter into the reality in spirit as well as form, and show at once the facts to our eyes, and the substance and meaning to our souls. This we believe to be the highest ideal of sacred art for the day wherein we live ; to be unattempted by most men, E 50 THE EXTERNALS OF SACRED ART. striven for by a few, and, when attained with labour and longing, most precious. We repeat that the great artist may produce a great work of sacred art, whether his method be traditionalist, or naturalist according to his own national associations, or according to those of the real scene itself ; but that the first method, the traditional, is, of its proper nature, a trammel to the artist ; the second, if pushed to extremes, an offence, whether rightly or wrongly, to the 6 wisdom’ of the age — if adopted in a modified form, a noble but minor degree of truth; the third, hardly to be grappled with, the highest and most noble truth when mastered. III. THE EPOCHS OF ART AS REPRESENTED IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. The very large and miscellaneous collection of objects of nature, art, science, and manufacture, gathered together at the Crystal Palace, professes to minister to instruction as well as recreation. Before proceeding to consider the phases of art as here represented, we must spare one glance to the especial character of the instruction supplied. Suggestions have not been wanting that a student of Praeadamite matters would derive more advantage from the study of actual fragments than from ever so much con- templation of Mr. Hawkins’s and Professor Owen’s bran- new resuscitations. No doubt of it. A person already learned in the question knows all that can be shown him of it here : a thorough investigator of the question will not accept an inadequate material symbol of the results of a predecessor’s investigation. But it is not the less true that an uninformed person, or one having a smattering of know- ledge and a superficial interest in the subject, would neither understand nor investigate the fragments, nor even wish to do so ; while he will immediately and without labour gain from the models in the Sydenham garden-lake as tolerable an idea of the appearance, habits, and affinities, of the ante- 5 2 THE EPOCHS OF ART diluvians, as the first science of the day can put into shape. Owen and Hawkins know more of the matter than they have expressed here, and the visitor must study as hard and possess equal capacity if he wants to know the same. He will never acquire an equal amount of knowledge even by studying the models thoroughly, and he is not likely to do that; but he will get general and distinct notions on the subject after a visit of a few hours, such as no quantity of unsystematic piecemeal reading or helpless inspection of authentic debris would have supplied him with. So with the natural history or the ethnology. Study a good book deeply, and you will know a great deal solidly ; go to the Zoological Gardens, and watch a single animal patiently and with a purpose, and you will know a little unimpeach- ably; go to the Crystal Palace, and you will acquire a number of varied ideas clearly presented to and impressed upon the mind. It will not be science, but it will be in- formation. So again with the art. The British Museum is a better mistress in Egyptian art and Greek art than the Sydenham Museum, but she takes a longer time in giving her curriculum. Her facts are perfect, but they are isolated. At Sydenham you find the most striking facts prearranged for you in the most perspicuous manner ; and, when you have gathered as much as serves your immediate purpose about the arts of Egypt and Greece, you can pass to Nine- vite, and Byzantine, and Saracenic, and Mediaeval, and Renaissance, and existing art ; all presenting a linked chain of sequence and divergence whose significance it is difficult to miss altogether; The teaching of the Crystal Palace is subject to the inferiority which necessarily belongs to a copy (the copy being, however, very often an infallible repetition) as com- pared with an original. Other special questionable points AS REPRESENTED IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 53 exist. There is the occasional difference of scale between the originals and their copies, — as, for instance, in the Colonnade of Karnac. We think it is fairly urged that, in such cases as this, a model self-evidently and unmistakeably remote from the size of the original would be more useful, as it would both present a larger comparative view of the entire subject and. eliminate all misconstruction. A still more serious source of error is the intentional alteration or falsification of details-, vulgarly called ‘cooking,’ — the ob- taining of what is assumed to be an improved general appearance at the expense of positive fact. Some samples of such a procedure are discoverable in the Crystal Palace. Thirdly comes the influence of individual views developed conjecturally, as in restorations and improvised polychro- matism. More than one instance will occur in which the man of learning will dissent from what has been done, and the man of taste repudiate it ; and, when this happens, it might generally have been the best course to leave the thing as it was found — defective possibly, but not false. Whatever maybe its inherent wants for teaching purposes, and the shortcomings in its execution, the Crystal Palace has its own real usefulness and influence. Comprehensive- ness and vividness are its great qualifications for this object. It is without exaggeration unique. Other museums give the brick from Babylon ; about which you must find out most things save that it is indubitably a brick, and that from Babylon it certainly did come. This gives not the real brick at all, but a panorama of the Babylon, and a panorama more strikingly interesting and more authentic, and of a wider Babylon, than was ever before shown. We believe that no other place tells so much as this will in so short a time, or makes the discursiveness of its lesson so palatable to those who cannot devote themselves to all the subjects 54 THE EPOCHS OF ART which it embraces. Its province is an educational one ; but it is that part of education which consists not so much in exhaustive teaching as in cultivation. EGYPT. The art of the Crystal Palace begins where the world’s art began — at Egypt. Strange to think that the earliest remaining monuments of this land had seen almost as many centuries before the Christian sera as they and the world have seen since. Stranger still, it is the first impulse to think, that what men have known of art in the succeeding ages has not been very much beyond what the Egyptians knew, however wide and important have certainly been their strides in learning how to express their knowledge. But in reality this is not strange; the strange thing would be if it were otherwise. It is not strange that men having eyes to see should use them rightly, and see nearly as much as lies within their horizon-line. An open eye and undepraved intelligence will, without any laborious process, conceive much of the true essence of Art — what she should aim at, and how aim at it. The brain may be more or less schooled in the means, the hand in the method ; but the clearness of physical and mental vision is the same. Would that the parallel held good throughout ! that the impulse, if sub- stantially as true when uninformed as when informed and at the zenith of art, could preserve itself unenfeebled thence- forward. But this will not be. The means supersede the end ; the learning chokes the knowledge ; the accidental overlies the essential. As language in its noble use reveals, and in its ignoble use conceals, the thought of the speaker, AS REPRESENTED IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 55 so Art has its two phases, analogous, yet with a difference. It does not aim at embodying Nature and nothing else, for Nature has already embodied herself better than any copy can do it for her. The true aim of Art is to embody a man’s thought concerning Nature. It will be successful or unsuccessful according as it penetrates to her essence or skims her surface ; but, either way, it will be genuine, and is not ignoble. It becomes ignoble when, instead of reveal- ing a man’s thought about Nature, it conceals his want of thought about her. All faithful early art has done the first, and all futile and effete art the second. For the absence of thought may co-exist with the possession of information. When Art is in her dotage, you may still find in her plenty of information about Nature — more than before, after a certain manner; but the thought is bestowed upon the mere art and the artist — what he can do for self-display, or to resemble another man’s art, or not to resemble it. The thought which the Egyptians derived from Nature most absorbingly, and expressed most distinctly, was that of repose. To their eyes, assuredly, Nature was not 4 a per- petual flux,’ but a perpetual endeavour towards rest. The endeavour was the dust of the race, the repose its crown. 4 Rest, rest, for ever rest, Spread over brow and breast : Her face is toward the West, The purple land/ Monotony is one feature of repose; and the Egyptians have it. The ruling sentiment resides in a single seated figure, the legs straight, fixed, and identical, the hands spread on the knees, the head poised without either raising or depres- sion, the eyes set forward; but it resides far more than fiftyfold in fifty such figures. The huge mass and colossal scale of Egyptian art are another feature of repose, forming in themselves a characteristic nationally distinctive, yet still 56 THE EPOCHS OF ART subordinate in expression to the leading thought. The pyramid, the labour of whose building has consumed years and ground down thousands into their unknown graves, shall endure for ages on ages. It cannot be removed or altered; it rests for ever there. The vast temple-columns shall not be transplanted; the sculptured giants shall sit, and seem to support the rock they are carved from, while there remains a rock to seem supported. The repose of Egyptian art often approaches or becomes passivity. But the Egyptian artist was not incapable of anything else. The bas-reliefs continually exhibit action and motion, as well as clearly-marked distinctions of charac- ter. For instance : the young Sesostris overcoming two Asiatic chiefs, from the temple of Abou Simbel, is vigorous and even spirited in these respects, and presents effectively the contrast of youthful strength in its full exercise with the lassitude of coming death : the Triumph of Ramses Mai Amun, from the temple of Medinet Abou, is not only full but amply diversified in the actions, especially of the captives. Still, each figure seems arrested in his motion, — not like a moving man petrified, but one that pauses of his own accord, and stands fixed. It is true that there is quite as much in this of the sculptor’s want of power to do more as of his intentional abstinence from doing it : but his whole being was so moulded that he did not wish to attain the more ; the art which his view comprehended did not include it. Had the desire existed, the power would have come. All this, however, shows that he had not ceased to think of Nature, treating art as the expression of his thought. One main idea possessed his mind; but the repose which he saw brooding over universal Nature did not obliterate her ebb and flow. Of all art, the Egyptian is the most permanent, as well AS REPRESENTED IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 57 in the tone and self-reproduction which imbued it from age to age as in the expression of its particular monuments. Yet even Egypt has her alternations and her gradual descent. Her art under the native dynasties surpassed that of the Ptolemaic period, to which, however, are due the beautiful lotus-leaved and palm-leaved capitals; and the Ptolemaic art surpassed the Roman. We have seen a thought of nature expressed with a monotony often almost servile, yet still not losing its nobility as thought. Let us turn to one of the latest statues in the Egyptian Court, one of the Augustan period, which is thus described by Mr. Sharpe in the official handbook. C A statue of a priest. It was made by a Greek artist under the Roman sway. His head- dress and the cloth round his loins are Egyptian, so is the square block behind which supports it : in every other respect it is a Greek figure.’ Not wholly so, we submit The face has the Egyptian smile, and the attitude some- thing of the Egyptian formality. But the smile has lost its meaning : it is no longer the calm satisfaction of one at rest well-earned, but the grin of a simpleton, who knows not why he should grin, but does so none the less. The for- mality is not grand and weighty, a part of the statue’s being ; but a mere addition to make it bear some affinity to a certain style. The Greek artist has given us more information about Nature than the Egyptians had done — he knows what an arm or a leg is better than they did : but he has not got a thought of Nature in his composition, and so can only express himself as a handicraftsman and nothing else. Another example of a much-earlier period* may suffice. * The two compilers of the Handbook do not coincide in their chronology. According to Mr. Jones, the temple of Abou Simbel was built by Ramses the Third, in 1565 B.c. ; according to Mr. Sharpe, by Ramses the Second, about 1150; and corresponding discrepancies occur in other instances. Where we give dates, we have followed Mr. Sharpe. 58 THE EPOCHS OF ART The lions before the model of the temple of Aboil Simbel will be immediately felt as less grand than those of a still remoter age at the entrance from the nave, the originals of which are in the British Museum. The cause does not consist in any less amount of conventional grandeur in arrangement, but in the fact that the older lions are more thoroughly leonine and feline than the others. The first are majestically recumbent, but with the grim fierceness about them of a future spring at their prey, which the dull gravity of the second does not possess. The sculptor has seen more deeply into nature and the essence of lion than his successor, and has expressed something greater. Some Egyptian scholars assert that the further we go backwards, even to the very origin of known records, the more advanced and admirable does the art of Egypt appear. The two great pyramids are the most ancient buildings of which we have cognizance, and the most stupendous : fully constructed temples preceded rock-temples, and the neces- sary features of the first are reproduced, not for necessity but for style, in the second. The finest Egyptian works at the Crystal Palace belong generally to a very early epoch, beginning about the fifteenth century b.c., and having dignity and refinement conspicuously united. There is less attempt to do anything of which the art was not then capable, less muscular development and more proportion. The figures and details of the temple of Abou Simbel, ancient as they also are, have much of the monstrous and overgrown in the parts, independently of the enormous dimensions of the whole. The earliest art had not done at all what was never done in Egypt or Ethiopia better than badly. The system of polychromatism adopted at the Crystal Palace is one which will give rise to frequent discussion varying according to its application to different kinds of AS REPRESENTED IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 59 architecture and of art. It may be used fearlessly upon the Egyptian work so far as authority goes ; though occasionally the particular colouring employed has been conjectural. It will be considered, however, by many, and by us among the number, that the brightness and newness of the colour- ing detract not a little from the force of the impression ; and the more so as taken in connexion with the reduced scale of many of the copies of famous monuments. On examining the details and studying them, we shall recover the befitting tone of mind more or less ; but the remotest antiquity of which we possess a trace, monuments stained and blurred with the ravage and decay of centuries, and the most colossal proportions in which stones hewn for temples and sculptured for statues have ever been made to express the genius and aspiration of man, are very inadequately represented by models reduced to the ordinary modern size, coloured like the rooms . of a new clubhouse, only a good deal brighter, and smelling of paint and putty. It is Egypt in duodecimo; a huge battered family Bible compressed into the last moroccoed, gold-edged, and gilt-clasped Anglican ( Morning and Evening Lessons.’ But no mode in which the thing could have been done would have been free from something of the same objection; and we think that, in this case, the additional facts displayed and implied by the polychromatism were worth the possibly additional weaken- ing of the antique illusion. GREECE. Greek Art in Greece and under Rome presents a sequence of something like a thousand years. Bearing internal evi- 6o THE EPOCHS OF ART dence of her derivation from Egypt, she cannot have been much ruder than the primitive monuments of which the record remains, nor much more effete than when the seat of empire was transferred to Constantinople, when Christian influences, long working dimly and silently, began to show with more and more prominence, barbarian inroads to dis- solve and reconstruct civilization, and the graft of the Byzantine style to supersede that which it grew into. How much longer she lingered, what last stages of decomposition she underwent, are matters which can have but little interest for the artistic enquirer, so far as herself is concerned. Palsy was already upon her, and all she had further to do was to glide into her grave, and fertilize the soil for a new crop. The earliest specimens of Greek art do not enter into rivalry with those of Egypt ; but substantially, as soon as the former emerged from her swaddling-bands and felt her limbs, she began very much where the other ended. Both stood on the right ground ; penetrated with a broad senti- ment gathered from nature, which they rendered with simple directness, and which found its main expression to a con- siderable extent in Greece, as in Egypt almost exclusively, in a placid unperturbed stateliness. But Greece had, from the beginning, more observation, discursiveness, and mallea- bility — more of the spirit in which the first step is taken as a starting-point for the second. She saw before her greater and more varied possibilities. It was not enough for her to have followed in embodying one sentiment. If she could do that much, she could do something beyond it; and at any rate the means were imperfect. Greece went on con- tinually elaborating and subtilizing the means. In the still partially archaic Lycian Marbles belonging to the British Museum, the means are already very advanced. Refine- ment distinguishes the appreciation of forms and the general AS REPRESENTED IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 6 1 treatment in good Egyptian works : these are more than re- fined — they are consummately and in the best sense elegant. In fanciful grace of arrangement and agile lightness they are unsurpassed. The ^Eginetan and Thesean sculptures pre- pared the way for those of Phidias. Here sculpture cul- minated. The time was ripe, and the genius of one man appropriated it and stamped it as his own for ever. It appears difficult to say how far the Elgin Marbles may dis- play decided intellectuality of conception, partly from the great mutilations with which the most important works have come down to us, partly from the traditional nature of the subject, which, whether for good or for evil, controlled the artist’s imagination : but, leaving out this aspect of the case, the art of Phidias has no parallel. Grandeur, beauty, truth, science, execution, relation — we may exhaust the list of the greatest qualities of sculpture, and find none but superlatives with which to describe the degree in which they are present here. Alcamenes, Calamis, Polycletus, Myron, are other great yet less famous names of the same period. The elaboration of the means proceeded. Scarcely was the Phidian age past when Praxiteles gave the first example of a naked goddess. With Phidias austerity had not been too austere, nor grace too graceful. An equal-judging Paris, he had awarded the apple not more to the beauty of Aphro- dite than to the grandeur of Here or the serene virginity of Pallas. Everything with him was cast in the noblest mould : but it seemed rather the inevitable expression of the nobility of the man than the intentional nobility of the artist. His successors worked upon still declining motives of conception and narrowing principles of form. Majesty which included beauty yielded the first place to beauty which was assumed to imply majesty. Phidias found resources in the accidents of ideal form; succeeding sculptors restricted themselves 62 THE EPOCHS OF ART more and more within the barriers of their ideal. Perfect form took the precedence of the sentiment enshrined in form. The gods became men and women, ordinary in sentiment, extraordinary in physical perfection. The Greeks ceased to embody some great meaning of Nature, such as the repose which moulds every expression of Egyptian art ; and carried Nature herself, in her external manifestation of human form, to the last limits of consummate refinement. From the time of Phidias there is no progress in the essence of art ; indeed, he had allowed no room for positive pro- gress, but only for varying developments of cognate qualities according to the bent of the particular artist : henceforth the progress aimed at consists in the defining and fixing of the highest standard of material beauty. So it went on : from Praxiteles in the fourth century b.c. to the sculptors of the batches of Hadrian’s Antinous in the second century a.d., and to the latest days when Greek art was still living. Even in the senselessly crowded compositions, and coarse execution, and lethargy of purpose, of her final degradation, some mask of the same intention is worn. Nothing can surpass the beauty of the Greek ideal ; but use made the ideal more and more conventional, and the type more and more a lesson learned by rote. Under Roman subjection, as Mr. Scharf’s well-stored and well-digested Handbook states, ‘so degraded did the Grecian chisel become that sarcophagi of Pentelic marble, covered with figures and ornaments, were shipped in vast quantities to the metropolis of the world, having all but the heads of such figures as were destined to be portraits completely finished. These were touched off and the inscriptions added by some resident mason. Hundreds of such sarcophagi are still to be seen ; and among them instances do occur in which the tablets and faces of the principal persons remain blank. It is AS REPRESENTED IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 63 probable, therefore, that these specimens remained unsold ;* — to be purchased in future ages, maybe, by reverential connoisseurs and worshipers of c the Greek ideal.’ Beauty is the soul of Grecian art, rendered with the most exquisite ease and mastery. That it has repose and that it has vitality are facts dependent not so much on essential conception as on perfect understanding. Repose is a necessary element of beauty in sculpture, and the wonderful capacity for the practice of art which the Greeks possessed could not be satisfied with any stage of execution stopping short of as much expressed vitality as was com- patible with a lofty and definite theory of the art itself. These are subordinate qualities : the beauty is the supreme thing, and a thing which, however distinctly formulated in the Grecian statues, and therefore, after a fashion, repro- ducible, has never been rivalled since, and seems unlikely to be in the future. The world is a modern world, and pursues its own tendencies ; or, if it will pursue those of an antique Greek world, it does so at its peril. There is one, and perhaps only one, deficiency in the art of Greece — that it fails to impress the heart; at any rate, the ipodern heart. We may or may not be ready to accept the retort that this is really the deficiency of the modern heart, and not of the greatest art of the world which fails to obtain entrance thereinto. We acknowledge a good deal of justice in the retort ; but are content, for our present purpose, to leave it as it stands, undebated. Egyptian art sways the imagination, and weighs upon the feelings with a sense of vastness, and mystery, and awful permanence. Partly by the power of association, but still more potently by its own inherent gifts, it produces the effect of sublimity. Greece is rather glorious than sublime; or, if, as in her Phidias, sublime, rather in an artist’s sense than otherwise. Her 64 THE EPOCHS OF ART medium for sublimating your feeling is through your sense of beauty. You admire the artist and the art — possibly with an unbounded admiration; you believe in them, reject all other art in comparison ; but your love for them is mainly an ‘ aesthetic’ love. Your eye is touched, hardly your heart. Greek statues cultivate artists, and educate — they sometimes spoil — academy-students and connoisseurs : the time is past, or is yet to come, for their re-acting upon men. The Greek Court at the Crystal Palace, and one of the Elgin friezes in it, are coloured : we are thus invited to consider the interesting question of the colouring of original Greek architecture and sculpture. Mr. Owen Jones has done his utmost to raise this question into prominence; issuing, distinct from the Handbooks, ‘ An Apology for the Colouring of the Greek Court, with Arguments by G. H. Lewes and W. Watkiss Lloyd, an Extract from the Report of the Committee appointed to examine the Elgin Marbles in 1836, from the Transactions of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and a Fragment on the Origin of Poly- chromy by Professor Semper.’ The question is sufficiently important, both in itself and in its bearing on the future of art, to induce us to refer in some detail to the facts brought out in the 6 Apology.’ There are three parties in the discussion : those who deny that the Greeks, in the purer periods of their art, did use colour ; those who admit a degree of colour, but stop short of believing in entirely painted statues ; and those who go to the utmost latitude in their assertion of its employment. Mr. Jones is a coryphaeus among the last. ‘An examina- tion,’ he says, ‘ of the facts recorded by these various authorities [Hittorff, Penrose, and others] will convince any AS REPRESENTED IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 65 one that the question is now narrowed to one of degree only — To what extent were white marble temples painted and ornamented ? I would maintain that they were entirely so ; that neither the colour of the marble nor even its surface was preserved ; and that, preparatory to the orna- menting and colouring of the surface, the whole was covered with a thin coating of stucco, something in the nature of a gilder’s ground, to stop the absorption of the colours by the marble. The Egyptians covered their buildings and statues in a similar way, no matter what the material : the Greek temples which were built of limestone were so un- doubtedly; the ancient Greek terra-cottas, almost without exception, have traces of this ground. To the belief that the Greeks employed it on their marble temples there is only one stumblingblock — the artificial value which white marble has in our eyes. The Athenians built with marble because they found it almost beneath their feet, and. . . . because it was the most enduring, and capable of receiving a higher finish of workmanship.’ Of the Elgin frieze Mr. Jones says, further on, ‘That it was coloured in some manner or other there can be no manner of doubt a very broad assertion, considering that there is not a particle of direct confirmation adduced as to any of the Parthenon marble sculptures. Indeed, it is an abuse of terms. There is doubt on the point, and grave doubt; though Mr. Jones may probably think that there ought not to be. For evi- dence he refers, inter alia, to ‘the ornaments of metal with which many of the marble statues were covered,’ Also, Mr. Bracebridge saw fragments dug up at Athens, in 1835-36, painted \when ?] with vermilion, ultra-marine, and straw- colour. Also, passages exist in ancient authors, which are considered to assert the use of colour on statues. These are quoted in Mr. Lewes’s contribution. The first is from F 66 THE EPOCHS OF ART Plato : but it is disputed whether that relates to statues or pictures ; and further, as Mr. Lloyd points out, it does not state, assuming the former, that the statues referred to are marble, or that the flesh is painted. One from Plutarch and one from Pausanias do not appear very cogent ; and that alluding to the Bacchante of Scopas is ambiguous. Another from Pausanias states that a statue of Bacchus in gypsum was ornamented with paint (i7rucefcocr/j,7]fjL€vov 7 patyr)). Two from Virgil, in which the speaker first promises Venus a marble statue of Cupid with varicoloured wings and a quiver painted according to custom, and secondly mentions a marble statue of Diana with scarlet sandals, are remark- able; though neither do these reach the question of the flesh. The passage upon which most stress is laid is from Pliny. 4 Speaking of Nicias, he says that Praxiteles, when asked which of his marble works best satisfied him, replied, 4 Those which Nicias has had under his hands.’ ‘ So much,’ says Pliny, ‘did he prize the finishing of Nicias ’ — tantum circumlitioni ejns tribuebat .’ Now Nicias, it is explained, was an encaustic painter. The final note which Mr. Wat- kiss Lloyd has appended to Mr. Lewes’s paper is scholarly and valuable. Colouring, more or less complete, of archaic statues, he admits unreservedly. ‘ As to the flesh of marble statues of the best age, no rule can be deduced for this from any practice that obtained in primitive times, or from chrys- elephantine works, which seem to have been in designed contrast in the whole of their treatment. The argument for colour on marble flesh of the best age, from existing remains, so far as I am aware, is equal to zero. But the passage respecting Nicias and Polycletus* is of very great force.’ He then refers to a passage in Vitruvius, nearly reproduced in Pliny, and concludes — ‘ If a verdict were to be given on * Praxiteles, according to Pliny and Mr. Lewes. AS REPRESENTED IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 67 this evidence as it stands, I am much disposed to think that it must be in favour of a tinge of vermilion, protected by a brilliant varnish, having been applied to the nude portions of (? some) marble statues in such a manner that both colour and varnish assisted the fine surface and brilliant effect of the lucent marble. 