There were in the Russian gallery some good heads very boldly and forcibly painted. Their authors, though their names ended in “sky,” “vich,” or “koff,” were pupils of the French or German schools, and therefore these works, though painted by Russians, can hardly be considered as characteristic of the school. The Byzantine element was not in the least traceable in the Russian galleries. Probably Byzantine pictures were excluded, as coming under the head of manufactures.
Greece exhibited a few pictures of modest proportions, and still more modest merit; but even this faint commendation cannot be accorded to Portugal, whose small contribution was ludicrous for its badness.
The art of the United States is even less national than the Russian. American artists seldom give us reminiscences of their country, and the American gallery was exactly like some of the rooms in the French Salon.
From their admiration of Parisian art it is probable that the American school of the future will, like the Belgian, be a branch of the French, unless indeed some American Fortuny should be raised in the States who would give an original impulse to Transatlantic art.
French critics were rather hard on the American figure-painters for choosing such subjects as the death of Cleopatra.
What in the world, they said, had Cleopatra and the Nile to do with America? About as much, I should say, as Nero and his atrocities had to do with France. According to these gentlemen, French artists may choose their subjects from any period and from any country; the same license may be allowed to Belgium, Germany, and possibly to England; but the American is to confine himself to the short and not very picturesque history of his own country.
This seems to me very unfair, but at the same time I should have liked to have seen amongst the landscapes something more national than views of Bougival or Fontainebleau.
I have now taken you all round the picture galleries of the International Exhibition, and I may with truth say that we have no cause to be ashamed of the position we hold in the European art-world. The French were at home and able to exhibit nearly all their best works of the last ten years. We, from reasons that are very well known, were unable to do so, and yet we held a very respectable position. I am not John Bull enough to say, as some of my friends at the hotel did, that our school is the first in Europe. But what I do say is that English art (speaking of course generally) is in a thoroughly healthy state; that English artists (also speaking generally) think more of their subjects and less of themselves than Frenchmen, Belgians, or Austrians do; that whilst some of the leading foreign schools are past the zenith of their power, we, on the contrary, seem to be improving steadily, and gradually getting rid of our faults. Some may be inclined to attribute this marked improvement to the extraordinary sums of money which have of late years been spent on art in this country, some to the existence amongst us of a school of high-art criticism, some to foreign influence. I attribute it to none of these causes, but solely to better training and a more scrupulous regard for nature.
It may be thought that in boasting about our better training I am blowing the academic trumpet pretty loudly, but I am not speaking so much of the training you get here and at other London art schools, as of the training which every young painter has to give himself after he has learned the A B C of his art. It is this training especially which is better than it used to be. The commonplace slap-dash way of going to work of former days is now the exception and not the rule with young painters.
One man may be careless or weak in his drawing, but he may have a keen sense for truthful atmospheric effect, and he labors away at his picture until he approximates to the out-of-door look of nature; another (a portrait-painter perhaps) wearies out his sitters in his endeavors to be truthful; a third will patiently brave the elements on a bare Scotch moor, humbly trying to imitate the fitful patches of sunshine and mist on the hillside before him.