I have been asked to note down at random my impressions of some few among this year’s pictures. These I am aware will have no weight or value but that which a sincere and studious love of the art can give; so much I claim for them, and so much only. To pass judgment or tender counsel is beyond my aim or my desire.
Returning from the Academy I find two pictures impressed on my memory more deeply and distinctly than the rest. First of these—first of all, it seems to me, for depth and nobility of feeling and meaning—is Mr. Watts’ “Wife of Pygmalion.” The soft severity of perfect beauty might serve alike for woman or statue, flesh or marble; but the eyes have opened already upon love, with a tender and grave wonder; her curving ripples of hair seem just warm from the touch and the breath of the goddess, moulded and quickened by lips and hands diviner than her sculptor’s. So it seems a Greek painter must have painted women, when Greece had mortal pictures fit to match her imperishable statues. Her shapeliness and state, her sweet majesty and amorous chastity, recall the supreme Venus of Melos. In this “translation” of a Greek statue into an English picture, no less than in the bust of Clytie, we see how in the hands of a great artist painting and sculpture may become as sister arts indeed, yet without invasion or confusion; how, without any forced alliance of form and colour, a picture may share the gracious grandeur of a statue, a statue may catch something of the subtle bloom of beauty proper to a picture.
The other picture of which I would speak, unlike enough to this in sentiment or in tone, has in common with it the loftiest quality of beauty pure and simple. Indeed, of all the few great or the many good painters now at work among us, no one has so keen and clear a sense of this absolute beauty as Mr. Albert Moore. His painting is to artists what the verse of Théophile Gautier is to poets; the faultless and secure expression of an exclusive worship of things formally beautiful. That contents them; they leave to others the labours and the joys of thought or passion. The outlines of their work are pure, decisive, distinct; its colour is of the full sunlight. This picture of “Azaleas” is as good a type as need be of their manner of work. A woman delicately draped, but showing well the gentle mould of her fine limbs through the thin soft raiment; pale small leaves and bright white blossoms about her and above, a few rose-red petals fallen on the pale marble and faint-coloured woven mat before her feet; a strange and splendid vessel, inlaid with designs of Eastern colour; another—clasped by one long slender hand and filled from it with flowers—of soft white, touched here and there into blossom of blue: this is enough. The melody of colour, the symphony of form is complete: one more beautiful thing is achieved, one more delight is born into the world; and its meaning is beauty; and its reason for being is to be.
We all owe so much to Mr. Leighton for the selection and intention of his subjects—always noble or beautiful as these are, always worthy of a great and grave art; a thing how inexpressibly laudable and admirable in a time given over to the school of slashed breeches and the school of blowsy babyhood!—we owe him, I say, so much for this that it seems ungracious to say a word of his work except in the way of thanks and praise. I find no true touch of Greek beauty in the watery Hellenism of his Ariadne: she is a nobly moulded model of wax, such a figure as a mediæval sorceress might set to waste before a charmed fire and burn out the life of the living woman. The “Actæa” has the charm that a well-trained draughtsman can give to a naked fair figure; this charm it has, and no other; it has also a painful trimness suggestive of vapour-baths, of “strigil” and “rusma,” of the toilet labours of a Juvenalian lady; not the fresh sweet strength of limbs native to the sea, but the lower loveliness of limbs that have been steamed and scraped. The picture of Acme and Septimius is excellently illustrative of Mr. Theodore Martin’s verse; it is in no wise illustrative of Catullus. I doubt if Love would have sneezed approval of these lovers either to left or to right. As for detail, surely one arm at least of his and one leg at least of hers are singular samples of drawing. In his two other pictures Mr. Leighton has, I think, reached his highest mark for this year. The majestic figure and noble head of Jonathan are worthy of the warrior whose love was wonderful, passing the love of woman; the features resolute, solicitous, heroic. The boy beside him is worthy to stand so near; his action has all the grace of mere nature, as he stoops slightly from the shoulder to sustain the heavy quiver. The portrait of a lady hard by has a gracious and noble beauty, too rare even among the abler of English workmen in this line.
The genius of Mr. Millais is of course a thing indestructible; but all that can be done to deaden or distort it the Academy has done. “They have scotched the snake, not killed it”—being as it is a “Serpent-of-Eternity.” There is nothing here to recall the painter of past years. There is no significance or depth, no subtlety of beauty; there is the fit and equal ability of an able craftsman. The group of three sisters is a sample of this excellent ability; no man needs to be told that. There is no lack of graceful expressive composition; there is no stint of ribbons and trimmings. There is a bitter want of beauty, of sweetness, of the harmony which should hang about the memories of men after seeing it as an odour or a cadence about their senses: and this beauty, this sweetness, this harmony, all great and all genuine pictures leave with us for an after-gust, not soon to pass or perish. The picture called “Rosalind and Celia” gives us graver and deeper offence. Of the landscape nothing evil shall be said, and nothing good; but the figures cry aloud for remark and reprobation. These women are none of Shakspeare’s. Think but in passing of the fresh grace, the laughters as of April, the light delicate daring, the tender and brilliant sweetness of the true “Ganymede;” what is left of all this? She figures here as a fair-faced ballet-girl, with a soul absorbed by the calf of her leg. And this dull, sickly, stolid woman huddling heavily against her is Celia; this is the purest rarest type that Shakspeare could give of heroic and sweet devotion; this is she who alone even among his women could not live but in another’s life. And Touchstone—can this sour ape-cheeked face be the face that Jaques “met i’ the forest?” these the lips that rallied Corin and wooed Aubrey? “Bear your body more seemly,” Touchstone. And with all this debasement and distortion of Shakspeare’s figures, we do not even get by way of amends a well-wrought piece of work; forget if you will the names attached, this is still but an unlovely picture. It seems that Mr. Millais has forgotten how to paint a lady; his women here all smack of the side-scenes or the servants’ hall. Admirable for its strong sure power of painting, the “Stella” is, nevertheless, pitiably vacuous. If the sailors at Nelson’s tomb appeal somewhat overmuch to popular sentiment of no deep or delicate kind, the picture is yet a noble one and impressive. The faces are full of simple and keen feeling, of tacit and loyal reverence. There is a superfluous ugliness in the two wooden stumps; and perhaps the knack by which the light is arranged so as to strike out severally from each pane of the glass lantern is too like one of those petty feats which are as lime-twigs laid to catch the eyes and tongues of the half-trained sightseers who jostle and saunter through a gallery, pausing now and again to “wonder with a foolish face of praise.” The worst of these pictures, painted by a meaner man, would justly win notice and applause; but it is no small thing that a great man should do no greater work than some of this. The clear eye and the strong hand have not forgotten their cunning; it is a master whom we find too often at work fit only for a craftsman. Surely a painter who has done things so noble will not always be content to take for his battle-cry, “Philistia, be thou glad of me.”