5 Mr. Penrose, the investigator of the Parthenon, is the least willing to admit the use of colour to any considerable extent. He holds it 6 unreasonable to suppose that the ancients entirely con- cealed, or even materially altered in appearance, the general surface of the white marble, which they made a great point of obtaining whenever possible, 5 and contests Mr. Jones’s assertion of the commonness of Pentelic marble to Athenian eyes. This opinion relates to the building; but, if the building was left white, or only white toned down, we may suppose a fortiori that the statues would be. Let us here glance at the treatment of the same subject, Greek architectural and sculptural colouring, by another authority, Professor Westmacott, R.A., in his 6 Handbook of Sculpture Ancient and Modern, 5 published as an inde- pendent work in 1864. Some of his principal conclusions are 1 — that, in the mature period of Greek art, colour could not have been employed to imitate the appearances of nature ; that the fine qualities of such works as the Elgin Marbles would be concealed by colour ; that the number of ancient sculptures upon which traces of colour have been found is comparatively very small, and the colour there always ungradated ; and that the authorities whom the poly- chromists rely upon for proving their case are neither in themselves beyond cavil, nor always properly to be under- stood in so wide and positive a sense as has been put upon them. Of demur on the former ground Mr. Westmacott gives instances in the story of Pliny that a bronze statue of 68 THE EPOCHS OF ART Athamas by Aristonidas exhibited the appearance of a blush by the redness of iron shining through the bronze, and the story of Plutarch that a statue of Jocasta Dying, in mixed metal, by Silanio, had a purposely pallid countenance. The incongruity and quasi-impossibility of these allegations, and their nugatory character in relation to art, even if truly stated, are pointed out with much discrimination : the stories — good old souls — ought henceforth to traverse the demesne of art very much in the guise of dogs with kettles tied by a professorial hand to their tails. Of demur on the second of the two grounds above mentioned we find a crucial instance in regard to the passage above quoted from Pliny, the great cheval de bataille of the polychromists, and which runs thus in the original Latin : ‘ Dicebat Praxiteles, in- terrogate quae maxime opera sua probasset in marmoribus, Quibus Nicias manurn admovisset; tantum circumlitioni ejus tribuebat.’ The unquestioning assumption of the poly- chromists that 6 circumlitio’ in this passage means 4 paint- ing’ always seemed to us much more easy than safe; and we are pleased to find Mr. Westmacott arguing out the question on the same basis. He says : : — One of the most frequently quoted authorities for the practice of systematically applying colour to sculpture, and even for employing a professional painter to complete the sculptor’s work, is a passage also in Pliny. In English it runs thus : 4 Praxiteles, when he was asked which of his works in marble he most approved (or esteemed most highly), replied 4 Those to which Nicias had put his hand so much (value) did he attribute to his (mode of) rubbing or polishing (the surface).’ There is no expression here that can with fairness or propriety be converted into meaning painting or the addition of colour ; nor can the passage, by any stretch of ingenuity, be made to describe the process of painting or tinting with a variety of colours. Nothing can be more distinct than the expression used by Pliny ; and it is not easy to understand how any scholar could translate circumlitio into colouring, or the simple assertion of manum admovisse (putting a hand to it) into meaning that the hand was employed in the particular function or operation of putting paint on a masterpiece of Praxiteles. There may be doubt and difficulty in deciding, in the absence of all AS REPRESENTED IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 69 proof in remaining examples of sculpture, what this circumlitio was ; but it seems tolerably clear what it was not. The assistance of Nicias may have been valuable in giving a certain richness of tone to the already finished surface of the statues by rubbing in a varnish or some composi- tion by which an extra appearance of softness was produced ; and this, according to the passage above quoted, was effected by a circular or rotary action (< circum ) ; but this is totally distinct from anything like painting, or applying a coat of colour to the statues. It is a process very analogous to that resorted to by many sculptors in modern times. ✓ To call this convincing would be too much; but it certainly appears to us persuasive and reasonable : indeed, we can say the same of Professor Westmacott’s entire disquisition upon ancient polychromy, as a question of fact and in- ference. When it comes to the question of aesthetics and opinion we are not so well satisfied, although we are far from dissenting from the main position that an uncoloured statue is better than a coloured one. That, however, in our view, is no reason for the absolute exclusion of colour- ing, or for the suppression of experiments in that direction. The style of some artists, though not the highest conceivable style, might be helped by colour; and we know as yet next to nothing of its actual capacities, so partial and limited has the experimentation been. We altogether object also to the dragging-in of morals, head and shoulders, into the discussion. The author observes that ‘his own objections are not confined to the mere technical question. Recognis- ing the moral influence art is capable of exercising, he can- not but feel that, if so meretricious an accompaniment to sculpture as flesh-tints should become popular, it must in- evitably lead to a preference of a class of subjects that would tend to lower the character of this art ; easily rendering it an instrument of corruption rather than the means of re- fining and elevating the taste of a people.’ All this is mere guess-work and begging of the question. We don’t know that Mr. Westmacott’s anticipations are correct; and we do 7o THE EPOCHS OF ART know that, whether correct or not, they are factitious so far as the question of art is concerned. Another minor point in which we cannot agree with Mr. Westmacott is his ob- servation, with reference to the Cnidian Venus of Praxiteles, that, had this statue been coloured, the extreme beauty of the marble could not have been the subject of remark. We are not aware that the colouring of Mr. Gibson’s Venus entailed the slightest difficulty in judging of the fineness of its material. On the whole, there seems unquestionably to be valid though not conclusive ground for believing that the Greeks did colour their statues to a large extent ; and, if so, best probably over the whole surface. But after all the practical question for living artists is not What did the Greeks do ? but What ought we to do ?■ — and we cannot admit that the decision is furthered by any Greek practice in the matter. Idealism, anti-realism, anti-naturalism, are theories of art maintained often blindly and illegitimately : but they have their true side nevertheless ; and, among the forms of art, sculpture is the one to which they are applicable at any rate. Paint- ing allows of, indeed demands, a very considerable amount of realism, though it must not be realism and nothing else : but this form of art is saved from ever being altogether realistic by the fact that it does not possess absolute form. Sculpture, on the contrary, does possess absolute form. Form is form ; and a statue, it has been truly observed by Guizot in his book on Fine Art, is not an imitation of the form of a man, but literally the form of a man, no less than are the flesh and blood. This fact makes- it most dangerous to proceed a step further on the road to realism ; and any amount of colour is a very serious step. Of course, such colour as that of bronze does not count ; for of the two it is less realistic to have a man one uniform burnished surface AS REPRESENTED IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 7 1 of golden olive-colour than one uniform surface of white. But any separation of colours with even an approach to the natural hue is unmistakeably realistic. It may be 6 con- ventional’ as colour, yet realistic as colour coming in aid of absolute form. Actual instead of represented form, actual instead of represented lights and shadows, and colour ap- proaching the actual in denomination and distribution, how- ever modified in tone, bring the statue so far on the road to realism that one scarcely knows whether it were not better to take the remaining steps. Mere faint stains of colour and carefully bestowed gilding are on a somewhat different footing. Our argument applies, however, even to them : but of course we are not contending against colour in architecture, or the harmonizing, within limits, of the sculp- ture with the building to which it belongs. Mr. Jones enquires — 4 How can one believe that, at one particular period in the practice of the arts, the artistic eye was so entirely changed that it became suddenly enamoured of white marble ? Such an idea belongs only to an age like that through which we have just passed — an age equally de- void of the capacity to appreciate and of the power to execute works of art — when refuge is taken in whitewashing.’ We need not observe that this is just assuming the fact and the right of the question both together. But are even the data tenable? Did no noble mediaeval men carve uncoloured stone before the revival of the classic taste? or were Niccolb Pisano, and Verrocchio, and Donatello, and Michael Angelo, born in an age without capacity or power, for which white- wash was the only resource ? 72 THE EPOCHS OF ART ASSYRIA. A sense of oppression is our predominant feeling in visiting the revived Assyrian Court. We are set face to face with ghosts ; the ghosts of a people and a religion strange and unexplored at best, which are here substan- tialized, by the newness of their getting up, in ‘ some other horrible shape’ which, if it does not ‘draw you into mad- ness,’ tends to draw or rather drive you off towards some- thing else more genial, human, and germane to sunlight in the nineteenth century. Egypt, even as lilliputianized in the Crystal Palace, is grand and noble, Greece beautiful and heroic; the Byzantine and more modern Courts enshrine the spirits of men and our brothers; but of the Assyrian Court we say, in the words of Coleridge, ‘The nightmare Life in Death is she.’ This, however, is a matter of feeling. The art of Assyria is not the less venerable because it can be so placed and presented as to produce a sense of uneasiness and dis- comfort; nor yet is that very sense an evidence that the mode of presentment is wrong. Perhaps the natural in- fluence of a Ninevite ghost conjured into the nearest make- believe of life is to excite discomfort and uneasiness. The reproduction at Sydenham may be the best possible under the circumstances, although it affords us the reverse of pleasure. We are far from supposing it ill done on that account. Saul did not like the ghost of Samuel when he saw it ; but he left it to commentators to discover that the ghost was not Samuel, but the Devil. On the other hand, while we perceive that our disrelish AS REPRESENTED IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 73 of the result argues nothing against the process by which that has been achieved, considering the conditions of the case, we do not hold it to be motiveless — a mere arbitrary and individual impression. In the mound of Nimroud or Kouyunjik, the human-headed bull is a fragment of history and of art, making the waste place reecho the hum of a mighty people, and giving forth utterances — obscure, indeed, but memorable and authentic. The ghost haunts its own sepulchre, and is awful. In the British Museum, the frag- ment is still more fragmentary, the voice still vaguer, but not less authentic. The ghost is brought into the light of common day ; we feel less awe at it, but the same surprise and curiosity. No one dreams of taking a liberty with the ghost. In the Crystal Palace, Mr. Fergusson has ‘ struck at it with his partisan’ ; and, though all the cocks of Syden- ham and of London are crowing their loudest around it, it cannot vanish. Mr. Fergusson puts leading questions to the ghost, which the ghost is forced to answer in Mr. Fergusson’s own words. That gentleman, or Mr. Collman, is quite sure that, if the ghost only knew it, the colours of his particular magic-lantern are the very things to suit it ; and he projects them accordingly. He knows all about the ghosfls residence, and domiciliates the ghost. Now this is what gives us a sense of oppression and discomfort in the Crystal Palace from the presence of objects whose originals excite feelings higher, more unmixed, and not such as we wish to escape from. Antiquity is antiquity, and modernism is modernism. These works are too old to be touched up into freshness with any congruous or satisfactory result. It is exactly the case of an old woman who paints. The face is not the less old : the face is as old as ever, and older by the contrast. She has only put on something which is new, and conflicts with all the rest. Fossils are not made 74 THE EPOCHS OF ART to be defossilized, nor would a mammoth whose jaws were to open by galvanism become a domestic animal. The effect of colour in the Assyrian Court is hard, glaring, and uncombined — an opaque heavy patchwork of blues, reds, and yellows, with ghastly oases of white. It is not altogether out of keeping with the style of the art; being massive in the parts, though not in the effect, and carried out straightforwardly, without 6 pottering over’ at- tempts at delicacy. The eyebrows of the human-headed lion meet thick and slab like black leeches. But, when we recall the aspect of the uncoloured originals, and compare it with the painted copies, — the refinement and impassive vitality of the one with the aggressive unrepose of the other, • — we reckon the colour, in any sesthetic sense, pure loss. For all this, we do not think that what is done has been done injudiciously. The originals in their time-marked condition are before us elsewhere. To reproduce them as they now are, as fragments and unrestored in respects where there is reasonable ground for restoration, were mere superfluity. We possess the real thing, and need not go seeking for a simple copy. To have given us at Sydenham casts of isolated works could be of no possible value. The restoration of part of an Assyrian building, according to the best lights we have on the subject, was well worth attempt- ing. Nor do we see any reason to doubt that it has been executed as successfully, and with as near an approach to full accuracy, as circumstances would admit. Of course a good deal of the colour and of the construction is con- jectural, and types which have been found at Susa and Persepolis did not necessarily exist as well in Nineveh. But what of that? To cavil at Mr. Fergusson’s production because he has not had unquestionable authority for each detail appears to us as futile as it is easy. Mr. Fergusson AS REPRESENTED IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 75 has studied the subject, and acted up to his opportunities; Mr. Layard has ratified the result with his general and particular approval. The very value of the labour bestowed upon it consists not in what is certain, which we can find better and as accessibly in the original, but in what is conjectural. The art of Nineveh appears to be an offshoot of the art of Egypt. It has repose, but not so much in sentiment as in fact — the repose embodied in fixity and rigidity. It shows more of the naturalistic ambition for truth in detail ; more minute observation of form, as in the muscles, the extremities, and so on ; but certainly not so high an appre- ciation of general form. Doubtless the Egyptian saw as much ; but he was bound still faster in the fetters of tradi- tion, which confined him to one mode of representation, and probably bowed also to the principle — true for each present generation, though obstructive to those which suc- ceed — that it is better not to do at all that which cannot be done well. Assyrian art is more terrene ; its largeness of scale partakes more of bulk and less of mass. Egyptian art teems with monsters of form and of size, and yet the abstract predominates in all its finer periods over the mon- strous. The bi-form deities of Assyria are grand for fierce- ness, 'pride, and power ; but they more nearly approach the grotesque. Nevertheless, her art is true art, and honourable. It stalks the world unsurpassed as yet for nationalism and a certain haughty self-consciousness. In its representation of brute form it is particularly noble. The half-strangled lion tearing at the colossal figure whose inexorable arm crushes the life out of him is as great, in a somewhat less majestic way, as the recumbent Egyptian lion. Force is the essence of Assyrian art; the physical force which struggles, slays, and conquers; the personal force ?6 THE EPOCHS OF ART whose will is law. It is intrinsically the art of a despotic king and a barbaric people; stern, self-exalting, fixed. It delights in conflict and in gorgeousness. Its kings stand erect, or sit supreme; its subjects fight, and swim, and besiege, and minister to their monarch, and build under rigid taskmasters ; it has few (if any) women, and them mostly servile or captive ; its eagles scent the slain ; its lions gnash on their triumphing hunters ; and its gods trample the ground with puissant spread wings and fronting countenance. THE MORESQUE. The greatest success of the Art Courts in the Crystal Palace is the Alhambra Court, reproduced with knowledge, skill, and, above all, in the spirit of genuine love, by Mr. Owen Jones. The objections which may be urged in other instances do not apply here, or cease to be objections. Like the Egyptian Court, the Alhambra is diminished in scale ; but its character and effect do not depend on size, and the dimensions of the parts, together with the relative proportions as far as practicable, are generally if not always preserved. Like the Grecian and Assyrian Courts, the colouring of this is to some considerable extent conjectural; but it proceeds on well-established principles, if not on unquestioned matter of fact, and neither startles by innova- tion like the Grecian experiment, nor disturbs by incongruity like the Assyrian, nor outrages by bad taste like some others. Here there can be no serious mistake. One hue may probably enough be substituted for another on some AS REPRESENTED IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 77 particular moulding, but the general scheme of the colour is scarcely less certain than the fact that colour of some kind there must be. Passing a fagade which is not a literal reproduction of any actual part of the Alhambra, you enter the Court of Lions. Here stands the fountain, cool in the pallid grey of its marble. The lions are queer quaint dolls, with a benign incapability of visage and of pose as of the first childish effort at the animal, no matter whether sheep or wolf, which we have all, before the age of ten, located in the neighbour- hood of a house with two windows and a door, and a twist of smoke out of its chimney, flanked on either hand by the tree with a ravelled thread for its foliage. The lions’ legs are square posts, and their tails, like something between a scimitar and a laurel-leaf, lie clinging along their haunches. "Primitive art was never more unsuccessful than in these mammalia, in whose production the Prophet’s prohibition seems to have punished the daring artist with sterility. Vacuous they truly are ; but their unassuming naivetd redeems them from being contemptible. Note too that their quaintness has nothing of the grotesque ; an element which appears altogether alien from the Saracenic spirit in art. A Gothic or Lombardic workman who could not do a igrand lion would have aimed at a grotesque one, or, even without intending it, would inevitably have fallen into the grotesque in failing to attain the truthful or the characteristic. The Moorish artist fails, and his product is simply a bathos. Beyond the Court of Lions lies the Hall of Justice. Here and elsewhere the endless intertexture and convolution of the wall-patterning exhaust the eye without wearying it ; and, if the colour is grateful without glare in the light, in the shade which overlies the Hall of Justice it tells at a few paces’ distance with only the richness of dead gold, and 7 8 THE EPOCHS OF ART of dyes felt but unrealized, and dim with mutual counter- action. Luxury and purity are the qualities of expression to be found at their full in the architecture of the Alhambra ; and the purity is the essence of the luxury. The two are not ordinarily conceived of as related, it is true ; and profusion, or the love of colour, or grace, or refinement, may at first seem the more appropriate name for the spirit of the style. These, however, are only modes of the central idea, second- aries derived from the primary ; while the luxury is a result, and not a principle. The brightest colours, be it remem- bered, are the purest ; and the purest of all taste is that which can not only choose them by preference, but can so combine them also as to give, without glare or fierceness, a splendour as of kings’ chambers, and a perfect harmony and balance. Restricted by religious prescription to the purest of all typical forms, those of geometrical lines and combinations, the Arab genius elaborated these with the most exquisite subtlety of curve and proportion, and poured forth designs with the exuberance of unclogged invention. The invention is, indeed, rather ingenuity than imagination or even fancy ; and a single Gothic leaf ranks higher to the intellect, because it has more perception and feeling, and means more, than a whole wall fretted into arabesque : but this is the necessity of the case. The lines are sharp, clean, and, with all their twined involution, continuous. Nothing is arbitrary or extravagant, nothing hybrid or amor- phous ; each minutest detail is a part of the whole, an offshoot of some stem, a completion of some incompleteness. Unsullied cleanliness seems a necessary quality for an oriental building, as frequent ablution is a religious duty for its inhabitants. Colour and moulding are firelike, flamboyant — a form suggesting the purity of lambent flame. AS REPRESENTED IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 79 The intricacy is like the intricacy of the science of num- bers — a perfect simplicity of principle capable of infinite extension. Arab ornament Piii che il doppiar degli scacchi s’immilla; but it is all interdependent, and resolves itself into few elements. It satisfies the most consummate refinement by satisfying the universal instinct ; and, while ministering to luxury by its splendour, and lightness, and lovely complete- ness, supplies this crowning luxury — that the beholder’s sense of beauty is equally sated on a close view or a distant, in repose or in motion, and without any tax on his reflective powers. We have been speaking of Moresque architecture as shown forth in the Alhambra, without indicating any dis- tinction between that and earlier phases of the style. We must remember, however, that the Alhambra shows a late, and what may not unfairly be termed a decadent or even debased, phase. The admiring terms which we have used are not more than we deem fairly due even to the Alhambra ; but, in their fullest application, they reflect back to the vivid and conquering style whose ultimate and still beautiful traditions wane in the Alhambra — yet wane imperishably. / THE BYZANTINE-ROMANESQUE. The Byzantine architecture, not less than the Saracenic, is distinguished by its love of colour. There is this differ- ence, however — that, whereas the former is above all things beautiful, the latter has not embodied its ideal unless it is imposing. The first delights, the second produces what the 8o THE EPOCHS OF ART French expressively term exaltation : a palace is the type of the one, whose charms are actualities of the earth ; a church of the other, whose glories hint of the city to come, where the light shall be c like unto a stone most precious, even a jasper-stone, clear as crystal.’ There is nothing solemn in the Saracenic architecture. It may indeed, in some moods, foster a kind of ‘ lotus-eating’ tendency, and conduce as a consequence to c mild-minded melancholy’; but this is a thing apart. On the contrary, the Byzantine style has something solemn even in its trivialities. The Court in the Crystal Palace embraces Byzantine art properly so called, and Romanesque art ; the latter illustrated chiefly from Germany, England, and Ireland, or parts directly influenced by the Irish style. Byzantine art arose under mingled Greek, Roman, and oriental impulses, in the building of Constantinople. The Iconoclastic persecution spread the seeds of it from the Empire of the East over most parts of Europe, among the Arabians, and in Asia Minor. Between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries it struggled against Gothic art, de- cayed, and at last succumbed. The pointed arch had over- come the round arch throughout non-Sclavonic and non- Grecian Europe. In Byzantium itself and the Eastern Empire, the style was not unmindful of the traditions of its precursors, and still less of its own. Curved forms became universal, columns of continual recurrence, mosaic work one of the most remarkable and elaborate features. Human and other figures disappeared. ‘ The general arrangement of the churches,’ as Mr. Wyatt says in his Handbook, c is that of a Greek cross inscribed within a square, with four central piers supporting a large hemispherical dome, the arms of the cross being surmounted by four smaller cupolas.’ The AS REPRESENTED IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 8 1 Lombard and other Romanesque styles, those of Normandy, England, and Ireland, and in a less degree of the Rhine districts and Germany generally, bear only faint and frag- mentary relation to the Byzantine. The fetterless and law- defiant mode and profusion in which the builders of these countries introduce figures and subjects — often, it would seem, in a spirit even of riotous glee — would alone suffice to mark the barrier between the two. It is not an easy thing to define by a single quality the intrinsic expression of Byzantine architecture. Perhaps it may be said to express the feeling of authority. It preserves and creates rigid traditions; is grandiose, gorgeous, and ceremonial, in its decorations. A peculiar aptitude for ecclesiastical ritual seems to belong to it, whether in its Eastern form, where richness of decoration and colour existed without the adjunct of pictured representation, or in its Western aspect, which united both. Its transitional character, however, between Roman and Pagan architecture and that which is the peculiarly Christian type, the Gothic, renders it adapted for definition according to its external features as it progressed from the one to the other, rather than according to its inward spirit. The beauties which it has bequeathed to us, at Venice and elsewhere, are exqui- sitely 'refined even to lusciousness — full of soft repose and hap^y brooding contentment. The fantasies and fierce life with which it teemed, and the monsters it gave birth to, under Lombardic and Northern influences, — if indeed this 6 Romanesque 7 architecture can be at all reckoned in with the Byzantine, — belong essentially to the Gothic temper, and may be almost said, so far as any distinction need be drawn, to outgothicize the Goth. G 82 THE EPOCHS OF ART THE GOTHIC. If any architecture maybe safely left, without description or criticism, to the feelings of those who contemplate its monuments, it is the Gothic. All men are familiar with it ; not only as a ruin or a revival, a relic or a toy, but as the living architecture of the country while yet it had a living architecture, and the model to this day to which a large proportion of our conspicuous edifices are made more or less vitally to conform. It is associated with ideas of antiquity and reverence ; antiquity not so remote as to be obsolete, nor reverence for a shadow without a substance. Our noble historical cathedrals are Gothic; our village churches, if old enough for affection and beautiful enough for delight, are Gothic. The most unperceptive can recog- nise the style ; the most unimpressionable feel the influence, and admire, if dull to the harmony and thought of the building, the glow of its painted window, the profusion, subtlety, and quaintness, of its carving ; the most unlearned can understand something of what the details are intended to express. No one finds himself repelled by coldness or barrenness ; or discovers that the Gothic architect was a pedant, with nothing to say for himself, or no means of saying what was in him intelligibly, man speaking to man. The beauties are obvious, the variety is continual, the effect noble. Gothic art is illustrated at Sydenham chiefly from France, England, and Germany, and to a slight extent from Italy. Spain and the North remain unrepresented. As in the other Courts, polychromatism is maintained as a principle, AS REPRESENTED IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 83 but its application is partial. The exemption, where it occurs, is a fortunate one. A Gothic arched doorway, such as that which forms the entrance from the nave of the Court, looks a very different thing, picked out in reds and blues, with its clustered shafts painted in conspicuous patterns, and its niches filled with statues coloured in imitation of life, from what it does in that aspect in which it is familiar to us, with its beauties those of form, chaste, delicate, yet massively strong ; its stone saints and kings not bran-new in their material imitation of life, but with a spirit of life about them visibly and purposely petrified — beautiful not only from the hand of its carvers, but from that of Time also. The painting of this court should prove a blow to the cause of Gothic polychromatism ; for few educated eyes will hesi- tate to decide that the uncoloured stone of the original admits no rivalry from the coloured copies, nor even the uncoloured copies from the coloured ones. Authority and reasonable inference may undoubtedly be pleaded for the experiment; but, if it is the fact — which does not follow without considerable stretching of the premises — that build- ings were painted wholesale and in this style, all we can say is that ‘ Decay’s effacing fingers’ have not swept away linger- ing beauties, but substituted the fulness of one beauty for the imperfection of two, and the Gothic buildings which have descended to the nineteenth century far eclipse those which rose to men’s gaze in the thirteenth or fourteenth. Indeed, it is no paradox to say that this is the case anyhow ; that the love for the signs of time upon a building is not a merely sentimental feeling ; and that, if the furrowed and weather-tinged and moss-stained grey of the walls could be translated back into its first flawless uniformity, and the blunted and jagged moulding be chiselled back into the exquisiteness of its first finish, we should lose, in actual 8 4 THE EPOCHS OF ART beauties, scarcely less than in the hold of the structure upon our reverence. At all events — to return to the colour- ing — whether or not a coloured building is in the abstract necessarily more beautiful than an uncoloured one, and whether or not a Gothic building requires or will bear painted walls in addition to painted windows and the rain- bow hues of the light which comes showered through them, of one thing all men may be certain — that the colour is not an additional beauty unless it is a beauty by itself. At the entrance to the Court, we are enabled to form a comparison between the German Gothic sculpture and that of England. From the former country are various ^figures by the renowned Veit Stoss : — a Virgin, which would be nunlike and pure but for an over-ingenious quaintness which pushes both qualities to the verge of affectation ; a colossal St. Peter, which has the same defect aggravated in proportion to the scale of the work; and a head of the Saviour in passion, where naturalism sinks into a display of squalid dejection. The English works are of the thirteenth century, from Wells Cathedral ; in the noble style distinctive of figure-sculpture in France and England about that period. The figures are pure, dignified, and serene ; with individuality of generic character but no mere peculiarity, deep sentiment but monumental quietude, profound incorporate loveliness but no obtrusion of the minor graces, imaginative height but no tricks of fancy. The essential perfection of the Gothic art is to be found in the works of this epoch, wfiiich, while they bear in a supreme degree that emotional impress which is the modern element in art, lack no requisite of the percep- tion of beauty. Perception — yes, and realization too. A foot is ill-drawn, a grasp ill-expressed, a form lanky, a head out of poise ; but all this is mere want of learning. Show the artist how to do the thing aright, and you will find that AS REPRESENTED IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 85 he already knows what is the thing to be done better than any teaching will expound it ; and, even as it is, the thing he wants to express to you, the proper beauty of his subject and its peculiar sentiment, needs no ekeing out of art by science to produce its utmost effect. Among past styles of sculpture which may deserve as a whole to be the model of the present day, this is at any rate one. The art of Greece, far more perfect as such, has been tried this long while, and has only formed a class of indifferent copyists; for the ordinary modern man who would imbue himself with the spirit of the Greek will discover that he has got chiefly dust and ashes for his pains, and without the spirit of any art its body is a corpse. The student who will put himself to school with Gothic works shall find their soul as vital to this hour as their form ; more vital, rather, for he can im- prove in a variety of ways on the latter, — too happy only if in doing so he shall have penetrated deep enough into the former to make his improvements worth having. In fact, the chief argument against considering these monu- ments the best ideal for the present day is that their highest beauties — the earnestness, the singleheartedness, and solemn yet impulsive gravity — would vanish under the hand of a ‘ better; artist’ (as phrases go) than the faithful old carver who fashioned them ; and certainly we should not wish to see the originals themselves more advanced than they are in execution. The beauty of imperfection, indeed, is among the most human and spiritual excellences of art. It interests the sympathy, and inspirits. The one touch more which it was impossible for the artist to give would make his work perfect, but would deprive it of aspiration. His mind and heart, which could conceive so much, and nerve his hand, spite of its trammels, to express it all to us, would lose evidence of their energy in proportion to the manual 86 THE EPOCHS OF ART freedom. Giotto is called ‘ the Raphael before his time.’ We might demur to the title, and query which later artist equalled Giotto in the greatest qualities : but, even admit- ting it, the phrase itself confesses loftier praise to Giotto than to Raphael ; to be a Raphael before the time proclaims a higher native supremacy and a more strenuous victory than to be a Raphael in the time’s fulness. This for the past of art. For the present, every man must acquire and use all the advantages which he is born to inherit, and which to throw away were idiotcy, not magnanimity. And so, the mediaeval model, powerless where it is behind the time, can teach no lesson but the highest ; a lesson which will inspire works as noble as the model only to the highest mind, but which will at least be open-eyed leading of the blind even to the humblest. The general terms of the comparison between the best Gothic art and the German maintain themselves as before when we enter the interior of the Court. The works of Adam Krafft, which belong to the fifteenth century, although extraordinary for skill, display a homely coarseness almost ludicrous. The characteristics of Krafft, and to some extent of the German school generally, are not without an affinity to those of Rubens, remote as are the tendencies of Gothi- cism and of that kingly painter; the like mastery and evident pride in the means, the like plenitude of life, and the like fidelity to any kind of nature, which degenerates into untruth to the kind required for the subject. The writer who of all men is entitled to have an opinion on the matter, Ruskin, specifies ‘ the characteristic or moral elements of Gothic,’ in the order of their importance, as savageness, changefulness, naturalism, grotesqueness, rigid- ity, redundance ; and the outward form of the architecture he calls ‘ foliated architecture, which uses the pointed arch AS REPRESENTED IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 87 for the roof proper and the gable for the roof-mask.’ We may well be contented to study the definition, and leave it as we find it ; but, if these ‘ six lamps’ of the Gothic archi- tecture are feasibly reducible under one head, we would be disposed to suggest the term 4 spiritual and vital energy — aspiration.’ THE RENAISSANCE. Art had been Gothic all over Europe for nearly two centuries, when Italy, one of the last to adopt the principle in its entirety, became the first to revolt from it. The predilection for antiquity, natural in a land of antiquities and never utterly worsted, began to assert itself more and more definitely; and the Revival or Renaissance supervened. Revival of what ? of antique art modernized, or of modern art antiquated? The upholders of the Renaissance make it a point to note that a remarkable degree of naturalism distinguished the movement. The question is one whose rationale deserves to be examined. A noble spirit of art includes two essentials — lofty con- ception, and the love of nature. Both principles may co- exist with either an early or an advanced stage of executive power. In the former case, the lofty conception will be fully stamped upon the work ; the love of nature, unable to express itself in perfect form, will appear as simplicity and individuality in the larger features, and in details will manifest some peculiar predilection in the artist. A minute point will be elaborated, not just because the artist has seen 88 THE EPOCHS OF ART it and can render it perfectly, but because he takes especial delight in it, and would linger over it and communicate his pleasure to others. When the spirit of art is thoroughly noble, and the execution advanced, everything takes its place. Giotto may be cited as an exemplar of the first state, and Leonardo of the second. But, if the execution is advanced without a noble spirit to work up to, the means supersede the end. Conventionalism moulds the conception, and the love of nature degenerates into mere mastery over matter-of-fact. The artist crowds points without reference to a whole. He prides himself upon executing well what were better not executed at all; what is neither endowed with adequate value in itself nor consecrated by his own predilection, but simply that which he knows he can do so as to surprise others. By the end of the fourteenth century, Italy knew so much about execution and so much about antiquity as to become dissatisfied with Gothic art — c above’ it. Turning out better specimens of sustained workmanship than before, she imagined that she was producing more excellent works of art ; and into labours still essentially Gothic in sentiment and character she thrust classic or bastard-classic details of architecture, costume, and accessory. Few things are less rigidly defensible than the jumble of such details which became the ornamentation of her productions. But ‘ there were giants in those days’ — a Ghiberti, a Donatello, a Luca della Robbia, a Verrocchio ; men who would have been great at any time, and who, born into that time and feeling them- selves superior to systems, wrestled with the system of their day. For be it remembered that it was then more con- ventional to be formally Gothic than to be Classic, as it is the reverse now ; and that, when we of the present are content to bring up the humble rear of the movement which AS REPRESENTED IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 89 they began, we are just, what they refused to be, the bonds- men of precedent. Nor be it forgotten that those men were the outcome not of Classicism but of Gothicism ; divided, indeed, in their allegiance, but nurtured by the latter into that independent mind which borrowed shape only and not essence from the former. If they, however, and such as they, stand great in individual dignity, the spirit which fostered the Renaissance movement in smaller men claims no equal honour from us. It was the spirit which whitens the sepulchre full of dead men’s bones within — which loves rapid ease more than patient energy. The Renaissance men perceived that the ancients had known more in various respects than their own immediate predecessors; and, setting a higher value on this than on the thought and feeling of the Gothic period, they found it more congenial, as well as easier, to reintroduce points of Classicism than to invent new things in Gothicism. They preferred facility to invention, and 6 naturalism’ to nature. That there is great naturalism in the works of the earlier Renaissance is true ; but it is a kind of Flemish naturalism : not that which makes its Virgin and its Infant Saviour the Blessed among women and the Word become flesh, but that which makes them a woman and a boy; not that which makes its angel a pure creature bearing the message of God, but that which makes him a man with manlier limbs and more birdlike wings. Reverence and faith went out, and artifice came in : but artifice is not art. As the movement progressed, the gods and goddesses were revived more and more : in itself a palpable falling-off from the themes on which the earlier art had delighted solemnly to dwell, and still more palpable from the spirit in which it was carried out. The antique mythology of the Renaissance is mainly a mythology of prurient men and women with 9 o THE EPOCHS OF ART names once venerable in Greece — skeletons to reclothe with flesh, but not with divinity. Barring their few greatest men, whose strength upheld a whole edifice of dilettantism, the Revivalists had no ghost to conjure up, but only a body to unearth. Christians became Pagans in art, and showed, by the lowering which Paganism underwent at their hands from its own ideal, that it was dead past cure. Renaissance ornamentation is frittered and frivolous ; often wonderfully executed, not seldom possessing details of refined grace, rarely displaying a beautiful, still more rarely a reasonable and consistent, whole. It gives eruptions and showers of bright minutiae, like a show of fireworks ; lavishes vain elegances, relieves them with cumbrous ob- trusions, and means well-nigh nothing. A good deal of the ornament in the Renaissance Court is pleasing, but profit- less ; in the Italian Court its later Raphaelesque stage is displayed, — less pleasing, as it appears to us, and as a whole equally unmeaning and incongruous. However objectionable may be the spirit of Renaissance art and ornament in so far as it derives from the Renaissance merely, no Court in the Crystal Palace boasts works of nobler excellence than this individually. The Singers of Luca della Robbia — not to refer to other examples — is one of the completest designs in existence; exquisite in its grace, as full of impulsive and simple nature as of poetic feeling, and in a spirit elevated to exactly the right point for such a subject. As a model of style it is unsurpassed. The sculptures from the Certosa, representing incidents from the life of St. Ambrose and in the building of the Certosa itself, are eminently characteristic, and approach very closely to Gothic manner. Ghiberti’s gate, which has exhausted the homage of Europe, it were idle to praise, insolent to criticize, in a sentence. Verrocchio’s magnificent equestrian statue AS REPRESENTED IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 9 1 of Bartolommeo Colleone, powerful as a Titan, severe as death, lionlike and stupendous, is what Ruskin terms it, one of the noblest works in the world. For the sublimity of towering energy and fierce will nothing in the Crystal Palace competes with it. The Elizabethan Court forms an interval between the Renaissance Court and the Italian. In entire buildings of this style there is a manorial aspect dear to English eyes, which claim it as their country’s own; but the details, such as those selected for the Crystal Palace, are ugly and distorted. The Italian Court carries us forward through the great day of Michael Angelo to the effete day of Bernini. The wonder- ful Bacchus, a creation greater than- any antique precedent, stands outside the court; within are the mighty mystic Dawn and Twilight of the Lorenzo monument, and the Light and Night of Giuliano’s. Buonarroti’s genius had perhaps little in it of the sacred, one of whose first requisites is what the Germans call selbsttodtung or self-annihilation : it was incarnate rather of enormous ambition, irrepressible effort, which marched on conquering and to conquer. He scaled peak after peak of intellectual achievement, and held them in his own right rather than as the vassal of a higher power. Yet the Virgin and Child from the Medici Chapel realizes in the most noble manner the conception of the ‘ Mater venerabilis, Mater pia.’ We do not know anything else from Michael Angelo’s hand so sacred as the head of the Blessed Mother. Phrenologists recognize a distinction between the qualities of self-esteem and love of approbation — assigning the nobler function to the first, and the ignobler to the second. The temper of which these are two varying modes was an essential of the Renaissance movement. It may be called acute 92 THE EPOCHS OF ART. self-consciousness. With the great men, it took the form of strong individual quality, the effort at superiority with some- thing of vain-glory, a versatile exercise of faculty, and an impatience of fetters unless self-imposed. With the small men, it displayed itself in trick, bravura, imitation of ap- proved models, less through a spirit of manly reverence than of fashion and the appetence for repute ; or, on the other hand, in a rage for novelty. With both it tended to place the art before the object of art — the painter, architect, or sculptor, before nature ; and, when the emancipation of executive power had culminated, it left conception sterile, and sank deeper and deeper into convention, vanity, and falsehood. IV. THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. PARIS, 1855. Grand displays of universal industry, such as that of which England gave the example in 1851, and that which has now made Paris the centre of attraction, may be expected to recur more frequently than collections of fine art organized on the enormous scale of the one which completed the circle of human endeavour represented in the French Ex- hibition, and whose memory will long continue to render that illustrious. In our glance at the contents, we shall endeavour to elicit some standard of art, and to characterize the several schools in their varying relation to it; to ascertain their point of contact; and to take a lesson from the mighty show. First, the statistics merit a word of comment. France contributes 2628 works, of which 1832 are paintings; England 783, a number exceeding by about 150 that of all the German states collectively. Belgium comes next with 251. Turkey is the smallest contributor, being re- presented by 1 painting and 2 architectural subjects. As regards France, it is not to be forgotten, whether we look to the quantity or to the quality of her productions, that 94 THE international exhibitions of art. she stands here in an exceptional position. Other nations have drawn upon their previous stores ; France sends not only the approved works of her past, but those, yet untested, of the present, — the annual exhibitions of 1854 and 1855 being merged into this Great Exhibition. Hence a first appearance of artistic fertility altogether disproportionate to that of other countries — greater even than the really vast activity of the nation in this line, or the other circumstances of the competition, would account for; and hence also, it may be, a more miscellaneous assemblage than the French would have desired to get together as examples of their mature powers. On this latter point, however, the candid observer will admit either that extreme stringency must have been exercised in the exclusion of mediocre works from the section pertaining to the last two years, or that the average of French talent is far ahead of that of other nations : and, without discrediting the first cause, we believe that the second has been quite as potent in its operation. Herein, indeed, appears to us to lie the great distinction of French art from the rest — it is beyond rivalry the most competent. The average French artist is a highly efficient man, and not a blunderer like the average artist of other countries. He may not intrinsically be any better than his neighbours — may not boast any more imagination, or fancy, or invention, or feeling, or elevation, or understanding of nature ; but he knows himself and his profession better. He has, in the first place, a distinct apprehension of what it is that he aims at doing : whether history, genre, land- scape, or animal life, his subject at once assumes shape, consistency, and intelligibility. As for the means of realiz- ing what he wants, he has them at his fingers’ ends. The result may be, and mostly is, cold, violent, affected, or even offensive ; but it is seldom downright stupid or incapable. THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 95 Often a failure in regard to its subject, the work is not a failure in regard to the artist’s conception of the subject; as far as he has seen into that, he enables others to see it through his rendering. What he knows, that he performs. However much his energies may in the abstract have been misdirected, they have still, in a limited view of immediate cause and effect, been judiciously husbanded and applied ; for the upshot is on the whole what he intended it to be. According to this view, the French school must be pro- nounced the leading technical school of Europe at the present day ; and that conclusion we feel no hesitation in adopting. There is such an organization among the French, such clearness, readiness, and activity, such familiarity with old forms and methods, and such ease in applying the knowledge to the production of works of whatever scale or character, as to place the nation at the head of art con- sidered in the light of a system of processes and expedients. An accepted dictum among English artists is the insensi- bility of the French to grace of execution. The technical mastery is admitted ; but it is held to be displayed without feeling or subtlety, without that delight which lingers over the task, and dwells with kindness upon its delicacies and minuter passages. There is truth in the censure, although it has been applied more broadly than the facts will warrant. It is rather to the confessed grandees of the French historical school, men who belong in some measure to the past, that the objection reaches, than to the younger schools of land- scape or cabinet subjects. Breadth, however, is undoubtedly one main quality of the French art, to which hardly any of its approved practitioners fail to direct their study. Breadth, one may readily concede, is more conspicuous throughout the school than fineness of execution, — a sombre, close, confined tone of colour, more than air, fancy, or brilliancy; g6 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. and, while eminent skill exists in characterizing whatever object may be represented, a certain uniform handling, often flat and heavy and regardless of texture, is to be regretted. Admitting therefore, and for the moment even without reservation, that the French is not a school of executive beauty, we have to consider how far such an admission is compatible with the leadership of technical excellence which we claim for it. At first sight, it should appear that the eminently technical school must be the eminently executive as a consequence : and so it is in efficiency, but not in tone and scope. The technical ability, being possessed in rich measure, is used as a means, not cherished as an aim ; it is wielded with precision, sureness, and quickness, not elaborated with affection and ingenious pleasure; and, having served its turn as a method of ex- pression, it is laid aside at the point where its intrinsic virtues would make it delightful for its own sake. And here we come to the paramount question, c What is the essence and legitimate function of formative and pictorial art? 5 Acknowledging in its fullest sense the axiom that the greatest artist is he who embodies the greatest ideas, we have still to ask, What are those ideas to be? We would answer — Ideas of form, colour, and expression. The man who has observed most in visible nature, who has the most deeply and nobly felt what he has observed, and renders that with the most exquisite and absolute intensity, he is the greatest man in high art. This no teaching, no learning, from any so-called school of art, can supply. It is based only on the most single-hearted devotion to nature, and comes straight from the inmost vitals of her explorer; it constitutes his very being, perception, and self. And thus a head or a drapery of Titian, a sky of Turner, a tint of Giorgione, or a stone surface of Veronese, a background of Durer or THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 97 a foreground of Van Eyck, a contour of Phidias, or an expression of Giotto, Angelico, or Raphael, is more com- pletely and perfectly high art than the best-invented and best-told story of an Italian or French master, or all the philosophy of history and religion which a modern German, much seeking and much cogitating, promulgates in strict form and chastised colour ex cathedra. Fine art is the profound perception of a visible truth communicated by the percipient ; and the invention which forms its highest ele- ment unites the perceiving faculty so intimately with the conceiving that it may almost be termed the directest and acutest act of perception — possible in its fulness to how few men, one here and one there, in a generation ! It is on these grounds that we regard the English school as a true and a hopeful one — the most hopeful in Europe in reference to its future possibilities. Of invention, indeed, it has little to boast ; of systematized knowledge, little. But, of all existing schools, it is the most open to new impres- sions — the most free in receiving, the least fettered by dogma or preconception in applying, them. Small in sphere, loose in manner, unintellectual in tendency, it yet maintains a certain independence, and looks round, not through authorized spectacles, but with clear eyes. It is, on the whole, unsectarian, and willing to trust its own impulses, and to learn of nature through the eye rather than receive traditions of her through the ear. It would rather, generally speaking, not construct theories of form or colour, but paint as it sees — often feebly, often negligently, but still not perversely. And the result makes itself mani- festly apparent in the Paris Exhibition ; where to pass from the Germanic and French schools to the British is to pass from dim woolliness or smoothness, and from louring half-tint, to something that hints of air, daylight, and emancipation. H 98 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. These, in fact— the French, the German, and the English — constitute the three great divisions of living art, to one or other of which all the contributing nations may broadly be assigned. France, supreme above all followers, leads Bel- gium, Spain, Italy. The art of the United States is mongrel, that of the Netherlands little beyond the drains of its past peculiar eminence : but they lean to France rather than to either of the other countries. The French school has two main branches, the historic and the picturesque ; the first distinguished by reflective power and comprehensive ability, the second by breadth, vigour, movement, and a striking grasp of effects realized with the minimum of labour. In its special quality of picturesqueness it is altogether un- rivalled, and any British works to which that attribute may be ascribed seem child’s-play and mummery in comparison. Germany, herself composed of so many distinct states, has her following in Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, and Nor- way ; although some of the best works, especially from the two latter countries, exhibit more of the French influence. Her characteristics are intellectual effort, and observation in domestic life; both, however, developed under conditions rather negative than otherwise in an artistic sense. England stands alone, a power, but without satellites; the nearest approach to a literal resemblance to her being perhaps observable where one would hardly have expected it — in the tone of Spanish colouring ; which, in the untempered clearness of some of its specimens, possesses a certain superficial look of the British principle. Spite, however, of national differences and the hindrance of academic tradition and example, there appears a common and growing tendency in the entire aggregate of the schools. This tendency is distinctly towards Realism — as the thing, less easily defined than apprehended, is now called in THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 99 France. It takes the special form, in France, of singular vigour and massive breadth ; earnest observation and rapid seizing of natural effects in landscape ; motion, power, and animal impulse, in man-life and brute-life ; to which is added, in extreme instances, a preference of subjects ordinary even to insignificance, and an obvious avoidance of accepted rules of composition. In England, the Praeraphaelite move- ment need but be named. In Germany, the movement likewise so-called Prseraphaelite has taken a quite different direction ; but here too some share in a similar influence is indicated, though more faintly, in a frequently overdone introduction of detail, together with the truthfulness and good humour which, somewhat chilly as they may be, dis- tinguish the domestic scenes. In the shifting diorama of artistic style, the eye soon gets disused to the form which passes, and used to the form which succeeds. But for this, an exhibition-room of the present day would be an object of genuine wonderment. Since art was art, the aim which now exists of representing natural facts, both in their general effect on the eye and also in their literal minutenesses, has not had a precedent. The ancients, as far as we can gather, scarcely represented effects at all, but only objects or personages — and even these in the main, it is to be inferred, with something of the same largeness and ideal character in painting as in their sculptured works. The mediaevals dwelt tenderly on a few effects, and, in some schools, minutely on a multi- plicity of objects; but the union of the two was hardly attempted, and never realized. The moderns have experi- mented progressively on effects, and dealt with objects on the large scale, but scarcely at the same time with their minutenesses — a Dutchman here and there plodding through the minutenesses, but mainly with a technical aim, and IOO THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. missing the effects and the natural balance and keeping. Now it is naturalism in its entire gamut — the French and its allied schools running the race side by side with the British in this respect, though it is to the British more especially that we owe the realization of the effect through its minute details. We may indeed trace back as far as to Rubens the first impulse given in this direction of the union of effects with details — one would not, in his case, say with minutenesses ; but the predominant tone of a con- temporary exhibition is so different from the Rubens aim in art that we need not here pause to enlarge on the particulars. The first impression produced upon the mind by an art-collection so vast as this of Paris is one chiefly of be- wilderment. Gradually that subsides. Countries which you hardly knew as occupying any station in art succeed each other, — none, or scarcely any, altogether without merit, some displaying even a high degree of technical attainment ; the greater lights come before you, full of endeavour, of talent, of novelty, or what strikes at first as novelty through being at all events less familiar than the form of art subsist- ing at home. How huge an amount of human toil, aspira- tion, ability, and observation, is represented by these works ! You feel tolerant — liberal : faults indeed and shortcomings abound, but almost everything has its worth, expresses something clearly, strongly, or agreeably, and claims con- sideration for one reason or another. This mood also changes. The first things that become absolutely insuffer- able are pretentious religious or historical works : smooth landscapes, commonplace subjects from life, French clever- ness and display, German hardness and quietism, English emptiness and namby-pamby, follow in their wake at a rapidly increasing rate. Then arises the question — These THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. IOI roods and acres of painted canvass, these tons of chipped stone, what is to become of them? Does the world want them ? How long will it endure to give them warehouse- room? New scores year by year enter upon the pursuit of art ; paint pictures, carve statues, gain prizes, win applause, realize money — but to what use ? What does it all mean — these brawny fighting men, these nymphs of a dead my- thology, green trees, foolish conceits, pruriences, and make- believes ? Before you have got half way through the exhibition, tolerance is clean gone. You perceive with sufficient dis- tinctness that a clever fellow, if he is nothing more than that, has no title whatever to perpetuate his cleverness on canvass or in stone. The inevitable and salutary necessity becomes palpable that an enormous amount of talent applied to art, unless highly original, singularly complete, or re- ligiously faithful, should die into oblivion generation after generation. Such is one chief lesson of the Palais des Beaux Arts. You rest in the conviction that third-rate art is an unmitigated nuisance ; and are more than half-minded to include the second-rate in the same verdict. But the first-rate and the strikingly individual shine forth more and more richly as the others sink. We proceed to pick out some salient examples, com- mencing with the richly-filled French department ; in which we may find it convenient to maintain our distinction between the historic and picturesque schools. Among all living painters, the most complete type of the historic school is Paul Delaroche ; not only on account of his personal eminence, but also because of the definiteness with which he embodies the tendencies of the school, and the leadership he exercises over others. Next to him in the strictly historic ranks, Ary Scheffer is probably the best known 102 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. on this side of the Channel. Neither of these, however, exhibits. In their stead we have lavish contributions from Ingres, Vernet, and Delacroix; the latter of whom, as being the leader of the Romanticists, we shall speak of among the picturesque artists, historical as many of his subjects are. In the course of a tolerably long life, M. Ingres has been a devoted but by no means a prolific painter ; and the visitor to Paris, who has before him forty-one of the master’s pic- tures in a room where nothing else intrudes, sees probably all his masterpieces, and more than half of his finished works. There is much of puzzling and contradictory about Ingres ; much also so individual as to take him at once out of the rank of artists whom it is possible to classify, and place him on an undisputed standing-point of his own. Starting from the studio of David, he has never entirely cast off the coldness and conventionality of the pseudo-classic; and the beholder may turn with enthusiasm from one of the greatest works of the period to find that its author is charge- able with one of the most ordinary. Ilis latest pictures, 4 the Virgin of the Host’ and 4 J oan of Arc,’ are unfortunately of this sort. Another is a perfectly commonplace allegory of 4 The Apotheosis of the Emperor Napoleon I.: He is conducted on a chariot to the temple of Glory and Immor- tality ; Fame crowns him, and Victory directs the horses ; France regrets him; Nemesis, the goddess of vengeance, overthrows Anarchy.’ But these and such as these we gladly leave for works of a very different stamp. Abstract purity of form is one great quality in Ingres’s fine pictures ; and in fact their chief and most abiding charm may be said to consist in the abstract feeling which one perceives to imbue the entire performance. The painter, it is evident, has some standard which he aims at attaining : you analyze and admire, and feel that, after all done and said, there is THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 103 something more than you can define. The two small works of ‘Pope Pius the Seventh tenant chapelle’ fill the mind and eye surprisingly— so profoundly are they characterized by the sentiment of church authority and ceremonial. Sometimes a subject unimpressive in itself appears to be chosen as representative of a period of history; and we know nothing in art that seems to come more truly out of the mailclad middle age than ‘King Charles the Fifth re- turning to Paris, and receiving the Provost and Sheriffs’; nothing more encrusted with the spirit of court honour and aristocratic exclusiveness than ‘Philip the Fifth, King of Spain, bestowing the order of the Golden Fleece on Marshal de Berwick after the battle of Almanza.’ At the same time, all in these is simple and matter-of-fact. So also the ‘ Ruggero rescuing Angelica from the sea monster’ is something far more than an illustration of Ariosto : it contains the essence of chivalric romance, although under a form so studiously simple and elemental that one hesitates to say where. In the ‘Birth of Venus Anadyomene,’ the ‘Odalisque,’ and the ‘Recumbent Odalisque,’ the exquisitely tender delicacy of the flesh and contours, the placid regularity of the features, with an expression as it were of inward delight in their own beauty, are equally abstract, and avail to give high rank to works which in other hands would be earthy and might even be gross. The portraits are wonderful embodiments of permanent character, not of momentary expression ; and among these the full-length of Napoleon when First Consul is certainly the most interesting and noble record of the man we are acquainted with. Ingres is reported to despise colour in his devotion to form; but there appears to be some misapprehension or great exaggeration in this rumour. His colour, like his form, has an abstract quality, and it sometimes lapses into coldness and even crudeness ; but 104 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. it is markedly pure and clear. In some pictures, such as the Venus, the effect depends as much on the absolute sweetness and serenity of the colour as on anything else. We regard it as not the least sign of Ingres’s genius that he is a fascinating as well as an unequal painter. While some remain deaf to his charming, others feel his influence more acutely than they can give a reason for, and are content to yield themselves to it, persuaded that he is not a man the secret of whose works can be gained by picking them to pieces. If there is something intangible and recondite about Ingres, we find quite the reverse principle when we step into Horace Vernet’s room; where the enormous ‘Sinaia’ from Versailles, the ‘Judith and Holofernes,’ and several other renowned examples, are collected. Of all painters, none is more unalterably positivist than Vernet; everything which he does is rendered and finished exactly as far as is needful for giving with rapidity and vigour a look of the reality, and nothing in the least beyond this. Perhaps there never was an artist of equal power and eminence who, without giving into negligence or coarseness, cared so little for the means of art, who manifested so little value for abstract properties of form or colour, or felt less inclined to go one hair’s breadth out of his way to satisfy what it is the fashion to call the aesthetic feelings, after once obtaining the essential requisites for presenting his subject clearly and effectively. We do not feel it an exaggeration to say that, spite of extraordinary skill at realization in every stroke of the brush — spite of life, movement, endless power of com- bination and knowledge of expression- — there is not one passage of beautiful execution in the large number of huge pictures which Vernet has here assembled. Everything is done with an immediately practical aim, by a brain and THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 105 a hand which act with the force and certainty of a steam- engine : the painter seems to be a machine for seeing and painting battle-pieces, hunting-pieces, and Arabized scrip- ture-pieces. The works are destitute of the feeling for art itself, as exemplified in beauty of colour and general treat- ment, richly as Vernet is endowed with the genius and means requisite for strict realization ; and the effect, though great and certain upon all men, is not of a lofty kind. It can scarcely be too often enforced that fine art must not be used as a vehicle of mere representation, such as the language of a newspaper-report ; but must indicate, on the part of the artist, a love and reverence for Nature, in the form, colour, and expression, wherewith she clothes every visible fact, as well as the ability to convey his own meaning distinctly. Failing in this, the work may present a clear narrative, and often a striking one, but it lacks the one quality which entitles a man to embody that narrative in form and colour instead of words. He is at best qualified to sketch ; and the same impassable distance yawns between his work and the complete art of picture or of statue as between prose and poetry in words. Vernet’s admirable gifts, far as they go to atone for deficiencies, must not make us forget these considerations. Neither does he stand alone, although the foremost man of his class ; there are other French historical painters, and of high distinction, who, differing altogether from him in other respects, share his deficiency. The name of Leon Cogniet is chiefly known by the two pictures now in the Palais des Beaux Arts — ‘ The Massacre of the Innocents , 5 and ‘ Tintoret painting from his dead Daughter . 5 The first is decidedly one of the most condensed and complete expressions which the subject has received from art : a young mother, huddled in the angle of a wall, tries to stifle her child’s crying, and 106 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. save him from the notice of the slaughterers, who are ad- vancing towards where she crouches. But the work stops short at telling its story well ; that is its whole and sole title to admiration as a work of art. Robert-Fleury again, like Cogniet, with all his fine technical knowledge and mastery, is rather a clear and able expositor than a born painter. His colour is hot and dirty, and of course disagreeable in consequence. He has a fine power of expression, however, — though still of what we have termed the positivist order. This is seen in his best picture here, 6 The Colloquy of Poissy in 1561’. A pupil of this eminent artist, of whom high things may confidently be predicted, and who tends more to combine with his master’s the merits of the pictu- resque school, is M. Comte ; who realizes to the life, in its ghastly hypocrisy and vivid couleur locale , the 4 Meeting of Henry the Third and the Duke of Guise’ prior to receiving the Communion together on the 2nd December 1588, the day preceding that on which Guise was assassinated by the King’s order. A remarkable series, strongly marked by the generic character of French historic art, is that of eighteen cartoons by M. Chenavard for works destined to adorn the Pantheon. They begin with a 4 Philosophy of History,’ and with Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, treated chiefly from suggestions in Dante, and pass on to subjects of the Roman period ending with Augustus, and of the Christian period ending with Louis the Fourteenth ; an historic parallel not without its element of grim satire, intentional or otherwise. They are distinguished by the fine broad study and hard-won knowledge of the French school, and by a grave clearness in the telling of the story. In beauty and in spontaneity they are somewhat deficient; but, on the whole, they furnish a standard example of the French historic system, THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 107 — showing its distinctive qualities, and how advantageously these can be applied by a man of ability and thought with- out imagination. Another series of cartoons, in a grand style of model-drawing, and daring in the vigour of their design, is Rage, Lust, Avarice, Gluttony, Envy, Idleness, and Pride, after Dante, by M. Yvon. The same artist’s enormous oil-picture of 6 Marshal Ney heading the Rear- guard of the Grand Army in the Retreat from Russia’ is one of those nightmare displays of physical energy and horror which the French painters affect, and in which the Englishman scarcely knows whether most to wonder at the display of force, or reprobate the unalloyed and valueless monstrosity. Ary Scheffer, as we have said, does not exhibit; but a picture from Henri Scheffer (his brother) represents the school, and the special section of it to which the absentee belongs, with as much dignity as almost any of his own productions. This work is the 4 Vision of Charles the Ninth’; who, haunted by the ghosts of his victims of St. Bartholomew’s Day, is represented alone in his chamber, groping on his knees in the agony of horror, and clutch- ing ivith one hand at the hangings of the wall, while the other holds out an unavailing crucifix. Ilis face is averted, with starting eyes and bristling hair ; but still the vision is before him — a vision of old men and young, women and children, with faces serene but pale and rigid in death, who, passionlessly accusing, with no gesture or mien of menace, but silent messengers of retributive doom, point to their bloody wounds. There is an awful quiet in this part of the picture. At the first moment it scarcely suggests itself to the eye that the figures are other than living flesh and blood. This is a daring but a justifiable and even admirable idea ; for the ultimate impression on the beholder is not 108 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. the more material, while the artist more fully enforces the terrible reality of the vision to the eyes of the appalled King. Judging from this work, although the others from the same hand do not present any corresponding height of excellence, we should say that the reputation of Henri Scheffer does not bear any fair proportion to that of his brother. The picturesque school of French painting may be con- sidered to include all that is much worth looking at in the nation’s art beyond the pale of the severer historic school. Of French genre pictures, and landscapes, and animal-pieces, enough and to spare are not good ; but, among those that are, the great majority strike at once by conspicuous and generic picturesqueness, — a quality which the reader will have much less difficulty in understanding than critics ex- perience in defining it. Eugene Delacroix has rendered himself one of the leaders of European art by carrying the picturesque style to its acme in application to historical subjects. Nor these alone has he treated, but subjects of all kinds; as a running selection from the thirty-six examples in the French ex- hibition will show. We find there ‘ Christ in the Garden of Olivet’; * Christ on the Cross’; ‘The Sibyl’; ‘Medea In- furiate’; ‘Dante and Virgil, conducted by Phlegyas, traverse the lake surrounding the Infernal City of Dis’; ‘ The Justice of Trajan’; ‘The Emperor Justinian composing his Laws’; ‘The Taking of Constantinople by the Crusaders’; ‘The Execution of Marino Faliero’; ‘Scene in the Massacre of Scio’; ‘The 28th July 1830’; ‘Combat of the Giaour and the Pasha’; ‘Algerian Women in their Apartment’; ‘The Convulsionists of Tangiers’; ‘Romeo and Juliet’; ‘A Lion Hunt’; ‘Head of an Old Woman’; ‘Flowers and Fruit.’ Religion, history, poetry, romance, drama, legend, still-life, THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 109 wild sports, national manners, public events of the day, are all laid under contribution. All are moulded by a wild magnificent energy, which courts difficulties and laughs them to scorn, delights in pomp and in rags, chivalry and barbarism, tears and blood, whirlpools of confusion, passion intensified to delirium and action to distortion ; an energy which pierces to the heart of the subject, seizes it as a whole, and never pauses till every corner of it has been stamped with the spirit which is its life. For this result the artist’s means are various and arbitrary. He commands a knowledge of form and action apparently derived from indefatigable early study, and which now seems to be used almost, often quite, independently of immediate reference to nature ; the faculty of a true colourist, whose colour is not seldom condemnable ; a vigour of handling whose very excess frequently sinks it into insipidity ; and a power of thought at once raised and enthralled by extreme suscepti- bility to the romantic. To talk of the originality of Delacroix is a commonplace. His faculties are of that order to which small successes, calmness, or a rapt contem- plation and intelligence of minute beauty, are impossible. He challenges Nature rather than worships her; and from such a man Nature guards jealously that loveliness which the humbler-minded find the least occult. The consequence is obvious : where Delacroix fails, which he does at least once to every success, he fails egregiously and perversely ; and when he attempts the beauty of a simple subject or such matter as still-life, he ‘ lies in cold obstruction.’ His genius, moreover, has nothing of the sacred ; and such very limited attainment as may be recognized in his religious subjects resides wholly in the qualities of passion and ima- gination common to his other themes. Delacroix may be called a French Rubens of the nineteenth century. For no THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. the spurious mythological feeling he substitutes the feeling of chivalry and romance— genuine, though pertaining to the past; for the lumbering hugeness of the Fleming he sub- stitutes the Frenchman’s suppleness, and the rude health of the seventeenth century is 6 sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’ in the nineteenth. But to both painters belong the exultant energy of life and motion, the prodigal ex- uberance, the large capacity for entering into all phases of human life, and obtuseness as to the limits within which that capacity, unhallowed by awful reverence, can be ex- ercised. As colourists also their resemblance partly holds ; Rubens has more of amenity, Delacroix of depth; both affect variegation and brightness of tint. We cannot part from Delacroix without dwelling, though for a moment, on a few pictures individually. The 4 Execu- tion of Faliero,’ however rapid and even careless may probably have been the mode of its production, ranks among the wonderful achievements of art of whatever period— gorgeous, terrible, and epic. In this and other works the master shows the same faculty that we noted in Ingres of embodying an sera of history in a moment : here the subtle, exalted, and merciless aristocracy of Venice, grown into a caste, incapable of further development, and fated, through epochs of crime and splendid debasement, to live itself out to extinction, stands before us. Less intellectual, but not less intense, is the murder of ‘The Bishop of Liege’ by William de la Marck, as described in Quentin Durward . The riotous and bloody debauch, the crowd and turmoil with flashes of lamp-light on the mailed limbs, the doomed bishop brought to the slaughterhouse in his episcopal robes, are rendered with fearful vigour : and similar qualities are displayed in the sketch of ‘ Boissy Danglas’ menaced by the mob in the National Convention. THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. Ill c Tasso in Prison/ seated in dejection while madmen are about him gibbering, is replete with dire reality. These four are small works, but none are more vital with the peculiar genius of Delacroix. Among the large canvasses, we may single out the renowned subject of Dante and Virgil, from the Luxembourg; the c Taking of Constanti- nople by the Crusaders/ with its yet half-barbaric chivalry, the heirs of sea-kings and Norman devastators ; the 4 Death of Charles the Rash at the Battle of Nancy’ — a mighty battle-piece ; and the 6 Algerian Women in their Apartment.’ The background to the Constantinople picture has some- thing of the old-world truth of Van Eyck, and is one of the most beautiful matters of detail that linger along the burning track of vehement Delacroix. One might think that Delacroix went far enough as a professor of the picturesque principle; but its extreme incarnation is Decamps. This painter’s many fine gifts in colour, character, manipulation, invention, or chiaroscuro, may all be summed up in the word picturesque. His figures run out of the canvass ; he affects arid landscapes, compositions of consummate skill broken by some abrupt eccentricity, lurid sunlights, white light bounded by shadow impenetrably black, and all that is most recherche in singu- larity or abandon of costume. Orientalism is his special province. Pie may exaggerate for effect; but he does it legitimately to make his own style of art supreme, and he never sinks into mere extravagance or grimace. The nine designs from the history of Samson, much as they lose of resource by being mere crayon drawings, are amazing in savage sombre strength. It is laughable to note that this tearing Orson has come out of the studio of M. Abel de Pujol, the most sheepish of tame allegorists and members of the Institute. 1 1 2 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. Courbet is another representative man of the school; but so exalt'e that, shooting out of sight of such painters as might be called his colleagues, he represents little except himself and his direct imitators. His 6 Burial at Ornans,’ exhibited in 1850, created that amount of noise, abuse, and disputation, which is immediate fame; and he has since occupied in France, as the apostle of 6 Realism/ a position somewhat analogous to that of the Prseraphaelites in England. Admiring Courbet as we heartily do, both from sympathy with the movement which he belongs to and on compulsion from his own force, we cannot admit the analogy, however, without very serious restrictions. Actual resem- blance in method there is none whatever : the Frenchman is the roughest of the rough, the Englishmen the most ex- quisite of the elaborated. The first paints with a scrubbing- brush clotted with coarse paint and chalk-grits ; the second, with a fine camel’s hair dipped in the choicest and purest tints of the palette. A more radical difference even is in the mode of looking at nature, and the conception of the thing to be achieved. Courbet seems to think that what- ever he sees is what he ought to paint; he never invents a subject, but copies a fact. 4 The Stone-breakers’ is a couple of men breaking stones, painted on a large scale broadly ; and absolutely nothing more. 6 The Young Village Ladies’ is a conversation of these damsels with a peasant- girl in a mountain valley ; a dog beside the ladies, and two cows beyond the intersecting stream. The merit of the picture is great; but it is nothing beyond the merit of literality — the colour not even truthful. ‘ The Meeting’ is Courbet, on a hot day, walking a dusty country-road in his shirt-sleeves, with sturdy staff and slung knapsack, who meets two acquaintances, one red-bearded, one a prosaic bourgeois-looking personage. It is just as any one might THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. II3 see the unexciting incident, provided he looked merely to broad features and overlooked the details. Next come ‘The Wheat-Sifters,’ ‘The Spinner,’ and so on; the title containing literally the entire subject of the picture, and the details being so generalized as to add little or nothing to it. A head of ‘A Spanish Lady,’ however, and ‘The Dix-Heures Rock, Loue Valley,’ are admirable pieces of dashing sparkling colour, — the former steeped in national character and supple abandon ; the latter a glorious snatch of landscape, as real as stones and grass, of which Anthony might be proud. In most of the pictures the colour is low and chalky, yet dignified ; the appreciation of general natural effects is correct; and the look of accessories is given, however flat and hurried. Composition is not only neglected, but evidently eschewed ; a point which shows only a half-grasp of Realism, as Nature, in her most casual combinations, is generally striking and peculiar, and abhors straight rows of heads or figures almost as much as an eternal pyramidal composition or the waviness of a Cor- reggio. Courbet, by his portraits and his works, seems to us a jolly, careless, pipe-smoking French painter; a man of enormous vigour, ease, and will ; hard-headed also and able, but by no means thoughtful. He sees as far into a mill- stone as another man — and no further; and is honest enough to paint, with a rough and ready freedom, exactly what he sees. But it never seems to occur to him that real sincerity in art must be exercised first of all in the invention of the subject ; that his function is to translate the sentiment of things as well as to exhibit their conformation; or that love and reverence, far rather than the ‘ hail-fellow-well-met’ spirit, is the true artist’s relation to Nature. The vitality of the English Praeraphaelites consists in their having remem- bered these fundamental truths. With all his shortcomings, 1 1 14 THE international exhibitions of art. however, and what may be called his impenetrable tough- ness, Courbet commands wonder, and merits honour. He appears even to imagine himself possessed of theoretic principles, whereas he really owns, if we read him aright, nothing but eyes and hands ; and, to avoid doing him any unintentional injustice, we subjoin an extract from his own profession of principles. 4 I have studied, apart from any spirit of system and without preconception, the art of the ancients and the art of the moderns To know in order that I might be able to do, such has been my idea. To be qualified to transcribe the manners, the ideas, the aspect, of my time, according to my perception — to be not only a painter, but also a man — in a word, to practise living art — such is my aim . 5 These words are extracted from the catalogue of an exhibition of his collected works which Courbet has opened close to the Palais des Beaux Arts, and which contains his two most remarkable productions — 4 The Burial at Ornans , 5 and 4 The Painter’s Study, a real allegory, terminating a seven-years phase of my artistic life, 5 — painted in the present year. From Gustave Courbet to Jean Louis Hamon is the stride from one pole of art to another ; from a digger’s tent to a lady’s boudoir ; from the clenched fist whose knuckles are yet red with knocking down a bullock, to a long, white, consumptive hand. Hamon is one of the most delicious of idyllic painters ; the most charming of French classicists, the most child-like and child-loving of Parisians. There is just a touch in him of dandyism — which one has scarcely heart to condemn. Pale tints, faces more vaporous than any other part of the picture — a mannerism in which Jobbe- Duval, Picou, and some other painters, share — chaste, white, boneless forms, the nicest delicacy in touch, the most im- peccable taste in accessory — distinguish our gentle Hamon. THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 115 The c Comedy of Human Life/ where Diogenes, Dante, Homer, antique warriors, little children, and modern por- tieres, hover about a Punch-and-Judy show, seems to be rather too infantine for any one to take the trouble of fathoming its shallowness. But then there is the lovely child’s-play idyl, 6 My sister is not at home/ — the sweet quaint composition and innocent feeling of C A Girl in charge of Children.’ Both yield to ‘The Orphans’; which is certainly one of the most placidly lovely among pictures, and somehow, spite or because of its naive treatment, so different from what the common sentimentalist would have chosen, one of the most touching. Two beautiful girls, pale in their tender bloom, with their golden hair and deep mourning, are in a room of the simplest elegance. One is threading her needle ; one has fallen into slumber. Behind her their little brother stands on tiptoe, about to tickle the sleeper with some long grass. There is no mother to kiss him for being mischievous. Futile and inexpressive of its subject as the picture may appear from verbal description, it is quite the reverse in reality; solemn, hushed, and ex- quisitely domestic. Every feature of it marks the last touch of artistic refinement. The' microscopic Meissonnier is another example of wonderful delicacy; a man who elevates a diminutive can- vass, with no subject, into high art by the perfection of his handling. As a colourist, he leaves nothing to complain of, unless sometimes when he a little exceeds his ordinary . allowance of square inches ; but colour is not the strong point. It is the handling and the light and shade; of which a faultless specimen is the picture of ‘ A young man reading at breakfast.’ Meissonnier, however, is too well appreciated to detain us longer. Bida, Thomas, Valerio, and Dehodencq, deserve record Il6 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. as excellent orientalists, following the path pioneered by Decamps ; Janmot, for his series of ‘ The Soul,’ which, with- out much direct invention, shows great artistic ability, in some instances, for conveying a sensation of the mystic and imaginative; and Ricard and Madame O’Connell, as por- trait-painters, — the first refined and penetrative, the second coarse, but sometimes brilliant. Of the French school of landscape we have already spoken in general terms. Its sentiment is in the main solemn, and even gloomy; its style broad, trenchant, and striking ; and it catches effects with singular readiness and power. Its strength, indeed, lies in effects rather than exact rendering; and this system, spite of a very pronounced generic character, preserves strong individuality in the several examples. The school is, on the whole, a noble one ; which Englishmen, addicted to an opposite principle, are far too chary of admitting. Hosts of landscape-painters turn up in the Exhibition, each of whom has studied faith- fully, and reported with vigour and animation; Theodore Rousseau, Aiguier, Leroux, Castelnau, Balleroy, Belly, St. Marcel Cabin, Simon, Tillot, Woets, Dargent, Hervier, Ziem, Lapierre, Trouve, Lambinet, Loubon, Varennes, Lafage, &c. Isabey is the special and recognized professor of the picturesque in landscape, as Decamps in figure-sub- jects. Rosa Bonheur and Jadin are two great names in animal- painting. Jadin, in the specialty of dog-painting, stands, to our apprehension, unparallelled. He seems to work as much in the spirit of a sportsman as of an artist ; so much so that some of his pictures — and one especially where scores of hounds are assembled for the chase — are lettered all over with the names of the distinguished animals. ‘ Tippoo at the age of sixteen’ is marvellous for life, force, THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 117 character, and painting; and the ‘ Return Home’ after a day’s hunting is not only full of the most impetuous motion and spirit, but rendered quite grand in feeling by its sky flaring with ‘ a last remains of sunset’ Troyon is another man of immense energy and skill, both in dogs and other animals and in out-door effects ; and Haffner, Philippe Rousseau, and Salzard, are such a triad of brute-painters as is not easily to be encountered out of prolific France. Leaving France in order to get a glimpse at her artistic dependencies, we come first to Belgium as the most pro- ductive and vigorous. Her art on the whole as here shown is, indeed, but a pale and dwarfed reflex of that of France, and we may quietly pass by the doings of her academic celebrities; but three of her sons, Alfred and Joseph Stevens and Henri Leys, claim a first-class place in any gathering, not only of their own compatriots, but of uni- versal art. There is hardly in the Palais des Beaux Arts a more massive and intense colourist than either Alfred or Joseph Stevens. The two may be spoken of together ; for, although Joseph, as being almost exclusively an animal-painter, oc- cupies an independent position, and although he may be distinguished by some shade more of vigour in form, and Alfred of richness in colour, the two pursue the same end with means nearly identical. Both are sturdy realists, both born artists ; not attempting, on the one hand, to embellish or evade workaday nature, nor, on the other, failing to demonstrate, in every effect chosen and every point of realization, a consciousness that the painter’s business is to express, together with the visible outward object, some predilection or insight of his own. In tone it cannot be said that either of the Stevenses is strictly true ; we nowhere find clear diffused daylight or sunlight, but sunken sullen Il8 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. brilliancy glowing through overcast shadow, and broad firm masses instead of infinite detail. Alfred's two small pictures, ‘Reading’ and ‘Meditation,’ are wonderful bits of rich colour in this way. The daring mapping-out of the general scheme of colour — as the snowy street opposed to the deep tones of the rest in Alfred’s picture of ‘ What People call Vagrancy’ — shows the eye and hand of the true colourist; and these are evidenced, less saliently but quite as decidedly, by the value given to small details as points of effect. Look, for instance, at the extreme darkness with which the hovering sparrows in the last-named picture tell against the snow — a point which any one may have noted in a London winter : they are almost black spots upon the white. Look at the flowers and tapestry in ‘Meditation’; the white and black cat, white jug, even the rude cottage print of Napoleon, which form the accessories to ‘The Siesta’; the nail against the blank white-washed wall, the ball of red cotton, and the oleander, in Joseph Stevens’s ‘Intrusion’; and the oyster and lobster shells in his ‘ Unconscious Philosopher.’ In all these we find the ‘ two things needful’ — instinct of what is right, and calculation of how to make it felt. We should add that in ‘Intrusion’ the expression of the mother-cat disturbed by a random dog is something marvellous ; the mouth twitches, baring the lucent teeth, the profile flattens, the eyes contract, the fur begins to bristle, and you can as good as hear the snarling grr -- with which she rouses the hostile nature of a dog who seems well-intentioned enough if left alone. Though the cat is the great triumph here, it is in dogs that the specialty of Joseph Stevens consists. There are immense force and varied character in his life- sized ‘ Episode of the Dog-Market at Paris’ — where an old woman, presiding over a whole squad of her kennelled clients, is sedately engaged in relieving one of them from THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 119 his too intimate bosom friends the fleas. Of all these pic- tures, the principal one is that entitled ‘What people call Vagrancy.’ In simple manly character, in dignified colour, and in masterly treatment, this could scarcely be overpraised. Sticklers for ‘composition’ will object to the straight line of figures, and the naturalism of the work partakes somewhat of the literal order : but the picture should be most warmly greeted by those in whose eyes strong truth, expressed with directness and power, overrides the dogmas of the schools. The head of the woman, bowed in life-long sorrow and present shame, and the hard clasp with which her thin hand holds the infant to her bosom, are perfectly truthful. Patiently she treads the pathway of crunched snow between the white heaps on either side; snow loads the street-posts and the background line of dead wall; and even the well-clothed gendarme blows his fingers in the raw cold. The charitable lady pressing forward with her purse is refreshingly different from the sentimentalities which form the common stock-in- trade for such subj ects ; insomuch that one is scarcely in- clined to quarrel with her for failing on the opposite side, in a want of evident interest or sympathy. The Stevenses must be classed, but not condemned, as mannerists ; their executive individuality, striking as it is, consisting in carrying to their acme certain main peculiarities of the French school. They are also chargeable, and especially Alfred, with painting rather studies or bits of pictures than entire works ; although each production, so far as it goes, is integral and complete. Further, they have little, in an intellectual sense, of what the Germans include in the term culture, and their extreme force of style verges on violence ; redeemed, however, from coarseness by a grateful and harmonious feeling of repose. They are un- doubtedly leading men, whose work will count for something in our period. 120 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. A more individual artist than even the Stevenses, and assuredly a much greater one, is Henri Leys ; who seems to be at this moment absolutely sui generis, save for a feeble and obvious imitator named Joseph Lies. His peculiarity is the treatment of subjects of manners of the middle ages, with a perception of character much akin to Holbein’s, Van Eyck’s, or Cranach’s, and a broad yet pre- cise and defined style of modern execution. The result has something of the quaint and grotesque, but full of spirit and life-likeness. No other artist treating similar themes comes so near the look of actual probabilities; we seem to see the productions of a contemporary. When one finds so interesting a line of subject so well done, one declines to question whether it ought to have been attempted at all ; whether the nineteenth-century man, however deeply he may have imbued himself with sixteenth-century fact and feeling, can know enough of them to make his work valuable in the same sense as one commemorative of his own age, or as a veritable record of the past. We are glad to waive the severe theoretic objection, and find M. Leys one of the most picturesque, enjoyable, and admirable of artists. Of his three excellent pictures now in Paris, the least remark- able is 6 The New Year in Flanders.’ ‘The Walk Outside the City-walls’ from Faust \ with its richly varied types of mediaeval character, each of whom is an individual as well as a type, is extraordinarily good ; and equally so a still more well-selected subject, ‘Bertal de Haze.’ This person- age, as the catalogue explains, ‘chief of the order of the Ancient Arblast, dying in 1512, bequeathed to the Church of Notre Dame his war-gear, to wit, his best corslet, his morion, his gorget, his arblast, his quiver with the arrows, and his hooked knife, to the end that the whole thereof might be hung up in the chapel of the order.’ Treated THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. I 2 I with Leys’s peculiar mediaeval feeling, this very mediaeval subject is something unique. The members of the deceased Bertal’s family are standing or kneeling before the altar and the war-gear, — the heart-wrung widow, the stalwart grave son, now head of the house, the demure little child ; and the row of white-vested priests seated chanting is at once quaint and solemn. After these men, the most noticeable Belgian painters are yerlat, De Groux, and Willems. The first has a 6 Cat and Dog’ subject, similar to Joseph Stevens’s, and scarcely less perfect. The cat is giving the unbidden dog an admonitory dab on the head with an indignant flat paw, and the play of her glassy green eyes looks suspicious. De Groux’s 4 Last Farewell’ — a burial in a foreign cemetery ankle-deep in snow — is an instance of extreme realism, whose painful impressiveness is only enhanced by the grotesqueness of its literality. Willems’s c Interior of a Silk-mercer’s Shop in 1660,’ though trifling matter comparatively, lacks no essential or apt embellishment. Of the other dependencies of artistic France little is to be said. There are some repectable, no eminent, produc- tions from Spain and the Low Countries ; from non-Austrian Italy still less. Inganni, and Dominic and Jerome Induno, from Austrian Italy, are clever at common life; the first well up in effects, the other two slight, and with a proclivity to the squalid. The United States show exceedingly ill, but excite nevertheless an Englishman’s curiosity and in- terest. The best brace of exhibitors are Healy and W. M. Hunt — both competent executive artists of the downright French style. Healy’s large picture of ‘ Franklin pleading the cause of the American Colonies to Louis the Sixteenth,’ the only subject of much importance from the States, has little to recommend it. His colour possesses something 122 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. broad and soft, but is neutral, and tends to murkiness and a scene-painting tone. His feeling for beauty is of the faintest. We take it that the exhibiting half-score of Americans is no fair sample of Transatlantic art-powers ; otherwise we should pronounce that no nation is less firmly grounded or less in earnest, and that the aspirations vented in that quarter are but breath lost. In the Germanic art we find nothing better than the domestic subjects of Knaus of Wiesbaden, a Dusseldorf student and a Paris resident ; which are well invented in a humorous and a dramatic point of view, replete with observation and character, and executed with all cleverness and ease. In ‘The Morrow of the Village Feast,’ the ex- pression in the good German face of the young girl seated by her sweetheart, who, having been induced to drink too much, is now sleeping overcome amid the debris of the revel, human and inanimate, is touching and exquisite in its naive truth ; an expression of wounded feeling and word- less appeal, abashed yet firm. To her the matter is no joke at all. We remember no living ‘ domestic painter’ of higher excellence and promise than Herr Knaus : he needs, not- withstanding, to be on his guard against the tendency to caricature. For the school represented by Cornelius we profess little or no sympathy, and a respect that stops considerably short of veneration. He is a thinker, a purist, a reformer — any- thing but an artist. Nothing comes to him impulsively, nothing is done unconsciously and gloriously; he is never better than he knows himself, or than every cultivated man can discover him to be. He sends a ‘ Selection of Cartoons for the Frescoes to the Porticoes of the Campo Santo in course of construction at Berlin.’ The seven angels of the Apocalyptic phials are fluttering, flying, and attitudinizing; THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 1 23 so are the four horsemen — Plague, Famine, War, and Death : 4 Satan Chained’ is worse in the same way. In the 6 Descent of the New Jerusalem’ there is a fine symbolic thought : the heavenly vision is seen by only two of the group of earth-dwellers, a youth and a mother. Kaulbach also sends some of his cartoons ; among them 4 The Tower of Babel,’ known to Englishmen as well by the enthusiastic exposition in Miss Howitt’s book as by an engraving. No one would deny the power and bold in- vention of Kaulbach; but he too loads his composition with system and abstruse intention. He keeps his eyes wider open than Cornelius or Overbeck to what real men and women look like, and his first notion of character and action is generally vivid ; but he determines - to be truer than truth, stronger than strength, and livelier than life, and ends by giving you a characteristico-academic abstract when you had bargained for a human being. Unencumbered by German traditions and the incubus of the grandeur of the old masters, Kaulbach might have continued to this day the genius which Nature made him, and which he showed himself in such works as 4 The Mad-house’ : as it is, he labours with huge thoughts, and secures the acclamation of Europe, and chiefly of Germany, for every step he strays further from true achievement in art. At least his steps are the strides of a lusty man, not the mincing of a coxcomb nor the shuffling of a monk. A pretty German domesticism, hushed and homely, is Meyer’s 4 Little Brother Asleep’ — the last contribution we need specify from Prussia. From Austria, Steinle sends a grand piece of form in 4 Eve,’ and a very clever water-colour in 4 The Jew of Venice.’ The domestic again appears in several works by Waldmiiller, full of fine qualities of ob- servation, feeling, and representation, which are impeded in 124 the international exhibitions of art. their full effect by some of the hardness and anti-geniality of German execution. Sweden makes a creditable appear- ance, with Hockert and Lundgren, for a country so remote from the centres of art; Norway with Tidemand; Denmark with Exner and Larsen, — whose 6 Coast of Marseilles,’ with a black-tinged blueish-green sea, dark and rolling in stern ridges, is remarkable. Switzerland’s muster is indifferent enough ; but it includes one thing nice and simple — ‘ Re- fectory of Capuchins at Albano,’ by Van Muyden. The holy men must have a passionate partiality for cats, of which a numerous rank and file is scattered about the apartment. At individual contributions from England we need barely glance, as there is hardly an important one among them that had not been previously made public at home. To English Praeraphaelitism — after admiring foreign excellence with no stinted or un-catholic homage — we return in the deliberate conviction that it embodies the highest, truest, and most vitally essential, among the fresh and direct move- ments of the sera. Its missionaries, Hunt and Millais, ex- hibit — the former ‘ The Light of the World,’ ‘ Strayed Sheep,’ and ‘ Claudio and Isabella’; the latter, ‘The Order of Re- lease,’ ‘ Ophelia,’ and ‘ The Return of the Dove to the Ark.’ We may also rely with proud confidence upon Anthony’s ‘Beech-trees and Fern,’ Madox Brown’s ‘Chaucer,’ Cross’s ‘ Death of Coeur de Lion,’ Dyce’s ‘ King Joas’ and ‘Jacob and Rachel,’ Leslie’s ‘ Sancho Panza and the Duchess,’ Linnell’s ‘Barley-Harvest,’ Poole’s ‘Job and the Messengers,’ and Mulready’s copious display. The last-named artist and Webster share with the Praeraphaelites and our water-colour school the chief part of the attention, not unmixed with surprise, which England has excited in France ; and we need only recall the names of Lewis, Cox, and William THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 1 25 Hunt, among the water-colourists, and Ross and Thorburn among the miniature-painters, as representatives of a class of art in which England stands utterly unrivalled and al- most without competition of any sort. On the other hand, the class of which Stanfield is a champion looks flimsy and artificial; Maclise, theatrical; and Landseer, whose sole first-rate specimen is 4 The Sanctuary,’ finds so many foreign antagonists formidable in energetic power and stern study that the balance is not righted in fairness to him until we call to mind his supremacy in invention and human sym- pathy with the phases and emotions of animal life. The two most remarkable English pictures not yet seen here are by Mulready and Leighton. Mulready’s is ‘ The Bathers’ — often promised and still withheld at the Academy exhibitions ; a charming, delicate, and original treatment of the worn subject, pure without prudery. The agile form of the girl in the background tripping up the bank is no studio stock-personage, but a genuine acquisition from nature. Leighton’s picture of the ‘ Reconciliation of the Montagues and Capulets over the dead bodies of their children’ amply confirms the hopes based on his Academy picture of the Cimabue procession. The colour is grand and dignified ; and the broken compunctious expression of Capulet reaches higher than anything in the former work. In the remaining figures, however, there is little character. In sculpture, France, England, Belgium, Austria (chiefly from Northern Italy), Prussia, and Saxony, are the con- spicuous contributors. There is little to be said of this department in a rapid review which stops only at the first- rate and the strikingly individual. Sculpture in our day is an entranced art well-nigh fatuous. It dreams of extinct Grecisms, and with half-shut maundering eyes makes clumsy copies of its dreams. For the rest, the general character- 126 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. istics of the various schools hold regarding sculpture as well as painting ; France taking the lead for terse completeness, and a feeling for which we can find no closer word than 4 picturesque.’ Our preference may be pitifully ‘ unideal,’ but we discover nothing else so admirable, so first-rate, as Fremiet’s 6 Cat and Kittens’; a perfect piece of life in marble. With this we would name Bonnassieux’s very beautiful 6 Meditation,’ Cavelier’s effective ‘ Truth,’ Debay’s famous and lovely c First Cradle,’ Jacquot’s soft and alluring 6 Nymph Surprised,’ Jaley’s 6 Modesty,’— which is French modesty, however, — Jouffroy’s delicate 4 Girl confiding her first secret to Venus,’ from the Luxembourg, and the animal subjects of Barye, Hebert, and Rude; the British Macdowell’s ‘ Girl preparing for the Bath ;’ and the Belgian Vanhove’s somewhat repulsive naturalism, C A Negro Slave after the Bastinado.’ Kiss’s colossal equestrian 6 St. George and the Dragon,’ in plaster, has more of the German ex- ternals than the substance of the heroic and fantastic. Lithography and the higher branches of engraving again bear testimony to the preeminence of France ; England and Germany, among whose constituent states we especially note Saxony, hold their own at any rate in wood-cutting. Architecture, which has engaged no countries much except France and England, counts even among their contributions few original designs, but only drawings and proposed restor- ations of existing buildings in the great majority of cases. France is terribly fertile in this line ; and indeed the chief feature of the architectural display is the restless tenacity with which she at present clings to the Gothic abstract, un- doing and redoing on all hands the Gothic concrete in its glorious monuments of the past. THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 127 LONDON, 1862. It would be a nice question for an artistic theorist to decide where the industrial art of the International Ex- hibition ends, and its fine art begins. Is its decorative art to be classed as fine or industrial ? Much pretty argu- ment, and some ingenious hair-splitting, might be devoted to this point. As a matter of principle, we should always incline to give the widest interpretation to the term Fine Art. We conceive the faculty for art throughout its whole range to be essentially the same; being composed, firstly, of a strong perception of character and beauty in the abstract properties of form and colour, and in the actual facts of nature ; and, secondly, of a vivid adaptation of these in whatever shape. The painting of a picture, the carving of a statue, the design of a building, the setting of a jewel, are all exemplifications of the faculty of fine art; the right doing of any one of these things is the function of an artist, and none but an artist, in the correct sense of the word, can manage it well. We conceive also that the extreme division and subdivision of art in the present day is one of the most baneful features of it — one of those which most cramp the artist, mislead the public taste, and cripple the powers of art itself. There ought to be much less of this distinction, and a much freer field for the artist to work in. The healthy and progressive periods of art have been those in which an artist for one thing was intrinsically an artist for anything. Not to recur to the antique times, we may remember that Giotto would paint a Crucifixion or a coat- of-arms as he was bidden, draw a circle as a final proof of 128 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. his artistic power, or execute a work of sculpture oT of architecture with perfect simplicity of competence and no sense of incongruity. Verrocchio was sculptor and painter; Luca della Robbia, sculptor and potter ; Francia, goldsmith and painter ; Leonardo and Michael Angelo were sculptors, painters, and architects ; Raphael was the same, as well as a painter of architectural ornament, and perhaps a designer for pottery; Titian would do mosaics — Durer, engravings — as readily as pictures ; Cellini, colossal groups as artistically as jewelry and plate. We might prolong the list to almost any extent. What have we now ? Engravers upon copper who know nothing of wood, and painters in water-colour who could not work in oils. The time will perhaps come again when we shall be well assured that the best painter or sculptor is the man to do a chair or a drinking-glass also better than anybody else ; when we shall naturally ask him to do these things, and he will do them as a matter of course, knowing no reason, in his aptitude or his professional position, why he should not. That time will be a better one than the present for all parties concerned. Holding these opinions, we should feel no difficulty in comprising, under the fine art of the Exhibition, a great deal of its industrial art. The exclusion of painted glass, for instance, is merely arbitrary ; and we could go a long way beyond this in the works to be included. Neither should we at all fear to exalt the art of the lower material form at the expense of that of the higher, where the facts might appear to us to warrant it. The truest estimate of the whole subject might possibly show us that about the very best fine art practised at the present day in any corner of the globe is the decorative art of the Japanese. We will not indeed venture to assert this as a fact; but we do advance it as a position capable of being fairly entertained, THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 1 29 and by no means refutable on the mere ground that historic painting and ideal sculpture are higher forms of art. After being sufficiently derided or decried for hinting at such a heresy, we shall still bear in mind the relative value of an Etruscan vase and late Roman figure-sculpture, of a painted window at Chartres and a picture by Domenichino, of pottery in Della Robbia’s hands and marble in Bandinelli’s, and shall perhaps deem the suggestion undisproved. However, our intention is to start with a more limited view of the fine art of the Exhibition, following the guidance of the official catalogue to that department of it. The sub- divisions which this catalogue gives, in reference to the country most fully represented, which is naturally our own, are those of paintings in oil-colour and in water-colour, sculpture, architecture, engraving, and art-designs. To these we shall at present confine ourselves. It may not be irrelevant or uninteresting to examine, in the first place, the comparative range and development of the fine art in the present Exhibition, and in its three great precursors, the original Exhibition of 1851, the Paris Ex- hibition of 1855, and the Art- treasures Exhibition in Man- chester of 1857. The first of these three, the Exhibition of 1851, need not detain us long. It purported to be a display of ‘the works of Industry of all nations,’ and included none of the aforenamed sections of fine art, except sculpture, and that much less fully and systematically represented than in the collections of 1855 and of the present year, though it must have considerably exceeded the collection of 1857. It is with satisfaction that we find, upon an inspection of the respective catalogues, that the Exhibition now open not only far transcends the Manchester Exhibition in its representation of modern art, but even exceeds to an ap- K 130 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. preciable extent (about 700 works) the Paris Exhibition as well. Of course, in the case of Manchester, it will be remembered that the basis of selection was a very different one, and that works of the older as well as the existing schools enriched the walls. These, however, cannot be in any way reckoned in the comparison which we are now instituting. Taking the modern art of that Exhibition, as well as of the Paris and London ones, in which the whole is modern, the account, as near as we can give the numbers, stands thus : — British Art. Foreign Art . Total. Paris, 1855 ..... 782 .. . 4307 . . . 5089 Manchester, 1857, about . 2100 . . . 700 . . . 2800 London, 1862 .... 3323 . . . 2443 • • • 5766.* Some readers may perhaps like to see a little more of the items. For their benefit we append the following table : — In Paris. Numbers. Totals. British Oil-painting 232' 55 Water-colours 146 77 128 199 ” Sculpture ” Architecture ” Engraving ” Art-designs . 55 Dependencies French Painting 1869 ” Sculpture 385 ” Architecture 188 ” Engraving 286 German (including Austrian) Painting . 379 Sculpture 164 Architecture 9 ” ” Engraving 83 j 782 2728 635 In London . Numbers. Totals. 790- 634 300 693 556 3i7 33^ 244 5i 36 95 31° S3 115 96 3323 426 604 * These numbers are the totals of the items afterwards given, and fall somewhat below the actual figures printed in the catalogues : the London catalogue especially seems to have left some considerable margin for possible contributions. According to the catalogues, the total in Paris was 5128, and in London 6228. THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 131 In Paris . In London. Numbers. Totals. Numbers. Totals. Dutch and Belgian Painting . . . ” ” Sculpture . . ” Architecture ” Engraving . . Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish Art Russian Art ........ Italian (including Roman) Painting ” Sculpture* ” Architecture ” Engraving Spanish Art . Swiss ditto United States ditto . Other Countries ditto 3 2 3 \ 252 ) S 2 7 { 405 26 | > 298 43) 20 ] 123 123 222 222 — — 115 115 54 1 165 1 21 f i( 76 191 | 1281 55 o -) 66 1 127 127 43 43 no no 119 119 43 43 13 13 60 60 53 53 in this list. It is with some surprise, as well as regret, that we find the French contribution to London to be greatly below the English contribution to Paris — 426 to 782 ; and actually below both the Germanic (604) and the Italian (550) sections here. The total absence of Russia from Paris in the war-year of 1855 presents some analogy to the reduction of the United States art, in this year of their war, to 13 works from 43, spite of the greater intercourse held by the States with England than with France. However, a certain proportion of the American works of art is excluded from this number- ing ; and we have been told, by a gentleman who has the best means of forming an opinion, that the war is not really so much responsible for the small show as the difficulty and risk in the transport of works of art from so great a distance. The largest proportional increase by far is that of Italy — from 76 works to 550, or more than seven times as many. The impulse of a people which now feels itself free, the unity of movement in a consolidated nation, * The sculpture in the 4 Roman Court’ includes several works by English, American, and other artists. The Venetian works pass as 4 Austrian, ’ en attendant. 1 3 2 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. and the influence of the Florentine Exhibition of last year, all doubtless conduce to so satisfactory a result. The 4 Other Countries’ on our list include Greece in woful im- becility, and one painter (in a rather sloppy style) from Turkey. One more item of statistics, and we shall have done with that branch of the subject. The comparative numbers of the several classes of art were as follows : — Painting . Sculpture . Architecture Engraving Art-designs In Paris . 3362 737 364 635 In London . 