John R. Reid, a Scotchman by birth, but residing in London, has treated scenes from life upon the seacoast in this manner. How different his works are from the tragedies of Joseph Israels, or the grim naturalism of Michael Ancher! He occupies himself only with the bright side of life with its colour and sunshine, not with the dark side with its toils. He paints the inhabitants of the country in their Sunday best, as they sit telling stories, or as they go a-hunting, or regale themselves in the garden of an inn. The old rustics who sit happy with their pipes and beer in his “Cricket Match” are typical of everything that he has painted.

And even when, once in a way, a more gloomy trait appears in his pictures, it is there only that the light may shine the more brightly. The poor old flute-player who sits homeless upon a bench near the house is placed there merely to show how well off are the children who are hurrying merrily home after school. His picture of 1890, indeed, treated a scene of shipwreck, but a passage from a poet stood beneath; there was not a lost sailor to be seen, and all the tenderness of the artist is devoted to the pretty children and the young women gazing with anxiety and compassion across the sea.

Frank Holl was in the habit of giving his pictures a more lachrymose touch, together with a more sombre and ascetic harmony of colour. He borrowed his subjects from the life of the humble classes, always searching, moreover, for melancholy features; he took delight in representing human virtue in misfortune, and for the sake of greater effect he frequently chose a verse from the Bible as the title. Thus the work with which he first won the English public was a picture exhibited in 1869: “The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” A family of five brothers and sisters, who have just lost their mother, are assembled round the breakfast-table in a poorly furnished room. One sister is crying, another is sadly looking straight before her, whilst a third is praying with folded hands. The younger brother, a sailor, has just reached home from a voyage, to close his dying mother’s eyes, and the eldest of all, a young and earnest curate, is endeavouring to console his brothers and sisters with the words of Job.

SANT.Cassell & Co.
THE MUSIC LESSON.
(By permission of the Artist.)

The next picture, exhibited in 1871, he called “No Tidings from the Sea,” and represented in it a fisherman’s family—grandmother, mother, and child—who in a cheerless room are anxiously expecting the return of a sailor. “Leaving Home” showed four people sitting on a bench outside a waiting-room at a railway station. To awaken the spectator’s pity “Third Class” is written in large letters upon the window just above their heads. The principal figure is a lady dressed in black, who is counting, in a somewhat obtrusive manner, the little money which she still has left.

In the picture “Necessity knows no Law” a poor woman with a child in her arms has entered a pawnshop to borrow money on her wedding-ring; in another, women of the poorer class are to be seen walking along with their soldier sons and husbands, who have been called out on active service. One of them clasps tightly to her breast her little child, the only one still remaining to her in life, whilst an aged widow presses the hand of her son with the sad presentiment that, even if he comes back to her, she will probably not have long to live after his return. Not only did Frank Holl paint stories for his countrymen, but he also painted them big in majuscule characters which were legible without spectacles, and he partially owed his splendid successes to this cheap sentimentality.

Almost everywhere the interest of subject still plays the first part, and this slightly lachrymose trait bordering on genre, this lyrically tender or allegorically subtle element, which runs through English figure pictures, would easily degenerate into vaporous enervation in another country. In England portrait painting, which now, as in the days of Reynolds, is the greatest title to honour possessed by English art, invariably maintains its union with direct reality. By acknowledgment portrait painting in the present day is exceedingly earnest: it admits of no decorative luxuriousness, no sport with hangings and draperies, no pose; and English likenesses have this severe actuality in the highest degree. Stiff-necked obstinacy, sanguine resolution, and muscular force of will are often spoken of as an Englishman’s national characteristics, and a trace of these qualities is also betrayed in English portrait painting. The self-reliance of the English is far too great to suffer or demand any servile habit of flattery: everything is free from pose, plain and simple. Let the subject be the weather-beaten figure of an old sailor or the dazzling freshness of English youth, there is a remarkable energy and force of life in all their works, even in the pictures of children with their broad open brow, finely chiselled nose, and assured and penetrative glance. And as portrait painting in England, to its own advantage and the benefit of all art, has never been considered as an isolated province, such pictures may be specified among the works of the most frigid academician as well as amongst those of the most vigorous naturalist. Frank Holl, who had such a Düsseldorfian tinge in his more elaborate pictures, showed at the close of his life, in his likenesses of the engraver Samuel Cousins, Lord Dufferin, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Wolseley, Mr. Gladstone, the Duke of Cleveland, Sir George Trevelyan, and Lord Spencer, a simple virility altogether wanting in his earlier works. They had a trenchant characterisation and an unforced pose which were striking even in England. It is scarcely possible to exhibit people more naturally, or more completely to banish from their expression that concentrated air of attentiveness which suggests photography and so easily intrudes into a portrait. Even Leighton, so devoid of temperament, so entirely devoted to the measured art of the ancients, became at once nervous and almost brutal in his power when he painted a portrait in place of ideal Grecian figures. His vivid and forcible portrait of Sir Richard Burton, the celebrated African traveller, would do honour to the greatest portrait painter of the Continent.

Mag. of Art.
FURSE.FRONTISPIECE TO “STORIES AND INTERLUDES.”HERKOMER.JOHN RUSKIN.
(By permission of the Artist.)

Amongst portrait painters by profession Walter Ouless will probably merit the place of honour immediately after Watts as an impressive exponent of character. He has assimilated much from his master Millais—not merely the heaviness of colour, which often has a disturbing effect in the latter, but also Millais’ powerful flight of style, always so free from false rhetoric. The chemical expert Pochin, as Ouless painted him in 1865, does not pose in the picture nor allow himself to be disturbed in his researches. It is a thoroughly contemporary portrait, one of those brilliant successes which later occurred in France also. The Recorder of London, Mr. Russell Gurney, he likewise painted in his professional character and in his robes of office. In its inflexible graveness and earnest dignity the likeness is almost more than the portrait of an individual; it seems the embodiment of the proud English Bench resting upon the most ancient traditions. His portrait of Cardinal Manning had the same convincing power of observation, the same large and sure technique. The soft light plays upon the ermine and the red stole, and falls full upon the fine, austere, and noble face.