But the first Saturday of May arrives, and with it many a rumour, true and false, of the state of matters within the Royal Academy—of the academicians who exhibit, and of what are to be 'the' pictures. From early morning, St Martin's bells have been ringing, and a festival flag flies from the steeple; no great pomp, to be sure, but it marks the occasion. About noon, the Queen's party arrives, and Her Majesty is conducted about the rooms by the leading members of the Academy. Between one and two, she departs; and immediately after, the crowd of ticket-holders for the private view cluster before the closed gratings. Punctually as the last stroke of the hour strikes, the portals are flung open, and a cataract of eager amateurs rush up the staircases, and make their way straight to the inner room, or room of honour, all in quest of the picture, to which the pas has been given, by its being hung upon the line in the centre of the eastern wall of the apartment. The salons fill as by magic; in half an hour, you can hardly move through a crowd of dignitaries of all kinds—hereditary, social, literary, scientific, and artistic. Perhaps, indeed, there is no muster in London which collects a greater number of personages famous in every point of view. The ladies of the aristocracy swarm as at a drawing-room. The atmosphere is all one rustle of laces and silks; and it is anything but easy to make one's way among the bevies of clustered beauties who flock round their chaperone, all one flutter of ribbons, feathers, and flowers. And to the Academy, at all events, come all manner of political notabilities: you find a secretary of state by your elbow, and catch the muttered criticism of a prime-minister. Ordinary peers and members of parliament are thicker than blackberries. Bishops prevail as usual; and apropos of ecclesiastical costumes, peculiar looped-up beavers and single-breasted greatcoats, the odds are, that you will be attracted by the portly figure and not very refined face of the Romish dignitary whose pretensions, a couple of years ago, set the country in a blaze. The muster of literary men is large and brilliant. Mr Hallam is most likely there as Professor of Ancient History to the Academy; and Mr Macaulay as Professor of Ancient Literature. Sir George Staunton puts in an appearance as Secretary for Foreign Correspondence; and blooming Sir Robert Harry Inglis, with the largest of roses at his button-hole, looks the most genial and good-humoured of 'antiquaries.' The Academicians—lucky Forty!—muster early. Happy fellows! they have no qualms of doubt, or sick-agonies of expectation as they mount the broad flight of steps. They have been giving hints to the Hanging Committee, or they have been on the Hanging Committee themselves. Well they know that their works have been at least provided for—all on the line, or near it; all in the best lights; and all titivated and polished up and varnished on the walls, and adapted, as it were, to the situation. You may know an R. A. on the private view-day by the broad, expanding jollity of his visage, if he be a man of that stamp, or by a certain quiet, self-satisfied smile of self-complacence, if he be a man of another.
But he looks and bears himself as a host. He cicerones delighted parties of lady-friends with his face all one smile of courtesy, or he does the honours with dignity and a lofty sense of—we do not speak disrespectfully—of being on his own dunghill, in respect to the more important exigeant connoisseurs, whom he thinks it right to patronise. He always praises his brethren's works, and discovers in them hidden virtues. For the Associates, he has minor smiles and milder words. The ordinary mob of exhibiters he looks down upon with a calm and complacent gaze, as though from the summit of a Mont Blanc of superiority. At any bold defier of the conventions and traditions of the Academy drawing-school, he shakes his head. The pre-Raphaelite heresy was a sore affliction to him. He looked upon Millais and Hunt as a Low-church bishop would regard Newman and Pusey. He prophesied that they would come to no good. He called them 'silly boys;' and he looks uneasily at the crowds who throng before this year's picture of the Huguenot Couple—not recovering his self-complacency until his eye catches his own favourite work, when he feels himself gradually mollified, and smiles anew upon the world.
Not so the nameless artist, whose work of many toiling days, and many sleepless nights, has been sent in unprotected to take its chance. He knows nothing of its fate until he can get a catalogue. It may be on the line in the east room; it may be above the octagon-room door; it may not be hung at all. Only the great artistic guns are invited to the private view, the rest must wait till Monday. Possibly a stray catalogue puts him so far out of his pain on Sunday. If not, he passes a feverish and unhappy time till the afternoon of Monday; and then, first among the crowd, rushes franticly up stairs. We had an opportunity the other day of seeing the result of a case of the kind. The picture—a work of great fancy and high feeling, but deficient in manipulative skill—the artist, a poet in the true sense of the word, had spent months in dreaming and in joying over. He found it in the dingiest corner of the octagon-room. His lip quivered and his chest heaved. He pulled his hat further down on his face, and walked quickly and quietly out.
We would gladly, indeed, see the octagon-room abolished. A picture is degraded, and an artist is insulted, by a painting being hung in this darksome and 'condemned cell.' The canvas gets a 'jail-bird' stamp, and its character is gone. In France, at the Palais-Royal, the young artists have a far better chance. After a stated time, the pictures, which, as the best have primarily had the best places, change stations with their inferiors; so that everybody in turn enjoys the advantages of the brightest lights and the most favourable points of view.
No need, of course, of attempting even the most summary sketch of the styles and ordinary subjects of the great painters who bear aloft the banner of the British school of art—of Landseer's glimpses of the Highlands; or Stanfield's skyey, breezy landscapes; of the quiet pieces of English rural scenery—meadows, and woodland glades, and river bits, fresh and rich, and green and natural—of our Lees, our Creswicks, our Coopers, our Witheringtons, our Redgraves, our Ausdills; of the classic elegance and elevated sentiment of groups by our Dyces and our Eastlakes; of the abundance of clever genre subjects—scenes from history or romance—poured in by our Wards, our Friths, our Pooles, our Elmores, our Eggs; or of—last, not least—the strange but clever vagaries of that new school, the pre-Raphaelites, who are startling both Academy and public by the quaintness of their art-theories, and the vehement intensity of their style of execution. All the summer long, the world is free to go and gaze upon them. All the summer long, the salons are crowded from morning till night—in the earlier hours, by artists and conscientious amateurs, the humbler sort of folks, who have daily work to do; in the later, by our old friends, the staring, insouciant, lounging, fashionable mob, whose carriages and Broughams go creeping lazily round and round Trafalgar Square. And at parties and balls, and all such reunions, the exhibition forms a main topic of discourse. Bashful gentlemen know it for a blessing. Often and often does it serve as a most creditable lever to break the ice with. The newspapers long resound with critical columns apropos of Trafalgar Square. You see 'sixth notice' attached to a formidable mass of print, and read on, or pass on, as you please. But you distinctly observe, at any rate, the social and conversational, as well as the artistic importance of the Royal Academy; and you confess, that a London season would be shorn of its brightest feature if you shut the gates of the National Gallery.
A. B. R.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Associates Royal Academy, and Royal Academicians.