2846 751 1007 841 3 21 This table shows that the increase of London over Paris in the number of works exhibited is more than covered by the architectural and art-designs sections; the increase in two of the other three sections would merge, if the three are taken together, in the sensible decrease in the single section of painting. Concerning this, it may be sufficient to remind the reader that the Paris Exhibition included the biennial display of French art, corresponding to our Academy gallery ; whereas the London Exhibition has excluded British works of painting not previously brought before the public. The prevalent character of the respective schools of art is a subject which might be treated from various points of view, and upon which much might be said from any one of these. We shall aim at being summary rather than ex- haustive, and at adhering to matter of fact rather than launching into speculation; and all the more summary, in that something of what would here claim to be stated has already been said in our review of the Paris Exhibition. The French artist is the one who keeps the properties and the limitations of art most steadily in view. He ad- THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 1 33 dresses himself with a clearer consciousness and a firmer purpose to using the elements of his subject as far as they pertain to an artistic conception, and eliminating those which prove extraneous or obstructive. To this quality of mind, and to his more advanced mastery of the materials of art taken collectively, he adds the greatest readiness to move along with the general movement of his school — to ‘keep in step,’ as it were, with his colleagues, and follow out the impulse of his chiefs. Embracing besides as it does an unrestricted range of subject, from the grand in scale and idea to all forms of subordinate work, French art has more uniformity, continuity, thoroughness of artistic aim, and adequate rendering of the thing intended accord- ing to the method proposed, than the art of any other country : it has the most of national, and the most also of artistic, style. Its tendency to select, and at the same time to realize — to exhibit facts with gravity and system, and in their relations as well as individually — makes the French, even irrespectively of direct choice of subject, the most historic school of modern Europe. With the French we may in the main (as in 1855) class the Belgian school, which shows strongly in the present exhibition — more strongly than in that year. In feeling and style it is still nearly related to the French school ; though with as much distinctiveness as suffices to render it a living and genuinely national school, not a mere ac- cessory offshoot. It is dominated by two men of con- spicuous ability, Leys and Gallait, the former now un- mistakeably a great painter. The aim of both these men is historic : — Gallait with a tendency to sentiment, ingenuity, and eclecticism, not free from thinness and artificiality of mind ; Leys with his intense re-development of mediaeval art, especially that of his own country, which makes his 134 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. paintings the most exceptional, and nearly the most ad- mirable, in the whole collection. If two works of living art are to stamp in the memory the International Exhibition of 1862, they will be ‘La Source’ by Ingres, and the ‘ Chapter of the Golden Fleece’ by Leys. The German school has as much aspiration, and perhaps as wide a range, as the French, but falls far short of that in the inborn faculty of art. While the Frenchman discerns, as a general rule, how his subject can be treated with an artistic result, and treats it accordingly, the German is Hammering at a matter-of-fact, or elaborating a train of thought — setting forth a treatise in form or colour. Ger- man art betrays too much of the contending forces of the 6 philister’ and the professor, neither of whom is intrinsically an artist. The art of the philister is literal, jejune; not depending upon the real powers of art for its impression. That of the professor is learned, thoughtful, wide-reaching, persistently demonstrative : it asks you to understand it rather than to perceive and feel it. There are plenty of reasons for its every item ; but there is one reason against all its items together, and that is that they do not produce upon the eye and the feelings the impression of a spon- taneous and beautiful work of art. A man like Overbeck or Kaulbach resolves that art must fulfil certain conditions in order to be sacred or historical ; not simply that it must exhibit, in a direct form and by the open secret of the means of art, the natural perceptions and feelings of the painter, to be received with equal directness by the spec- tator. We have on the whole, in German art, much capacity and exertion, with very little intuition. Allowing for honourable exceptions, its most imposing works are stilted, its slighter efforts by well-trained men trite and ungracious, and its lower level of mere furniture-art the THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 1 35 most artificial of the day. Yet there is so much solid material to work upon that it seems as if the advent of a great natural painter might produce as salient effects in the opposite and true direction as the pietistic and theoretic revivalism of Overbeck and others has for years past pro- duced in the track now pursued by the German devotees of high art. The British school stands apart from the foreign ones chiefly in two respects. It began only early in last century, so as to be free from any chain of tradition linking it with the elder schools ; and it is much more distinctly marked by the individual aim of each artist to do what he chooses in his own way than by the feeling for artistic style or any technical ideal. At the present day this latter characteristic is waning as the impulse towards definite fact, and bold yet exact realization, set on foot by ‘ Praeraphaelitism’ in 1849, spreads over the entire school. Still, this impulse, whatever it may eventually lead to, is more based upon the principle of going straight to nature than upon any conception of art as art, such as would result in technical uniformity of style. In other respects the good and evil effects of the influences to which the British school has been subjected are ex- tremely mixed. Its freedom from tradition handed down from the past has been a benefit to its naturalness and living interest, but has always left it hitherto somewhat in the uneasy position of a parvenu who would fain stand on a level with the old families, but does not know how to set about it. British art has almost always failed in at- tempting the classical, or the sacred or heroic treated ac- cording to the ‘high art’ formula; it is not grounded in these things, and yet feels that its position is depressed by the want of them. Of course the right plan would be to leave them on one side till time and training bring the tone 136 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. of them, till the adolescent art grows into them naturally ; just as the parvenu’s best wisdom would be to remain an eminent man of the middle class instead of figuring as a pseudo-aristocrat, and to leave aristocracy for his great- grandchildren to lapse into. The 4 great style’ is not to be attained by attempting unprepared a great subject in an imitation of another man’s great style : only by greatness of conception, and a strenuous mastery of each step in the scale of art, leading upwards to the highest. The other point which we named as distinctive of British art — the individuality of aim in each man, apart from any general feeling for technical ideal — has been equally chequered in its results. One might at first assume that such a state of things would lead to great originality; but upon close inspection the expectation is disappointed. It has as yet led rather to nonconformity than to originality. The artist has too generally not reached the standard of art, instead of striking out an original path in art ; for the fact is that in art the art is itself supreme, and the artist who does not try to be excellent in art, but rather to do something to please his own or the popular notion, has not risen into the region in which artistic originality is so much as attainable. We have thus had a great number of men pursuing art with a certain freedom from cut-and-dry dogma, a certain open- ness to facts, and wish to follow out nature in variety of matter, freshness of colour and surface, and the like. We have had more of this sort of work than the continental nations ; and yet the result has not been admirable, because the efforts have been scattered and arbitrary, and not guided by adequate conception of the portion which the art ought to bear in the work of art, or by any strong resolve to work up to and realize such a conception. The school has been plain-sailing, easy-going, discursive, garru- THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 1 37 Ions, not, wound up by a strong purpose, and pursuing it by clearly defined means. But, if this has been the character of the school generally, we can at any rate claim some most noble men as rising out of rather than abiding in it — Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Blake, Etty, Turner, David Scott, Flaxman, and others. And in the present day, with the establishment of Braeraphaelitism and the works of its leading men, a quite new order of things has begun, as we before intimated, and has almost transmuted the school. We shall revert to its characteristics when we come to speak in detail of the British contributions. Returning now to the foreign schools, of which we have already named the chief, we are sorry to find little to praise in the Italian. The land of Giotto and Leonardo remains fallow as yet, — waiting for a new crop, we may fairly hope. We fail to discern any special character in the Italian art. It is not, in a direct way, much addicted to futile copyism of its own past greatness, nor strongly under the influence of any living school — not even the French. It is mediocre work of nearly the same kind which other nations do better at the present day, the sculpture more attractive than the painting. The Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Russian art has all a certain analogy to the British in modern starting-point, and aim at directness of represent- ation rather than at any particular development of style. The Dutch, indeed, has a pedigree going further back than that of the British. Its art of the present day seems to have descended without any violent interruption from that of Teniers, Ostade, Jan Steen, Terburg, Cuyp, and the others of the seventeenth century. Yet it has no special resemblance to the artistic manner of these painters, and has shaken off the love of ugliness and meanness which infected their class. Barring this, it treats chiefly similar 138 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. subjects of home-landscape and social life, in a style separ- able from that of Belgium as being smaller in scale, neater in surface, and visibly less affected by France. The Scan- dinavian art shows healthily and vigorously; it makes a much more decided impression here than it did in Paris in 1855, and has merit enough to surprise as well as gratify most visitors. Its choice of subject is generally serious, combined with domestic heartiness, and with the view of displaying something characteristically; its artistic point of view corresponds. The Danish pictures are perhaps the best ; they show a greater intermixture of foreign study with national traits than do those of Sweden and Norway, but their superiority does not depend upon this. Sweden sends a remarkable work of sculpture in the ‘ Grapplers’ by Molin. From Denmark come several of Thorwaldsen’s works. The Russian is a much less national art, and less good into the bargain. It seems to pick up subjects, styles, and artistic motives, much as they come. Spain is noticeable for the great preponderance of her figure-subjects, frequently of a very ambitious order. She appears scarcely affected by the modern feeling for landscape, to judge from the present display. Her power of art is barely up to the mark, and yet does not show any gross failure. The Swiss art bears its part very creditably among the minor schools, but seems rather wanting in a powerful point of view; the works, though including plenty of national subjects, have some- thing of a miscellaneous character, as if there were a good number of skilful enough men, with no particular leadership or aim to secure their work against a quality approaching well-trained amateurship. The United States display is too limited to do any justice to the pictorial ability of the country. In sculpture, the strikingly fine and very uncon- ventional works of Mr. Story secure for America a sculptural THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 1 39 pre-eminence of which the fussy popularity of Powers’s 4 Greek Slave’ in the Exhibition of 1851 was but the mirage . In estimating the relative merits of the schools as here represented, the great difference of the starting-points adopted by the several countries must be borne in mind. England has been peculiarly liberal to herself in this re- spect ; France peculiarly restrictive. The former begins with Hogarth, who was an established painter towards 1730 ; the latter only admits works executed by living men since 1850, or since 1840 by the dead, if born later than 1790. Italy, which goes back to Canaletto, with Austria, Spain, and Russia, follow more or less the example of England. The other countries approximate to France, though we doubt whether any has adopted quite so stringent a rule. Of course this difference of system wholly deranges the balance of comparison. We may compare the fertility of mind and motive in the French section with that in the British section from 1840 or 1850; but it would be mon- strous to lump together in our brains all the British works from Hogarth to Millais, pit them against the French, and vaunt our own superior versatility and breadth of range. The relation between the character of the pictorial and the sculptural art of the several countries may generally be well traced up to a certain point, subject to the considera- tion that the entire sculptural art of the time is weighed down by pseudo-classicism. The two countries in which the sculptor seems most nearly to bound his aim to the attain- ment of grace and attractiveness, in a somewhat conventional form, are England and Italy. The great skill and attain- ments of Mr. Gibson do not wholly save him from serving as an example, though certainly a very refined example, of this fact ; Mr. Ives,* whose 4 Pandora’ bears a considerable * We are unable to say for certain whether this gentleman is English or American. 140 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. resemblance to Mr. Gibson’s ‘ Venus,’ is another. How- ever, there is no portrait-sculpture in the gallery wherein character is so intensely studied, or modelling carried to such a pitch of perfection, as that of Mr. Woolner. In speaking of Mr. Gibson, we must pause for a moment to express an opinion that his coloured statuary — the ‘Venus,’ ‘ Pandora,’ and ‘ Cupid,’ the last perhaps the best example of the three in point of colour — cannot fairly be decried as a failure. It appears to us to be a highly interesting at- tempt carried out with undeniable charm of no mean order ; a legitimate phase of sculpture, capable of much variety of experiment (of which one method only is here exemplified), and having a separate beauty of its own, which need not be allowed to interfere with, nor yet to be obscured by, the separate beauty of colourless sculpture. The art is wide enough for both ; and the adherents of white marble may be content to constitute an immense majority, with every prospect of so remaining, without seeking to expunge the exiguous minority. We are disposed to think, however, that such merely arbitrary adjuncts of coloured ornament as Mr. Gibson introduces in the gold ear-rings and blue hair- fillets of the 6 Venus’ were best omitted; the colour being, as a rule, limited to the distinction (indispensable if colour is used at all) between the tints of flesh, hair, and eyes, and that of white drapery. In such accessories as the box of Pandora and the butterfly of Cupid, colour is again un- objectionable. Returning to our starting-point, we may cite as our Italian example the 4 Zephyr and Flora dancing’ of Signor Benzoni, in which the extreme grace and airiness of movement must not blind us to the almost total want of making-out of form, or detail of surface. Pierotti’s 4 Indian Hunter,’ however, carries the vigour of actuality and model- ling to a point quite exceptional. France comes to sculp- THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 141 ture, as to painting, ardent and prepared, and seems less hampered than other countries by stock notions of what to do, and how to do it ; we find similar clear grasp of ideas, centrality of purpose, and firm drawing and execution. The choice of subject appears sometimes (though scarcely as here shown) a little arbitrary and impracticable ; but in the present hide-bound state of the art — which almost seems to be out on parole, pledged not to transgress certain limits, and show a clean pair of heels — this is rather a fault on the right side. The sculpture of Germany mostly conforms to the theories which regulate her painting, having a tendency in the historic or legendary-historic direction, crossed with an aim rather perhaps at the pretty than the beautiful; it makes by no means a striking muster at South Kensington. The Belgian sculpture verges towards ornamentalism and an ill-poised aim at picturesqueness ; the counterpart per- haps, but in no good form, of the prompt, adaptive spirit which Belgium evinces in painting. The finest work from this country, however, ‘ The Discobolus hurling the Discus/ by Kessels, is wholly free from any such blemish, and re- markably true in action. As to the general march of the western fine art of the present day in all forms and all schools collectively, we must recur to the inference we drew from the Exhibition of 1855, and say that the dominant impulse is towards Realism. At first, indeed, one may feel almost overwhelmed by the immense variety before one. Classicism and picturesque- ness in sculpture — diversity of periodic style in architecture — landscape, domestic, historic, and abstract, in painting — seem hardly amenable to any single bond of union, not to speak of the great differences of aim in the several schools. Gradually, however, the facts become more harmonious and tangible. The arts of the countries, like the countries them- 142 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. selves, have approximated. There is not among any of us any aim, for instance, so ideal as that of Fra Angelico, so hectoringly classical as David’s, so vaguely fantastic and attitudinizing as Fuseli’s, so merely factitious as Lancret’s and Boucher’s, so forced and blatant as Bernini’s. So far on the negative side of the question. On its positive side, we feel the clue more firmly in our hand the more we regard the better minds and the finer artists of the time in all branches, to the exclusion of its inferior level of work. The dominant impulse, then, is towards realism; towards a conception of things in their actual and essential cha- racter, and an endeavour to convey this by a serious adhesion to facts. Even so noteable a classicist as the great Frenchman Ingres is no direct exception, as his small pictures (of which the present Exhibition presents no example) from history or historic anecdote attest, not to dwell upon the genuinely realistic element which mingles even with his idealism. Delacroix and Delaroche move in the realistic direction as truly as Millais and Holman Hunt, though under widely different aspects ; and a very important and excellent section of French art deals, in an eminently positive and trenchant spirit, with the true life and occupa- tions of the people. Breton, Brion, Marchal, and several others here, might be cited. The German revivalist school is no doubt a counter-movement ; yet even in that school the stronger men provide for the grafting of a considerable amount of realism upon the theoretic or abstract stock which they cultivate. In architecture, we regard the Gothic movement as equally an endeavour after realism, or con- structive use and decorative propriety, rather than as a mere dilettante vamping-up of an old form of art. In painting, the realistic tendency may possibly be to some extent connected with the modern love of landscape. From THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 1 43 natural truth in landscape proper, the step is easy to the same truth in landscape backgrounds to figure-subjects; and, if this is introduced, the figures themselves cannot be allowed to contradict the actuality of impression as a whole. This is a suggestion, however, upon which we would not venture to lay any particular stress. Thus much premised by way of generalities, we proceed to offer some remarks in detail We shall first, rather for the sake of mere respectful recognition than of criticism, name some, here and there, of the foreign works of salient merit,* and herein, with an eye to brevity, we confine our- selves to living artists, and to such as have not been already incidentally mentioned. Next we shall come to the British school — still summarily, though not quite equally so. And a very few observations upon Decorative Art will finish up our review. From France we adduce as of the first quality the splendid nude study, and the portrait of Prince Napoleon, by Hippolyte Flandrin ; that wonderful piece of history and terror passed through the crucible of art, 4 The Gladiators’ by Gerome ; the two records of historic and national periods (a great point of attainment in modern French art), the 6 Charles V.’ and 4 Louis XIV.’ by Robert-Fleury ; and the Italian peasant women and girls of Hebert and Reynaud, the latter delicious in simplicity and natural impulse. From Germany, we think the finest picture of all is the 4 Galileo’ of Hausmann, a work of most special insight into character and the intellectual bearing of the facts, as well as excellent in artistic qualities. Menzefs 4 Frederick the * The inadequate space given to foreign as compared with British art might seem due to insularity : to avoid which imputation, I trouble the reader with this note to explain that it was the result of accident, as the chance willed it, rather than design. The same may be said of the omission of details concerning sculptural works. 144 ™E INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. Great surprised at night at Hochkirch’ is a wonderful piece of action and hurried rallying energy — a masterpiece of military historic art. Piloty’s vast picture of ‘Nero after the Burning of Rome’ has made here, as well as in Ger- many, a strong impression by qualities of an obvious kind, yet not to be had for the asking. Israels’ s solemn and dirge-like painting of ‘The Ship- wrecked,’ in the Dutch section, is unsurpassed by any picture of domestic tragedy in the Exhibition; while the point and nicety of the social incidents by Bles (though tainted with something of a vulgar feeling), and ‘ The Fisherman’s Return’ by Bource, full of manly heartiness and simplicity, vindicate the stout Hollanders, high and low, against the ugly and debased aspect in which the native painters of two centuries ago loved to present them. Bel- gium, unrivalled in Europe in the particular form of art practised by Leys, has able historical painters in De Groux and Pauwels ; sturdy and dainty domestic painters in Dillens and Willems ; and a great artistic faculty in Alfred Stevens (here shown only in small single-figure pictures) ; while Yerlat in animals, and Van Moer in architecture, may cope with the foremost men of other countries. The best Swedish picture is perhaps the ‘Westphalian Kermesse,’ by Jernberg, a most remarkable piece of not very sightly truth. Miss Amalia Lindegren is also a highly accomplished do- mestic painter. The Norwegian, Tidemand, in incidents of national peasant life, has eminent strength of sentiment, impressive and interesting. Denmark possesses in Dals- gaard, the painter of the ‘ Itinerant Mormons seeking to make Proselytes,’ an artist of singular individualism and earnestness, with equal power apparently over the picturesque and the expressional elements of such a subject. Almost as much may be said for Elizabeth Jerichau and for THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 1 45 Exner. Sorensen’s ‘ Early Morning off the Skaw’ is an admirable piece of sea-study, showing genuine power under thorough control ; and Hansen must be named among the choicest painters of old interiors in Europe. The Russian, Aivazofsky, has a gift for atmospheric effect and incident in landscape, though not far advanced in artistic completeness. Perhaps ‘The Kiss,’ by Moller, a Neapolitan subject with something of the style of Leopold Robert, is the best Russian picture, though others show more promise on account of their greater nationality. In Switzerland, Calame, Lugardon, and Meuron, for mountain scenes, and Van Muyden for graceful domestic simplicity, take a very honourable position. From Italy we might cite some sculptural works not previously specified ; but, setting aside these, we find no painting so good as ‘ The Expulsion of the Duke of Athens,’ by Ussi, which is generally appro vable, if not much beyond that, and at any rate tells its story with great aptness and perspicuity. In Morelli’s ‘Icono- clasts,’ much admired in the Florentine Exhibition of last year, we find nothing beyond the level of respect- ability. Gazzotto’s three pen-and-ink designs from Dante are works of special mark, most elaborate in completion and steadily studied in drawing, and showing, by their decisiveness of impression spite of many points of short- coming, the value of a clear purpose unflaggingly carried out. The wonderful engraving by Schiavone from Titian’s ‘Assumption,’ distancing all other engravings in point of richness and delicacy of surface and pictorial effect, is a real triumph, which ought not to pass unnoticed. Among the Spanish painters, Manzano, the author of a convent- scene with a lovers’ terrible parting, takes the lead. On the remaining schools we need not dwell, beyond expressing L 146 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. our dissent from those who find in the American painter Page the nearest approach to a modern Titian. England and Hogarth must have the lasting fame of initiating modern art. Italy, Spain, Flanders, and Germany, were comatose in art, and France had come to her Watteau, Pater, and Lancret, and was coming to her Greuze — all men of an essentially decadent period, great as was the individual merit of Watteau, — when Hogarth introduced into painting the new and important element of Brains. It is not an exaggeration to say that the kind of intellect evinced by Hogarth — the invention of subject, dramatic truth, power, and consistency, actuality of treatment, and moral bearing upon real life, — was a new thing in art, and was both the germ and the epitome of whatever is most vital in the modern as distinguished from the elder schools. Hogarth made painting as much an affair of mind as literature had always been; and he has impelled or con- strained his successors to perceive that so it must be in the present age of the world. Absurd as it would be to say that the great painters of former times — a Giotto, a Michael Angelo, a Durer, or a Tintoret — were men wanting in brains, it is nevertheless true that none of them had imported into art the same quality or the same quantum of intellect as Plogarth did : with them, the conception of art and the form of pictorial representation had always been the paramount things; much more so with other men of equal or analogous painting faculty, such as Veronese, Velasquez, or Rubens. Giotto, Raphael, and Durer — the former two in illustrative, and the last in invented, subjects — had come nearest to the standard of Hogarth; but the cases have an essential and unmistakeable diversity, which we need not pause to analyse in detail. To the argument that the art, and not the intellect of any other THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 1 47 order, is really the supreme thing for the artist, we should be the last to demur; but this also, being a collateral question, need not detain us, and does not invalidate the position which we claim for Hogarth as the founder of modern art. The British school has two other claims to rank as an originator. Turner stands so far apart from all other land- scape-painters as to be rather the founder of a new phase of art than the supreme master in an old one. In more recent days Praeraphaelitism has arisen to assert that there is no necessary antagonism between the most pictorial con- ception of a thing and the thing itself ; that it is open to the painter, however imaginative, to follow nature in all respects, not only in some, in detail and in all details, not only in generals and in hints for after adaptation ; that entire freedom of invention, and every possible latitude of artistic aim and point of view, are compatible with, and may in the main be even aided by, entire adherence to visible matter of fact. This is the gist of Praeraphaelitism, and not the crude notion, so often attributed to it, that mere matter of fact, subserving no artistic purpose, is the be-all and end-all of art. The Prseraphaelite artist is eager to take the jury- man’s oath of 6 The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth but he chooses for himself, from any province of fact or invention, what he will tell the truth about, and what the real truth available for his purpose may be. It is a doctrine which had never before been so accurately and so fully set forth, and was promulgated at a time when artistic sophistry and flimsiness prevailed to such an extent as to give the doctrine the character of a protest. The very last thing to which it can be fairly likened is the revivalism and pietism of that modern German art which has sometimes been termed Praeraphaelite, but which is more properly Raphaelite without the backbone of Raphael. 1 48 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. We have mentioned the chief general claims of the British school of painting to gratitude, but we find it much less easy to define the broad distinctive characteristics of the school. Foreign critics, talking about English domes- ticity, high finish, untoned colour, and so on, as they did at the time of the Paris Exhibition, do not appear to us mainly to hit the mark, though what they say may be true enough as far as it goes, and the domestic has certainly had an extreme development among us, sometimes original, often namby-pamby. O11 the whole, we can fix upon no general term more comprehensively definite than to call it the Representative School. It is a school not marked, unless as an exception, by idealism, breadth, aspiration, tradition, picturesqueness, or vivid prepossession of any sort. It is not historic, nor religious, nor allegorical. It contemplates things dispassionately, without seeing deep into them, to do which is the property of imagination combined with percep- tion ; it represents them accurately and nicely, with some ingenuity and no great grasp, aiming mostly to make the spectator see the thing as the painter sees it, not because he has any very strong feelings or perceptions of his own to express in the mode of representation, but because he does so see it, and thinks that is the way it would strike an average and unprejudiced eye. The school is therefore on the whole truth-telling and wide in its range; but its truth tends to run into particulars and to miss intensity, and its width of range seldom embraces the highest things treated in the highest form. Two of the earlier schools, the Flemish-German of the middle ages and the Dutch of the seventeenth century, may also be called schools of Repre- sentation; but the British is so much freer in its movements than the first, and so much more refined in taste and acuter in intellect than the second, that neither of these schools THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 1 49 can be at all cited in its genealogy. The British represent- ative school may be said to take the narrative form; it represents facts without, for the most part, vitalizing them by passion, or transfiguring them by poetic conception. We may be pleased to reflect that, as time passes, and the minor men, who give the average tone to the school, sink further out of sight, the greater masters, less capable of being comprehended under a uniform designation, will stand out uncompanioned, and hand down to posterity an artistic history nobler than the annals of the time itself. Hogarth, as we have already said, was the initiator both of British and of modern art. From him we derive most of that which is distinctive of our school in subjects of incident, even in such as have but a very slight analogy to the range chiefly illustrated by Hogarth himself. Opie shows the semi-literal method of treatment in historic art — a hybrid which has little value. It is not literal enough, nor elevated enough, and the combination is an unsightly one. Of this method we see the dregs in Northcote, and still more unpleasantly in Westall, who is an example of meagre and cast-iron conventionalism. West developes a merely traditional and half-understood classicism, with scarcely any of the innate feeling for art on its own account ; he is worthy of lasting honour, however, in consideration of his having been the first man of his time to show, in the picture of the ‘ Death of Wolfe/ the practicability, which soon grew into the necessity, of treating a contemporary historical subject in contemporary costume. The anecdote of Reynolds’s opposition and conversion is well known. Stothard is the representative of purism ; a quality alien from the general tendencies of British art, and incompatible with many of the right and needful aims of a painter, although marked by great suavity in Stothard’s hands. The purism 150 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. of Stothard contrasts with the muscular and attitudinising idealism of Fuseli; a style which scarcely deserves to be calledddealism, but rather extravagance, in respect of form and manner, but which is united with some true imaginative gifts in the Swiss painter. It contrasts also with the sub- limity of Blake, combined although this is with a purism of a more ideal and severe order, as well as with a daring use of form, often in its most physical aspect, to express the most abstract of intellectual abstractions. Hilton is an example of the modem historic painters of our school, with little guidance save from rules of art which the great artists from whom they are derived would have disdained to for- mulate into rules whereby to fetter their own free genius. Equally modern are Bonington and Newton, typical paint- ers of the period of ‘ annual’ literature and art, with enough of nature and of art to work up well for the display of cleverness, and for the gratification of a not too exacting public. Spite of the comparative flimsiness of their aim, they both show well in this exhibition, and deserve to be remembered with cordiality. Muller, a clever and vivid sketcher in picturesque landscape and figures, belongs essen- tially to the same class ; and perhaps it was with sound self- knowledge rather than carelessness that he seldom carried his works beyond the stage of sketching. Alfred Chalon, in his historic or fancy subjects, was still the fashionable portrait-painter, ready, skilful, and brilliant. David Scott is one of the greatest names of our school ; belonging dis- tinctively, by style of painting as well as by birth, to the Scottish section of it, but displaying powers and resources, both of colour and drawing, of a most exceptional kind, marred certainly, too often, by turbulence of feeling and erring ambition. Where he failed, he was wont to fail disastrously; as he achieved magnificently what he achieved. THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 1 5 I For intellect, knowledge, and strength, he stands perhaps unrivalled in our school; his main characteristic may be termed Historic Invention under a dramatic aspect, as shown here in the pictures of c Paracelsus’ and ‘ the Water- gate of Calais.’ Maclise also, among our living painters, possesses this supreme gift of Historic Invention, thwarted in great measure by narrowness and theatricality; while in Cross, with less invention, there was true historic capacity in thought and style. Haydon was not destitute of the same inventive gift ; but an ambition fully as erring as that of Scott, more restricted in the feeling with which it was associated, and combined with a pseudo-classic tendency, made his position in art approach much nearer to ultimate failure. Etty, again, exemplifies the classic tendency; but it is united in his case with a splendour of colour, and an essentially natural taste and perception for nude form, and every now and then — as in the great Judith series — with a majestic energy of aspiration, which rank him among the true masters in the roll of art. Leslie was admirable in that department of domestic art which leans to elegant simplicity, as well as in his power of illustration of great dramatic humourists, such as Shakspeare and Cervantes. In both these departments he may remain long unsurpassed. With Wilkie, as the first very excellent master of that style after Hogarth, we commence the long list of our simply domestic painters. Nicety, tact, and reserve, mingled with some genuine dramatic ability, distinguish his productions. Among his leading successors of our own day may be named Clark, gentle and quiet ; Thomas Faed, dexterous, and often with an intrusive air, tending to the affected in sentiment, and the silly in humour ; O’Neil, cold and hard in art, and only now and then sincere in feeling; Abraham Solomon, more clever as a painter, but mostly trading in a poor spirit 152 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. upon the spectator’s sympathy or smiles; and the Scotch painter Harvey, in whom some truth of humour and emo- tion loom through a settled artistic mannerism. William Collins was also to a great extent a domestic painter, but very miscellaneous in subject. He offers on the whole a compendium of the aims and qualities of the British school, upon a mediocre level; looking at most subjects with a certain genuineness, but carrying them out in a per- functory manner which stops short of artistic breadth and power, and, when he aimed higher, betraying but too clearly that neither mind nor hand came with any adequate pre- paration to the arduous effort. Mrs. Wells, whom we regret to have to speak of in this division as prematurely numbered among our deceased painters, will long probably remain the leader of our female art, and indeed the most richly gifted of all w T omen-painters. British portraiture begins with one of the great names of all time, Reynolds. Colour, breadth, and intensity of natural perception, are among his characteristics and charms; but of course a sentence, or a whole article, would do him no sort of justice, and we leave the filling-in to our readers. In Lawrence, in the ensuing generation, we see, spite of much diversity of style, the dregs of Reynolds, as we saw the dregs of Opie in Northcote. He had unquestionably great natural talent ; but the attempt to be graceful and impressive in his facility led him, by easy stages, to showi- ness, looseness of character, and an empty brilliancy more fatal than narrow-minded literality. Gainsborough, the equal and rival of Reynolds, is more contemplative and poetical in his portrait-art, if not perhaps absolutely so high a master; he was certainly more large-sighted and versatile. Copley shows to great advantage in the exhibition. With- out appearing to aim at any very special pictorial results, THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 1 53 he succeeds in a high degree, through simple good sense, clearness of view, and steady competence of work. Raeburn displays a strong individuality, with something of the same provincial turn which generally clings to literary work pro- duced under the like conditions. Jackson’s portraiture is of the ordinary modern class, having no particular aim beyond life-likeness, and that sort of breadth which can be obtained by obvious and systematized expedients. Most of our current portraiture follows in the same track ; as that of Grant, which, with considerable merit in its way, adds the blemish of more decided flimsiness of handling, and that of Graham Gilbert and Watson Gordon, which at least illustrates the prevalent style in a marked and manly form. Landscape begins in England with a very evident Claude influence, if we take Wilson as our first landscape-painter of note : in Gainsborough the style is thoroughly fresh and national, though blameably slight. The reaction against the neglect which blighted him in life has made the more recent estimate of Wilson somewhat too high-pitched. His feeling, except in the many instances where so-called rules of art interfered, was true, but his perception and style were limited. However, two or three of the pictures in the present collection are beautiful in harmony. Crome dis- plays another influence from old art, that of the literalist foliage-painters, and especially Hobbima. In his best pro- ductions, however, he rises far above this, as in the 4 Mouse- hold Heath,’ a work eminently marked by strong natural perception, enjoyment of space and breadth, and power to contemplate ordinary things in the true spirit of art. On the whole, Crome belongs to the modern way of seeing and feeling, though partially to the old way of representing. Callcott goes a step beyond him in modernism, although he lags far behind in all those qualities which make the artist 154 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. Amiable and well-meant platitude is constantly distilling through his brush from mind, eye, and hand, and not often turning out so well as in the meritorious pictures collected at South Kensington. Loutherbourg, and Runciman who may be classed with him, get most of their inspiration from Salvator, whose influence over our landscape school may almost be said to have died out with them. In the very fine sea-piece by John Chalon, as in others of the landscapes of this versatile painter, we find a certain idealism mixed with a boldly tentative spirit, which seldom rose quite out of the region of effort into that of achievement. Of Turner (very imperfectly represented here, though with several noble pictures) everything or nothing might equally well be said, so far does he transcend all other men, and all sum- mary characterization. He sucked into the vortex of his own marvellous genius each past faculty of each past land- scape-painter, re-created the art, and opened up, it may be said, a new line of man’s power over nature. He stands at present the exemplar of perfect landscape ; perfect, we say, spite of the manifold imperfections of even so great an artist as Turner, because it is not yet in evidence that any greater result is within the compass of the art. It may be developed some day; but we have no ground for conjectur- ing that it will. From the universality of Turner the gap is vast to the exclusiveness of Danby or Martin. The former may be considered as representing landscape of a single feature ; that in which unity of impression is produced more by voluntary blindness to whatever does not subserve the immediate purpose than by a finished sense of relation and fitness. Martin, the prototype of Danby in this re- spect, is further to be distinguished as a master of grandeur inconsistent with the high qualities of art; perspective with him supersedes architecture, scale supersedes drawing, gloom THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 1 55 and corruscation supersede the majestic breadth of serenity. Constable stands out prominently as the most unmixed pro- fessor of modernism. His advent was a turning-point in the school. He carried out to the utmost extent the fresh- ness and off-handedness of modern landscape; catching at the obvious general look of things, and doing all so as to be recognized and enjoyed by the least studious eye which has gazed upon nature. Sincere and not to be called super- ficial in aim, he has done more than perhaps any other painter to elicit and encourage the mindlessness and slovenly facility of the modern school. We have spoken as yet of the progress and variations of our school in the hands of deceased painters only, save in two or three instances where we have coupled with the names of the past some of the present, as belonging to the same category. We now turn wholly to our living painters. The patriarch of the generation is Mulready,* whose works may be defined as uniting the basis of domesticism with some points of poetic garnishing — a kindly, anti-literal, almost pastoral feeling — and high artistic choiceness of ex- ecution. The power of mind, however, proves hardly suf- ficient to support these more delicate qualities in the cases where the domesticism, in a positive and tangible form, is withdrawn. Perhaps his most prominent personal quality in art is a determination always to do his best, aided by a more than common freedom from variation of power; and, along with this, a faculty and habit of giving all the elements of his own range of art in impartial and nicely ad- justed balance. His essential defect, besides the slenderness of mental force, is a noteable want of impulse and of sturdy spontaneity. He is a humourist, and an idyllic designer; * The reader will bear in mind that this was written in 1862, accounting for Mulready’s being mentioned as a living painter. 156 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. a painter of character, of sentiment, and of simple agreeable- ness ; a realist, and a purist ; an adept in drawing, design, colour, texture, composition, handling, effect. But he is not an absolutely great humourist, nor great idyllic designer, nor great colourist, or the rest of it. His works are emi- nently ‘ satisfactory’ in a certain sense — that is one of their distinctive qualities ; and yet they afford less genuine satis- faction than many works obviously imperfect. He has produced masterpieces, real masterpieces which are sure to live : only, the indisputable artistic gift which is in them stops short of power, and the mastery is the very utmost which he possesses. It is not the outpouring of a cornu- copia, but the squeezing of a sponge : there is no reserve of faculty behind, the evidence of a lavishly endowed nature. Eastlake is wholly a painter of sentiment, or more pro- perly purism — the same characteristic which we have noted in Mulready, and especially in Stothard, with much less native or available gift, and a more consciously defined style. His pupil Dobson moves in the same track, but has not shown himself at all equal to Eastlake ; his feeling for art being as inferior to that painter’s as the latter’s original gift is inferior to Stothard’s. Cope and Paton, after all that can rightly be said in appreciation of their unusual abilities and attainments, represent prosaic poetry; hard, fixed eyes, and minds which feel how fine a thing it would be to be rich, subtle, and much- embracing. Nearly the same may be said of Herbert, who is, however, with at least an equal natural faculty, a good deal more smart and stagey, with less solidity of attainment. His prose comes nearer than Cope’s to looking like poetry ; but, on examination, it is hollower as prose. Hook offers, in his figure-pictures, one of the first examples of the treat- ment of incidents chiefly for the sake of colour, while his landscapes are almost equally strong in transcript and THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 157 pictorial conception. Robert Lauder, with one or two others, are direct inheritors from Walter Scott in general choice of subject, and feeling for chivalry; a feeling which even in Scott took a somewhat factitious form, and which has sunk into a very flimsy affair in the hands of his pictorial imitators. The most strictly popular of living painters at the present moment — excluding those who addict themselves to domestic subjects — is probably Phillip, whose artistic qualifications consist in an insignificant but telling choice of subject, and a fine promptitude and vigour of execution often chargeable with coarseness. The popular style, however, appears equally in the natty dexterity of Frith and Elmore, and the well-considered ingenuity, and careful but not strongly distinctive painting, of Egg. The public want, above all, something that tells its story in a salient way, and in which the pictorial conception of the subject — the means of representation which constitute pictorial, as other means constitute poetic, art — shall not be made very pro- minent. But in the long run this judgment is directly reversed, and pictures descend to posterity more in virtue of their art than of any other quality. Poetical feeling is not a prominent characteristic of the British school ; it is the title of Poole to a high rank among our living painters, though he is not well disciplined in execution. Archer shares the same tendency ; but he paints more evenly, and is altogether more of a realist. Anecdotal history has for many years been a staple branch of our art, and has es- pecially conduced to the popularity of Ward, spite of an extreme lack of refinement in his treatments. Lucy handles history in a broader way, endeavouring to keep himself right, but failing generally to attain an absolute success through the want of dramatic power; his last and largest work, the 4 Jack Cade,’ shows a French influence, which may probably do him more good than harm. 158 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. Of other painters exhibiting a foreign influence, we may name Calderon in his later works on the French side, Cave Thomas on the German, and chiefly Leighton, in whom there is something of French training and of Italian feeling. He bids fair to be the most eminent of all the British artists who have had a foreign tendency, and the one with the most numerous following. Another influence — that of Etty - — might at one time have produced a marked effect upon the school ; but, coming to be taken up, divorced from its greatness in colour, by a conventionalist like Frost, its arch-disciple, it has fallen into mere foppery and prema- mature senility, and by this time into deserved disrepute. F. R. Pickersgill has sometimes a similar aim, with no small reality of colourist power, but he cannot be said to have carried it far. The phase of art which has exercised a real and most potent influence of late years is that previously referred to — Praeraphaelitism. It started with actuality of conception and thoroughness of execution, involving great elaboration of detail. As the masters of the movement advanced in power, the range of their style has also enlarged, passing, in some instances, into intensity rather than detailed thoroughness, and always making a strong point of colour. Solidity and realism are its abiding characteristics, exercised indifferently upon modern or mediaeval subjects, and combining our school, to a great extent, into unity of effort with every possible variation of motive and point of view. Before Praeraphaelitism began as a distinct movement, Lewis andDyce had taken some steps in the same direction — the former with delicate com- pleteness of detail, the latter with definition and some degree of severity of form ; and, as the movement progressed, both have, to a considerable extent, moved on in the same track, although it would be most unfair to these eminent men to THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 1 59 class them amid the followers of a cause of which they were the independent forerunners. The same is the case with one of the leading Praeraphaelites of the present day — Madox Brown. He had already made his mark before the actual Praeraphaelites were out of the Academy school, and has gone on from strength to strength in development of the bent of his own genius, and in sympathy with theirs. The admirable emigrant picture, ‘ The Last of England/ as well as his other two, show him to be one of the natural leaders of the British or any school. Millais and Holman Hunt are the two of the original Prseraphaelite trio of 1849 represented in the Exhibition; the former supreme as a born painter, the latter great also in painting faculty strenu- ously worked out, and much more noteable as a man of intellectual vigour and aspiration, although not possessed of Millais’s spontaneity of artistic perception and power. Martineau, with his truly excellent picture ‘ The Last Day in the Old Home,’ establishes a full claim to be considered one of the most distinguished leaders in the same school ; for thoughtful expression, vigour, and completeness, this work could scarcely be surpassed. Hughes, more to be praised for grace than strength, is also a leader in a differ- ent subdivision of the company. In living portraiture we have already mentioned some of the prominent men. Watts turns aside from the very level track ; and, showing an elevated feeling for beauty, and a thoughtful study of character with a view more especially to its artistic adaptability, he paints portraits which stand out in marked and classic contrast to the slurred workmanship of the day. Wells also, in studies of heads and express portraiture, proves a capacity for plain work in good pic- torial style, which may be a valuable corrective to a great deal th&t calls loudly for correction. l6o THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. Landscape of late years has come almost wholly into the domain of Praeraphaelitism. Anthony, indeed, is great in power of a more sudden and arbitrary kind, massive in swift handling, and imperiously concentrated in the im- pressiveness which he stamps upon his work from a vivid personal sensation of it. Perhaps he has succeeded best where he thought least about finished detail, though the 6 Beech-trees and Fern’ is an instance to the contrary. Mason also, a painter of singular perception and refinement, is more foreign and broad in his method. But our other landscape-painters of recent time, Inchbold, Boyce, Alfred Hunt, Lear, Brett, Davis, Whaite, M‘Callum, and to a great extent Oakes, are all of the Praeraphaelite type ; witnessing, however, to the width of its range and aim by works so different as the ‘Val d’ Aosta’ of Brett, endless in finish of detail, and the ‘ Harrowing’ of Davis, at once profoundly actual in its broadly realized facts, and poetical in its impression and suggestiveness. With the exception of Turner, we doubt whether any painter of our school ap- proaches nearer to the ideal of true landscape art than Davis in this delightful work. In animal painting we have three men to name of special excellence. Ward was a master in solid literality, and had considerable insight into the varieties of brute character. Landseer is the dramatist of the animal world : life, spirit, incident, are at his command more richly and more sym- pathetically than with any other painter of the like class. We need not dwell upon a power recognised and appreciated probably throughout the civilized world, with no dissentient though some qualifying voices. Wolf, a German whom England can only claim by adoption, is the most perfect of the three in intimate study of veritable fact and detail — the positive forms, instincts, and habits, the minutiae of furs THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. l6l and plumages. If Landseer is the dramatist, and Ward the connoisseur in live stock, Wolf is most distinctively the naturalist. We here conclude our very summary notice of the oil- painters, considered with reference to the phases which our school has gone through in their hands, and we pass to the water-colours. Our water-colour art may be divided into three branches. The first is the style with which it commenced : subjects, generally of landscape, washed in with a prevalent brown or greyish-blue tint, passing gradually into a more fully developed key of natural colour. The second is the style practised by Robson, Barrett, Prout, Turner, and many others, up to our own day; embracing the full key of colour, though often kept down with a tendency to a prevalent tint. The third is the style now generally in use, and the chief technical distinction of which is the use of body-colours, combined with as complete and free an employment of all the hues of the palette as in oil-painting. It shows no limits of aim, no voluntary stopping-short of the facts of nature in atmosphere or colour. Its products are pictures differing from oil-pictures only in the diversity of the vehicle and the consequent aspect of the work, not in any diversity of artistic point of view. The student of the works of Turner, from the earliest to the latest, will find that he covers the entire field of water-colour operations. His first works, corresponding to the first branch of the art, are perhaps on the whole scarcely so perfect as those of Girtin. He was at this time a student rather than a master, although in many instances he reached the acme of that style also. In the second style he stands unrivalled, and also in the third, which he practised, how- ever, with only a sparing use of body-colour. The most M 1 62 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART, perfect and enchanting landscapes in the whole world are to be found among his works of these two classes. The Exhibition contains several of each kind ; those of English scenery and gentlemen’s seats belonging to Sir A. A. Hood, in the former (or second) style, are most specially to be commended to one’s study and delight. In the first style Cozens and Girtin are the chief masters ; the latter, more particularly, reaching to an excellence which the limits of the system could not transcend, and which is entirely satisfying to the eye. We ask for no more, so ex- quisite are the feeling and perception indicated with these restricted means. Sandby and Edridge, and often Blake, belong to the same division. Robson and Barrett, in the second style of the art, are consummate in repose and light. With them we may name Yarley, De Wint, Copley Fielding, Prout, Cox (one of the greatest artists of the British school, in any department), Dadd, and the wonderful truth and colourist-power of William Hunt, whether in figures or still-life. For pure, actual, and intense colour, very few men could be placed beside Hunt. An artist of real talent much cankered by flimsiness, Cattermole, is a leader in the practice of water-colour paint- ing with body-colour, as is also Lewis, profoundly versed in the subtleties of colour and manipulation. The use of body-colour, however, varies greatly among the men belong- ing to the third division of the art, which is to be dis- tinguished from the two earlier divisions not more by this quality than by the other which we have mentioned — the prevalent merging of the province of water-colour, as a method governed by its own laws, in that of painting generally. Alfred Newton in landscape, and Burton in figure-subjects, have attained a very high pitch of depth, THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 1 63 brilliancy, and relief. We might refer to many other men — to Alfred Fripp, Haag, and Smallfield, for particular merits ; to Corbould, Tayler, and Richardson, for points of fallacy into which the style has already led, and seems but too likely to continue, under the influence of popularity, to lead : but the aspects of water-colour art as at present practised are so familiar, and receive such constant illustra- tion in annual displays, that we may be content to pause here. We will only add the expression of a regret that the art tends, on the whole, to fall into mediocre hands, not guided by any high abstract conception of art, or of the opportunities of this particular branch of it. Aimlessness in style, slightness and unimportance of subject and execu- tion, threaten to keep water-colour art popular among pur- chasers, and second-rate in intrinsic value, until some new genius, as firm in grasp as Cox or Hunt, shall arise to rule it in the present, and carry it forward to further develop- ment. We proposed at starting to limit ourselves in the main to that section of the International Exhibition which stands apart in the official ‘Fine Arts Catalogued Our few re- maining and very insufficient remarks will apply to that part of the Industrial display which partakes most largely of a decorative or art character. It is perhaps scarcely an exaggeration to say that beauty of decorative art is a more healthy and essential thing in a nation, and a more to be desired point of attainment, than beauty in the painting of pictures and the carving of statues; just as a nation blessed with lovely national melodies is better off, as a musical people, than one which, without these, might produce here and there a composer of lofty symphonies or oratorios. All nations hitherto, as far as we know, have risen into the power of High Art out of 164 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. a long-possessed sense and practice of decorative beauty; and most or all have declined in decoration from the period of their culmination in high art. Raphael, carrying pic- torial art beyond the limits traced by his predecessors, and ruining the remnants of true decorative taste by his ara- besques in the Logge of the Vatican, is one example in point out of many. The reason for this may not be far to seek. Decorative beauty is perfect at a point below that where the highest high art, the greatest range of subject treated in the most fetterless manner, begins. The prac- titioner of high art, and the nation familiarized with it, seek to introduce into decoration analogous qualities, which it is not able to bear, and drag down, in the spoiling of decoration, the true standard of the high art itself. Modern Europe has risen into a certain competence of High Art, or at least of natural subjects treated in art with- out any conventional limitation. It has reached this point, not, as of old, through a gradual perfecting and enlargement of decorative processes, but by independent effort in painting and sculpture, and the study of the older models of high art. The result is that, in England, along with a certain realizing of the standard of pictorial and sculptural art, there is at the present day nothing that can be called a style of decoration; while in France and some other countries the style of decoration is false and decadent, although the higher art has a character of vitality. On the other hand, China, japan, India, Turkey, and the East generally, have genuine and most lovely decorative art (exposed in some instances to partial deterioration from European influence), and have not yet risen into the stage of what Europe recognizes as High Art. But, by these very conditions, they are in a •healthier phase of art than Europe, although a more limited one. THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 165 Chaos rules as yet in European decoration ; false stand- ards, false attempts, and failure in the result. We may quote at random a few examples which court and repel the eye in the Exhibition; such as the French carpet of the Sleeping Beauty, the sham-Gothic wooden pulpit from Louvain, the porcelain from the Prussian Royal Factory, or from Dresden, the copy in Gobelins tapestry of Titian’s Assumption (wonderful certainly in its mistaken way), the Italian wooden inlaid tables, or Tweedy’s Shakspearian and Crusoe sideboards. Most of the painted glass is also erroneous in principle, or coldly imitative of a better period of past art. The English is on the whole the best, and contains a great deal of clever effort, partially at least successful. In this department the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Co., shows an originality and an artistic ex- cellence, true at once to decoration, and to high art in design of figure-subject, which promise well for the future ; and the same may be said of their furniture and other decorative work in the Mediaeval Court, which stand far apart from most of the specimens in their vicinity. The reason is that this firm includes various artists who are content to practise high art in painting or architecture, and to be decorators and beautifiers of furniture when this is the point in question. Above all, they come with some freshness to the task, and, with many evidences of mediaeval sympathy, are not direct copyists of any extant mediaevalisms merely as such. Their glass is significant in invention, original and artist-like in design, and simply effective in colour, yet almost retiring in comparison with some of their cruder competitors. It is curious that these artists, who have not produced a single specimen in the least like any specimen of any period of the middle ages, have been popularly pitched upon as the most c exaggerated medievalists’ of all. Curious, and also 1 66 THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. suggestive : the occult reason, undetected by the adverse commentators themselves, being that the artists in question are genuine mediaevalists in spirit , so far as they are medi- aeval at all, while the mass of glass-painters are mere imitators of the externals of mediaevalism, faults and sole- cisms included. Similarly, one of Titian’s senators in a a frock-coat and trowsers would be more truly Venetian and senatorial than a London shopkeeper in the robes of a Pro- curator of St. Mark’s. The one would possess the essence, the other fumble in the cast-off clothes. But your popular discriminator cannot be so nice in his distinctions : by instinct he blunders towards the truth, but in expressing it he inverts the terms. He would tell you that the counter-jumper is a Procurator, and that the senator is 4 doing the Titianesque.’ Returning now to the Mediaeval Court in the Exhibition, we notice the altar-cloths and carpets from designs by the architect Mr. Street. These are very brilliant in their particular class of design, and show in like manner the advantage of having at work an artist of a high class who bends to decorative require- ments when he undertakes to meet them. The revived and ever-increasing study of the Gothic styles appears in numbers of other objects throughout the Exhibition, especially from our own country, and will not fail to produce good fruit wherever it is taken up by a man who, understanding and obeying the form of art within which he works, has yet a personality and an independent perception of his own. Among the French contributions, many of them in various departments most skilfully and excellently worked, we must specify the extreme exquisiteness and subtle manipulation of a great deal of the porcelain. Much of that from Sevres is truly consummate in its way. The uses of such exhibitions of art as that to which the THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF ART. 1 67 world has here been invited are more gradual than imme- diate. They reveal to us our attainments by example, and our deficiencies by comparison; suggest to each nation something to be learned from the other; and plant seeds far and wide, to be cultivated, let us hope, into beautiful exotics, and finally adopted into the national mind and practice. But each nation must remain itself, and must elicit to the uttermost its own gifts. These may be chastened and corrected here and there by extraneous hints ; yet the national mind must not lapse into that slovenly cosmopoli- tanism which, in art as in social and political morals, by obliterating deep-lying distinctions, would leave it shallower than before in any real perception or sympathy — a vague approver of good and bad alike, aimlessly aiming at ir- reconcileable qualities, and incapable of any steady self- development or unswerving conviction. To say No, and stick to it, is a necessary obverse of the power of saying Yes to some purpose. V. PRxERAPHAELITISM [1851]. Non pas que je sois l’adversaire de ce qui se fait maintenant dans la peinture en Angleterre ; j’ai ete frappe meme de cette prodigieuse conscience que ce peuple peut apporter meme dans les choses d’ imagination. II semble meme qu’en revenant au rendu excessif des details ils sont plus dans leur genie que quand ils imitent les peintres italiens, et surtout les coloristes flamands. — Delacroix, 1858. The rules of art may be broadly divided into two classes, the positive and the conventional. We say conventional, not here in the invidious sense in which the term is more currently used, but merely to imply the presence of general consent. The rules of perspective, of anatomy, are positive rules; there are both positive and conventional rules of light and shade, and of colour; those of composition, as teachable under any system, are wholly conventional. And the reason of this distinction is too obvious to need being more than alluded to. Nature is always in perspective, and any conspicuous departure from her ordinary plan of ana- tomy is a monstrosity ; there are natural facts and harmonies of colour, and uniform effects of light and shade, as well as combinations and proportions of these, generally adopted, but not constantly visible in nature ; while no certain means exist for determining the relation of position in which a given event or emotion will place those affected by it. PRiERAPHAELITISM. 169 To the positive rules obedience is imperative, though not of equal importance in all cases — he is not a correct artist who violates them : obedience to the conventional rules can rationally be based only on conviction of their value as conducive to truth or beauty. No man is born into the world under obligation to subscribe to the opinions, or see according to the perceptions, of another ; least of all is the artist bound to do so. Art — except such as consists in the mere collection of materials through the medium of strict copyism— represents individual mind and views working from absolute data of fact. Turn and twist it as we may, nature and the man are the two halves of every true work of art. The imitation of natural objects as specimens, unblended, unsubordinated, with no purpose save imitation, is confessedly a low branch of art : but the imitation of another man’s perception of natural objects ? The imitation of the form of a face through which you are incompetent to trace or pourtray the character is a laborious imbecility : but the imitation of Phidias’s or Raphael’s preference in feature, because Phidias or Raphael liked that, while you prefer Miss Smith? The conventional rules of painting are, and must ever be, matter of opinion : they are not fact, but belief of the best adaptability of fact. Of such are the rules of a principal light and a principal shadow in certain definite proportions, of the balance of colour, and of specific forms of grouping — as the pyramidal, for instance. The faith in these or the like of these as imperative dogmas in art, the non-observance of which is heresy, has been the result of one of two causes; either that general opinion, and consequently that of the artists who first acted on and promulgated them, was in their favour, or that the public taste was indoctrinated by the artists. There can be little doubt that the second PR^ERAPHAELITISM. 170 supposition represents the true state of the case; it being difficult to believe that, on questions of the practical management of nature by art, the public should have been in advance of its professors, or that any but floating notions, waiting to be put into shape but incapable of guiding, should have been abroad on the subject. We may assume, then, that the public was educated into these principles successively by their visible influence in renowned works or the direct authority of the painter ; and that they have come down to late generations insisted upon, magnified from methodic practice perhaps into tradition and formal rule, with all the additional weight derived first from ad- miring disciples, then from unquestioning scholars, lastly from drowsy and comfortable imitators. It is so pleasant to learn what you have to do, instead of studying and discovering it. On enquiry, the artist of the nineteenth century finds that conventional rules rest on some one’s ipse dixit or ipse fecit • and, reflecting further on the point, it may possibly occur to him that he too is endowed, or, to be an artist, ought to be endowed, with the faculties of observation and analysis, and might exercise those faculties for the confirm- ation or otherwise of the axioms he has been taught. Per- haps he will walk out into the sunlight, and be struck with the teasing fact that, so far as his unaided perceptions testify, there is no principal shadow occupying one third of the space, and that really the background declines to recede in that accommodating ratio which he knows it is bound to abide by. Or perhaps he will mix with the intellectual and the beautiful, and, finding a hardly appreciable leaven of Greek ideal, be compelled to lapse into the notion that mind can speak through homely features, and loveliness be English as well as Hellenic. Or he will come across PRiERAPHAELITISM. 1 7 1 groups of endless variety, consistency, and interest, which by rights do not compose at all. It is now three years ago that three young artists as- serted in concert through their pictures that such was their deliberate conviction. They informed the general body of artists and the public at large, in the language of practical demonstration, that, in fact, they intended to divest them- selves of not a little of the academical arraying supplied to them, and would replace it from their own resources to the best of their ability : that what they saw, that they would paint — all of it, and all fully ; and what they did not see they would try to do without. And they called themselves Prseraphaelites. The painters before Raphael had worked in often more than partial ignorance of the positive rules of art, and un- affected by conventional rules. These were not known of in their days; and they neither invented nor discovered them. It is to the latter fact, and not the former, that the adoption of the name ‘ Praeraphaelites’ by the artists in question is to be ascribed. Prseraphaelites truly they are — but of the nineteenth century. Their aim is the same — truth; and their process the same — exactitude of study from nature : but their practice is different, for their means are enlarged. Nor is it in direction, but in tone, of mind — in earnestness and thoroughness — that they are otherwise identified with their prototypes. Such we understand to be the character of the protest which the C P. R. B.s’ have devoted themselves to record, — investigation for themselves on all points which have hither- to been settled by example or unproved precept, and un- flinching avowal of the result of such investigation ; to which is added the absolute rejection of all meretricious embellish- ment — of all which might be introduced to heighten effect 172 PRiERAPHAELITISM. or catch the eye to the disregard or overlaying of actual or presumable fact. It is in the nature of conventional rules that their true authority diminishes in proportion as their factitious sway extends itself ; for they come to be looked on as inherent and necessary elements in pictorial practice, instead of what they really are, means to a certain end, useful only in so far as they subserve that. But this end may be, and often must be, one not germane to the true purpose of the work in hand, when its introduction and all that ministers to it are but so much excrescence. Thus it is that the pernicious use to which rules of this kind are applied has narrowed the word ‘ conventional’ into an epithet of reproach. The artist is taught to rely not on fact, but on another’s use or combination of fact. He puts his eyes to school. He takes results, and not materials, as his ways and means for working in a creative and imitative art ; and rejoices to find that his secondary creation is like a previous secondary — comparatively careless whether either resembles the primary. The main dangers incidental to Praeraphaelitism are threefold. First, that, in the effort after unadulterated truth, the good of conventional rules should be slighted, as w r ell as their evil avoided. Certainly it is not the first glance at any aspect of nature which will inform the artist of its most essential qualities, and indicate the mode of setting to work which will be calculated to produce the noblest as well as the closest representation possible. Minute study, however, such as the Prseraphaelite artists bestow on their renderings from nature, cannot but result in the attainment of one order of truth. Besides this, it is a practical education; an apprenticeship to the more accurate learning of structure, to the more eclectic apprecia- tion of effect ; and tends in a more thorough manner to PRiERAPHAELITISM. 173 answer the purpose contemplated by the cramming educa- tion which they set aside. To the disadvantage under notice the Prseraphaelite method of study from nature is liable, as are the executive and manipulative parts of a picture under any system — and for the same reason, that, in all, experience is required for perfect mastery ; with this difference in its favour, that it has an absolute value of sincerity and faithfulness. The second danger is that detail and accessory should be insisted on to a degree detracting from the importance of the chief subject and action. But this does not naturally, much less of necessity, follow from the Prseraphaelite prin- ciple ; which contemplates the rendering of nature as it is, — in other words, as it seems to the artist from his point of view, material and intellectual (for there is no separating the two things), and the principal, therefore, in its supremacy, the subordinate in its subordination. The contrary mistake is one to which only a low estimate, a semi-comprehension, of his own principles, can lead the Prseraphaelite. It can scarcely, under any circumstances, be fallen into by a man of original or inventive power. Thirdly, there remains the danger of an injudicious choice of model ; a danger of whose effect the Prseraphaelite pictures offer more than one instance. All artists, indeed, unless they have emancipated themselves into so imaginative an altitude, far from the gross region of fact, as to dispense with models altogether, are exposed to it ; for Virgin Maries and Cleopatras are not to be found for the wanting : but he who believes that ‘ ideal beauty consists partly in a Greek outline of nose, partly in proportions expressible in decimal fractions between the lips and chin, but partly also in that degree of improvement which he is to bestow upon God’s 174 PR^RAPHAELITISM. works in general/* will find the difficulty yielding enough under the influence of idealism by rote. The Praeraphaelite dares not ‘ improve God’s works in general.’ His creed is truth ; which in art means appropriateness in the first place, scrupulous fidelity in the second. If true to himself, he will search diligently for the best attainable model ; whom, when obtained, he must render as conformably as possible with his conception, but as truly as possible also to the fact before him. Not that he will copy the pimples or the freckles; but transform, disguise, ‘ improve,’ he may not. His work must be individual too — expressive of me no less than of not-me . He cannot learn off his ideal, and come prepared to be superior to the mere real. It is indeed a singular abuse to call that idealism which is routine and copy ; a solecism which cries aloud to common sense for extinction. A young artist cannot enter the lists armed with an ideal prepense, though he may flaunt as his pennant the tracing-paper scored with fac-similes of another man’s ideal. If he will have one, properly so called, he must work for it ; and his own will not be bom save through a long and laborious process of comparison, sifting, and meditation. The single-minded artist must, in the early part of his career, work according to his existing taste in actual living beauty, whether or not he means eventually to abide on principle by unidealized fact ; and tastes in beauty differ notoriously. The prescription-artist corrects his by Raphael and the * As Mr. Ruskin phrases it in his pamphlet, Prceraphaelitism. His main principle, however — that our artists should, and that the Prseraphaelites do, 4 select nothing’ — would in truth, as it appears to us, while it assumes to beg too much in their favour, carry their condemna- tion in it, could its application to them be verified. This we believe not to be the case ; and that, indeed, strict non-selection cannot, in the nature of things, be taken as the rule in a picture of character or incident. But perhaps Mr. Ruskin intended his exhortation in a much more limited sense than it bears, thus broadly put. PRiERAPH AELITI SM. x 75 Greeks. For the other there is nothing but watchfulness, study, and self-reliance. He is working arduously not to self-expression only, but to development. Modern Prseraphaelitism is distinct from medievalism equally in thought and in practice, so far as the latter depends on education, skill of hand, and acquaintance with the principles of design or perspective. Even in the works which bring the originators of this ‘ totally independent and sincere method of study’ within the same lines of thought or of period with the predecessors of Raphael, the points of variance are essential and decisive. Yet more alien are they from that important section of the modern German school which is said to have recurred to a past phasis of art with the view of reaching by gradual stages to their ideal. This ideal, to judge by the chief works of the separatists, seems beyond doubt to be the Raphaelesque. The works of Overbeck, of Steinle, and in a less degree of Cornelius and Bendemann, bear a strong affinity to the Raphaelesque standard of form and sentiment — sometimes to that of Raphael’s later period, seldom to his earliest. Other paint- ers, such as Fuhrich in the compositions which display himself most vividly, can hardly be said to have reverted to any previous school; the character of conception and invention being with these, where not markedly original, German and national to the fullest extent, similarly with the quality of form ; for the sources of which characteristics it would be futile to refer back from the artists themselves. Historically, however, some of this subdivision also may be counted in the same class; and, in the works of all, a standard, a preconception of some kind, is equally and unmistakeably evident. But the German and the English cases present this important difference. The former was an academic revival : the principles of an unquestioned 176 PR^ERAPHAELITISM. dogma had fallen into degradation, and the aim has been constantly after the highest issue of the school which announced it. In England the Raphaelesque dogma is not only a convention but a cant ; few, if any, enforce it systematically in practice. It is held in terrorem over the heads of students ; but such is the almost unlimited range of subject and attempt recognized in England that little beyond fragments of precept, intended to enhance the telling attractiveness of a picture, are seriously laid to heart. These are enough to restrain the student from launching out unfettered on the study of nature, but do not suffice to create a school even academically correct. The English innovation corresponds with the German in no other sense than this. The English revivalists recur to the one primary school — nature, as interpreted by their own eyes and feelings; the Germans, to the purest form of a school ready-organized for them. The English, starting with the acquired knowledge of the day, and having before them an unbounded horizon, may be expected to work out such faculties as are in them to original and progressive results; the Germans, with the same advantages, but a rigorously fixed goal to aspire towards, may at best rival their most cherished prescriptions. Actual consonance be- tween the outcomings of the two systems there is none. The Praeraphaelites have been working bravely and with- out compromise for three years, and have fought their way into public disfavour, — a gain perhaps, as art goes. We hold them to be in the right path : not only because they have achieved unique excellence in imitative execution, nor that we consider their system exceptional, and as such specially needed at the present moment (though these would be grounds of rational approbation) ; but because we believe it to be intrinsically the true one, capable, and best PRiERAPHAELITISM. 177 capable, of leading its adherents each to the highest point of attainment his mental faculties will permit him to reach. It is of secondary importance, yet matter for satisfaction and of good omen, that the young men who have set the first example in this course of study are, unless we mistake, of power themselves to work out the process to worthy intellectual results. N VI. CRITIQUES ON CONTEMPORARY PAINTERS AND DESIGNERS. Quid interest qua quisque prudential verum requirat? Uno itinere non potest perveniri ad tam grande secretum. — Symmachus. MADOX BROWN. The Exhibition of Mr. Browiis Collected Works (1865). Among the visitors to the exhibition of pictures painted by Mr. Ford Madox Brown, there will be some considerable diver- sity of opinion as to the calibre and value of the collection ; less diversity as to its interest ; little or none as to its marked individuality. It is the extreme reverse of an empty or an or- dinary exhibition : it suggests, on the contrary, a great number and variety of topics bearing upon matters of art, and of these we shall endeavour to indicate and skim over a few. We all know how decided a development the plan of exhibiting works (often single works) by single artists has taken of late years, chiefly since Mr. Holman Hunt com- menced thus displaying his 6 Finding of the Saviour in the Temple.’ The plan has its advantages and its weak points. Its advantages (irrespectively of its possible money-advan- tages to the exhibitor or speculator, which we shall not discuss) are mainly that it shows the visitor some one or two things, without distracting him by the presence of other CRITIQUES ON CONTEMPORARY PAINTERS & DESIGNERS. 1 79 and antagonistic works ; and that he has thus a fair chance of assimilating whatever nurture of eye or mind may be forthcoming. The weak points of the plan are the paucity of attraction held out to the visitor, and the demand made upon him, in the way of payment and interruption, being the same as for mixed exhibitions containing hundreds of works. Were the system of exhibitions of single works to spread further to a great extent, it would be impossible for the keenest dilettante to follow them up — his time and patience would be too much trifled with. Besides, there is a certain sense of proportion even in small things, of which the practical and arithmetical mind is not unfairly tenacious. In this respect, as in some others, a single picture may be compared to a single poem, and an exhibi- tion to a volume. If Mr. Tennyson, for instance, publishes any new poem, every appreciator of poetry wants to read it, and will read it whatever the terms may be; yet our enthusiast would not consider it reasonable if the Boadicea (suppose) had been detached from the Enoch Arden volume, and published separately, with all the honours of a volume to itself, at the same price as the other. He would pay, but he might also grumble. Now it is much the same with pictures. The miscellaneous exhibition is like the volume of varied contents ; the single picture is like any one poem singly; and the single-picture exhibition is like one such poem, of disproportioned tenuity, published in the form and at the price of an ordinarily full volume. As poetry, it may be inexhaustible; but, as occupying time and as money’s-worth, it comes to an end very soon. An exhibition such as that of Mr. Madox Brown, con- taining some hundred works all from one hand, and pre- senting in fact a whole artistic career at one glance, combines to a great extent the advantages of both the mixed and the 180 CRITIQUES ON CONTEMPORARY individual exhibitions, and avoids the objections to both. There is neither scantiness, glaring disproportion, excess, nor scattering and confusion of interest. We learn more about the painter than if we had watched his contributions through a score of successive galleries, and more about art (supposing the painter to be of the elect band) than if we looked at a hundred even of the better sort of works in a miscellaneous collection. Such a full individual exhibition has something specially complete and satisfactory ; correct- ing partial notions as to the merits or defects of the artist, founded upon sparse experience of his work at intervals of time and place, and enabling the spectator to estimate definitely how far one peculiarity or imperfection may be balanced and atoned for by an excellence per contra . The artist tacitly assumes, as it were, one of the functions of judge in the critical court of justice, and furnishes his own summing-up. The sense of satisfaction and of full connaissajice de cause is materially enhanced when, as in the present case, the artist publishes an explanatory or descriptive catalogue of the exhibited works. This is a point on which we hope public attention will be distinctly fixed ; it is an innovation, all but without precedent, and, as we think, a very important one. Mr. Brown has issued a catalogue clearly defining the subject-matter of the several works, and the point of view from which they have been invented and treated, with some minor details, more particularly as to dates. He writes like a man of full mind, whose temperament and profession have led him to observe and reflect upon a number of things ; and, without arbitrary digressions, he suggests several considerations which well deserve following out. His tone is remarkably free from that bane of personal records and explanations, mauvaise honte ; free also — and PAINTERS AND DESIGNERS. I.8l perhaps on that very account — from the apparent opposite of mauvaise honte , often as much its obverse as its opposite, uneasy and egotistic self-assertion. We can imagine few greater reforms in the practical and (so to speak) proselytiz- ing relations of fine art than the general adoption of a similar plan of plain descriptive exposition by such artists generally as are of enough importance to make their pro- ductions worth expounding, and their expositions worth reading. The plan would involve three leading benefits. Firstly, it would enable the spectator to know for certain exactly what the artist meant, and what his work means, and would thus cut short a deal of silly and often perverse guess-work. There is an enormous difference between the perceptiveness of various people regarding the meaning of any work of art which tells a story, especially one which presupposes some facts not included in the work itself; brother artists are a good deal readier than the general public at divining the true meaning, and probably few con- tinental nations are, on the whole, so stolid at these problems as the British. Secondly, notices of this nature by artists of distinction would be truly important and interesting records for per- manency. This is so self-evident that we need not pause to develop the point ; one has only to reflect for a moment at what rate one would prize such notices if left behind by Michael Angelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Tintoret, Durer, Rem- brandt, Hogarth, and many others, even of considerably lower rank. Thirdly, such notices would subserve a very important purpose in fixing the mind of the artist, and also of the reader and spectator, upon the amount of thought and meaning which the work really contains, whether large or small. A big canvas full of vacuity would stand at once 182 CRITIQUES ON CONTEMPORARY confessed as intellectually of minor dimensions than a small one packed with purpose ; a futile mind would pour into the public ear the unconscious confession of its own futility, to be laid to heart however much the eye might be beguiled by the cunning or imposing hand. In these respects we are bound to say that very few living British painters who might follow Mr. Brown’s example in writing a descriptive catalogue would succeed in making it so interesting, or so creditable to their artistic performances, as he has done ; for the simple reason that very few paint pictures containing so much solid and detailed thought as his. In the present exhibition, for instance, the picture of ‘Work’ is at once seen to be full of matter, and a moderately prolonged or careful inspection will satisfy one that this matter is serious and good, not trivial or haphazard ; the catalogue enables one to follow out the whole scheme of thought into its details with certainty instead of by guess, and shows that not a corner of the picture, a figure, or an action, is without its close yet varied relation to the central idea. Herein, we may add, lies perhaps the sole counterbalancing draw- back of the descriptive-catalogue scheme ; it might tempt some painters to be less careful and emphatic in telling their story upon the canvas, knowing that they can fall back upon the explanation which the catalogue supplies. We do not, however, impute any such failing to Mr. Brown, whose story is, in this painting as well as in others, con- sistently and vigorously, no less than elaborately, told; it is not merely on the surface, yet neither is it abstrusely reposited, or frittered into ingenuity. The moderate-sized picture of ‘ The Last of England,’ which at the first glance consists of little more than two half-figures, is an eminent example of this : others we shall have occasion to name in the sequel PAINTERS AND DESIGNERS. 1 83 The only artistic precursor of Mr. Brown, so far as we remember, in issuing a full descriptive catalogue, was the great idealist Blake. His catalogue, lately republished in Mr. Gilchrist’s book, is, as one might guess, more arbitrary, discursive, and personal, than Mr. Brown’s, and would not form, in point of execution, a safe or a tenable precedent for any one to follow. It is, nevertheless, a precedent of considerable incitement and encouragement to the reflective; as it remains to this day a fascinating piece of reading, and its literary treatment of the ‘ Canterbury Pilgrimage’ may well stand comparison with the artistic treatment of that work by the self-same hand, for whose illustration the catalogue was chiefly designed. In general, painters seem to have been exceedingly chary of explaining their works in writing, even in a more casual way than by regular descrip- tive catalogues ; an instance or two from Delacroix might be cited, and doubtless others passim , but comparatively very seldom. This strikes us as singular — almost unac- countable. It would have appeared to us natural for every artist of the present day who knows his worth in his high calling, and the chances and mischances to which his works are necessarily liable, to let none of those works pass finally out of his possession without preserving a photograph of it (unsatisfactory as photographs from coloured productions certainly are), and a detailed written description. Yet probably there is no artist alive who does this to the full and on system. Within the easy memory of the present generation, the British school of painting has been subjected to three suc- cessive main currents of influence, and has passed through phases modified accordingly. The first influence was the exhibitions in Westminster Hall, beginning in 1843, of cartoons and frescoes, and the parliamentary commissions 184 CRITIQUES ON CONTEMPORARY thence ensuing; the second was Praeraphaelitism, which started in 1848-9; the third was, and is, the example of foreign, and especially French, art, commencing to be felt about the time of the Great Paris Exhibition of 1855. It would be difficult to imagine a school of art which had less of distinct artistic idea, less of firm and resolute artistic practice, than the British school when the cartoon competitions were first brewing : we speak principally, though not exclusively, of oil-painting and of figure-pictures, and to these we shall confine the ensuing remarks. In the Royal Academy the four men of decided eminence were Etty, Maclise, Leslie, and Mulready; Herbert was rising. Alfred Chalon, Abraham Cooper, Collins, Eastlake, Howard, Hart, George Jones, Uwins, Patten, Charles Landseer, Red- grave, Webster, are also names still familiar to us : the President was the fashionable, and now already more than half-forgotten, portrait-painter Shee. Outside of the Academy were Cope, Dyce, Ward, Egg, Elmore, Goodall, Hook, F. R. Pickersgill, Poole, Frank Stone ; some of them quite young aspirants, the best of them yet unexercised in their full strength : the only one who had as yet done his best was Poole. Haydon and Martin were the very promi- nent hostile outsiders ; in Scotland there was David Scott. All these, or most of them, were the hommes