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| G. F. WATTS IN HIS GARDEN. | WATTS. | L’Art. LADY LINDSAY. | |
| (By permission, from a photograph by A. Frazer-Tytler, Esq.) | (By permission of Lady Lindsay, the owner of the picture.) | ||
Henry Holliday, who has of late devoted himself largely to decorative tasks, seems in these works to be the juste-milieu between Burne-Jones and Leighton. And the youngest representative of this group tinged with religious and romantic feelings is Marie Spartali-Stillman, who lives in Rome and paints as a rule pictures from Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, after the fashion of Rossetti.
Others, who turned to the treatment of antique subjects, were led by these themes more towards the Idealism of the Cinquecento as regards the form of their work; and in this way they lost the severe stamp of the pre-Raphaelites.
| Cameron, photo. |
| WATTS. HOPE. |
| (By permission of the Artist.) |
In these days William Blake Richmond, in particular, no longer shows any trace of having once belonged to the mystic circle of Oxonians. The Ariadne which he painted in the old days was a lean and tall woman with fluttering black mantle, casting up her arms in lamentation and gazing out of those deep, gazelle-like eyes which Burne-Jones gave his Vivien. Even the scheme of colour was harmonised in the bronze, olive tone which marked the earliest works of Burne-Jones. But soon afterwards his views underwent a complete revolution in Italy. Influenced by Alma Tadema in form, and by the French in colour, he drew nearer to the academic manner, until he became, at length, a Classicist without any salient peculiarity. The allegory “Amor Vincit Omnia” is characteristic of this phase of his art. Aphrodite, risen from her bath, is standing naked in a Grecian portico, through which a purple sea is visible. Her maidens are busied in dressing her; and they are, one and all, chaste and noble figures of that classic grace and elegant fluency of line which Leighton usually lends to his ideal forms. In a picture which became known in Germany through the International Exhibition of 1891, Venus, a clear and white figure, floats down with stately motion towards Anchises. It is only in the delicate pictures of children which have been his chief successes of late years that he is still fresh and direct. Girls with thick hair of a blonde cendrée, finely moulded lips, and large gazelle-like eyes full of sensibility, are seen in these works dreamily seated in white or blue dresses against a red or a blue curtain. And the æsthetic method of painting, which almost suggests pastel work in its delicacy, is in keeping with the ethereal figures and the bloom of colour.
Walter Crane has been far more successful in uniting the pre-Raphaelite conception with a sentiment for beauty formed upon the antique, Burne-Jones’s “paucity of flesh and plenitude of feeling” with a measured nobility of form. Born in Liverpool in 1845, he received his first impressions of art at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1857, where he saw Millais’ “Sir Isumbras at the Ford.” The chivalrous poetry of this master became the ideal of his youth, and it rings clearly throughout his first pictures, exhibited in 1862. One of these has as its subject “The Lady of Shalott” approaching the shore of her mysterious island in a boat, and the other St. George slaying the dragon. Meanwhile, however, he had come to know Walker, through W. J. Linton, the wood-engraver, for whom he worked from 1859 to 1862, and the former led him to admire the beauty of the sculptures of the Parthenon. After this he passed from romantic to antique subjects, and there is something notably youthful, a fresh bloom as of old legends, in these compositions, which recall the sculpture of Phidias. “The Bridge of Life,” belonging to the year 1875, was like an antique gem or a Grecian bas-relief. At the Paris World Exhibition of 1878 he had a “Birth of Venus,” noble and antique in composition, and of a severity of form which suggested Mantegna. The suave and poetic single figures which he delights in painting are at once Greek and English: girls, with branches of blossom, in white drapery falling into folds, and enveloping their whole form while indicating every line of the body. His “Pegasus” might have come straight from the frieze of the Parthenon. “The Fleeting Hours” at once recalls Guido Reni’s “Aurora” and Dürer’s apocalyptic riders.
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| WATTS. | Pageant. PAOLO AND FRANCESCA. |
| (By permission of the Artist.) | |