Among the portraits of special local interest are those by Mr. W. T. Roden, of Samuel Lines, the Birmingham artist; of Peter Hollins, the Birmingham sculptor; of his Eminence Cardinal Newman; and of John Henry Chamberlain, who has been justly described as the “second founder of the Birmingham and Midland Institute,” and who, until his lamented death, was Chairman of the School of Art. Those of John Bright, by Frank Holt, R.A.; of George Dawson, by H. T. Munns; of William Murdock, by John Graham; of Arthur Ryland, the founder of the Birmingham and Midland Institute, and sometime Mayor of the town, by Sir J. W. Gordon; and of Sir John Franklin, by T. Phillips, R.A., also deserve note in this connexion.
Watts and Portraits.—The large room of the Art Gallery is nearly filled with a collection of Mr. Watt’s pictures, kindly lent by the artist. Much interest now attaches to these works, as Mr. Watts has just offered them, with others, to the nation. We can somewhat measure this noble gift when we remember that the collection contains portraits of some of our ablest and most famous men, as well as large and important figure pictures, the work of a lifetime, and that these are the best works of an artist of world-wide reputation. The English School of portraiture has attained a high standard in the works of such artists as Millais, Holl, Ouless, and Richmond; but the portraits by Watts stand apart from even these in their nobility of treatment, scheme of colour, and rendering of the man, his very life and soul. The portraits of Mr. Burne Jones, the Marquis of Salisbury, and Lady Garvagh, recall to mind the best works of Reynolds and Gainsborough. Again, Dr. Joachim, a lamp-light study—is quite Rembrandt like. Those of Cardinal Manning, Carlyle, Mr. Browning, Mrs. Manners, in blue against a blue background; John Stuart Mill, Lord Lawrence, Lord Sherbrook and Philip Calderon, R.A., also merit careful observation. Mr. Watts’s subject pictures are painted with the noblest motives, and the methods of execution and schemes of colour are all made subordinate to the idea. The subject “Love and Death,” was suggested by the struggle of near friends to resist a fatal disease in a young man whom the artist was painting; and here the power of art, imagination, colour, conception, drawing of drapery and figure, all unite, not for technical display, but to realize in an intense degree the motive of the picture. The same may be said of “Mammon;” dedicated to his worshippers. In the previous picture the colour is blue-grey; in this it is gold and scarlet. “The Meeting of Jacob and Esau” is a striking instance of the successful definition of opposite characters. “Orpheus and Eurydice” is descriptive of the moment when Orpheus looks back, and when, by reason of this act of impatience, Eurydice sinks back to Hades. “Fata Morgana,” turning on her followers through life, is also a splendid work.
This room further contains the large painting by Professor W. B. Richmond, M.A., entitled “An Audience in Athens during a Representation of the Agamemnon.” This, too, is a most valuable decorative work of Art in the attitudes, costumes and expressions of the audience, and in the rendering in colour and tone of the clear sunlight of Greece. Other decorative works in the Art Gallery are Mr. Albert Moore’s “Dreamers,” lovely figures most delicately painted in a scheme of yellow orange, grey and green; “Sapphires,” blue and orange; and “Canaries,” yellow orange and grey, with a little green. On a screen will also be found a small but very fine collection of works in water-colour by Mr. Walter Langley, R.I., including “Amongst the Missing,” “Time moveth not,” and many well known works by this artist.
The town possesses one of the strongest examples of Sir Frederick Leighton, P.R.A. “A Condottiere” is quite Titianesque in its painting of flesh, armour, and drapery. One example by Mr. Alfred W. Hunt is also the property of the town. It is called “A Norwegian Midnight,” and therein are displayed colour, mystery, sense of space, and moving cloud forms. Two of the finest paintings by Mr. Henry Moore, A.R.A., are also included—“Summer Time, off Cornwall,” and “The Newhaven Packet.” Other works in the Gallery of more than ordinary interest are: “Intellect and Instinct,” by H. Stacey Marks, R.A.; “Detected Correspondence,” by John Opie, R.A.; “A Martyr of the 16th Century,” by W. Geets; “February Fill Dyke,” by B. W. Leader, A.R.A.; “Ready for Work,” by John S. Noble; “A North-West Gale,” by John Brett, A.R.A.; “Homeward,” by W. Napier Henry; and “The Poacher’s Widow,” by Breton Riviere, R.A.
It is a matter of real congratulation to Birmingham that her sons have taken a prominent place in the world of Art, and that, owing to an enlightened policy, the town now possesses a suitable gallery, wherein high-class works may be viewed by all. The works exhibited, whether purchased by the Committee or on loan, are generally of such a decorative character as to be of the greatest value to designers and other Art workmen. It is to be hoped that, stimulated by past example, as well as by present opportunities, the inhabitants will fully appreciate the importance of furthering that Art, which is at once a source of pleasure to the workers, and of illimitable enjoyment to the beholders.
Sculpture.—[By Whitworth Wallis.]—The history of the birth and growth of sculpture, with no word for its decadence, death, and ultimate renaissance would alone be a subject difficult to compress into the space of a volume, but when there is to be added to that some account of the art in the time of the supremacy of its achievement, before it became tainted with decay, the task is vast indeed. Fortunately such a dissertation is not required in this place.
The art of sculpture is not restricted, as most people think, to the carving of mere marble and stone. In its strict meaning it is the art of cutting any material whatsoever into any required shape; but the word is now generally accepted for the art of representing anything by form, no matter what the material may be, or what the method of its making; so that the word “sculpture” applies to Sculpture proper, and to castings in bronze, as well as to the carving of gems, ivories, and to modelling in wax and clay.
Egyptian Sculpture.—In every part of the world, in modern as in ancient times, savage races have delighted to decorate their weapons with carving, and to make representations of men and animals, which they afterwards worshipped. But it was Egypt, that cradle-land of learning and of art, which seems to be the nation where first the rudeness of savage carving was brought under restraint and nurtured into Sculpture. What had previously been an amusement was changed by their priests into an art. But these very priests who first fostered the art were ultimately the means of stunting its growth and arresting its highest development. The reverence which long ages of worship caused the archaic statues to receive induced the priests, who were the representatives of learning and of wisdom, to make these old types symbolical of divine attributes, and it was considered sacrilegious to attempt to alter what had gradually come to be believed was the true likeness of the god. Thus religion, which was the kind foster-mother of the arts of sculpture and painting, came, later on, to be its most determined enemy.
Whilst in Egypt Sculpture was being strangled by Convention, all progress being arrested, and all originality starved out of it by the regulations which bound it to its archaic form, a new race of artists arose along the shores and amidst the islands of the Mediterranean. In Greece Art found a new and happy home. Greek Sculpture, based on Egyptian precedent, and influenced greatly in its growth by Phœnician thought, gradually freed itself from all the trammels of the past, and formed a school of Sculpture, the results of which have never been equalled in all the after ages of art production.
Greek Sculpture.—It was left to the beauty-loving Greeks to perceive that Sculpture was of all others the art by which they could best express and best immortalise the most perfect of all Nature’s physical beauties. It was the Greeks who made Sculpture what it was, and with their school died out the highest development of the art.