I return now to the works of Mr. Watts. His little landscape is full of that beauty which lives a dim brief life between sunset and dusk. The faint flames and mobile colours of the sky, the dim warm woods, the flight of doves about the dovecote, have all their part in the grave charm of evening, are all given back to the eye with the grace and strength of a master’s touch; the stacks that catch the glare and glow of low sunlight seem crude and violent in their intense yellow colour and hard angles of form: natural it may be, but a natural discord that jars upon the eye. “The Meeting of Jacob and Esau,” though something too academic, has in part the especial, the personal grandeur of Mr. Watts’s larger manner of work. In the pale smooth worn face of Jacob there is a shy sly shame which befits the supplanter: his well-nigh passive action, as of one half reassured and half abashed, bares to view the very heart and root of his nature; and the rough strenuous figure of Esau, in its frank grandeur of brave sun-brown limbs, speaks aloud on the other side of the story, by the fervid freedom of his impetuous embrace. Far off, between the meeting figures, midmost of the remote cavalcade, the fair clear face of a woman looks out, pale under folds of white, patient and ill at ease; her one would take to be Leah. It is noticeable that one year, not over rich in excellent work, should give us two admirable pictures drawn from the Hebrew chronicles. What they call scriptural art in England does not often bear such acceptable fruit. I know not if even Mr. Watts has ever painted a nobler portrait than this of Mr. Panizzi; it recalls the majestic strength and depth of Morone’s work: there is the same dominant power of hand and keenness of eye, the same breadth and subtlety of touch, the same noble reticence of colour.
Before I pass on to speak of any other painter, I will here interpolate what I have to say of Mr. Watts’s bust of Clytie. Not imitative, not even assimilative of Michel Angelo’s manner, it yet by some vague and ineffable quality brings to mind his work rather than any Greek sculptor’s. There is the same intense and fiery sentiment, the same grandeur of device, the same mystery of tragedy. The colour and the passion of this work are the workman’s own. Never was a divine legend translated into diviner likeness. Large, deep-bosomed, superb in arm and shoulder, as should be the woman growing from flesh into flower through a godlike agony, from fairness of body to fullness of flower, large-leaved and broad of blossom, splendid and sad—yearning with all the life of her lips and breasts after the receding light and the removing love—this is the Clytie indeed whom sculptors and poets have loved for her love of the Sun their God. The bitter sweetness of the dividing lips, the mighty mould of the rising breasts, the splendour of her sorrow is divine: divine the massive weight of carven curls bound up behind, the heavy straying flakes of unfilleted hair below; divine the clear cheeks and low full forehead, the strong round neck made for the arms of a god only to clasp and bend down to their yoke. We seem to see the lessening sunset that she sees, and fear too soon to watch that stately beauty slowly suffer change and die into flower, that solid sweetness of body sink into petal and leaf. Sculpture such as this has actual colour enough without need to borrow of an alien art.
The work of M. Legros is always of such a solid and serious excellence as to require no passing study. His picture of Henry VIII. and courtiers is, I must think, an instance of absolute error; it has no finer quality of its own, and the reminiscence of Holbein is not fortunate. “The Refectory” makes large amends: he has never done more perfect work than this. The cadence of colours is just and noble; witness the red-leaved book open in one monk’s hand on the white cloth, the clear green jug on the table, the dim green bronze of the pitcher on the floor; beside it a splendid cat, its fur beautiful with warm black bars on an exquisite ground of dull grey, its expectant eye and mouth lifted without further or superfluous motion. The figures are noble by mere force of truth; there is nothing of vulgar ugliness or theatrical holiness. As good but not so great as the celebrated “Ex-voto” of a past year, this picture is wholly worthy of a name already famous.
The large work of Baron Leys stands out amid the overflow all round it of bad and feeble attempts or pretences at work in all the strength of its great quality of robust invention. It has the interest of excellent narrative; in every face there is a story. A great picture is something other than this; but this also is a great thing done. It is a chapter of history written in colours; a study which may remind us of Meinhold’s great romances, though the author of “Sidonia the Sorceress” may stand higher as a writer than Leys as a painter. All the realistic detail is here, but not the vital bloom and breath of action which Meinhold had to give. Rigour of judicial accuracy might refuse to this work the praise of a noble picture; for to that the final imprint and seal of beauty is requisite; and this beauty, if a man’s hand be but there to bestow it, may be wrought out of homely or heavenly faces, out of rare things or common, out of Titian’s women or Rembrandt’s. It is not the lack of prettiness which lowers the level of a picture. Here for imagination we have but intellect, for charm of form we have but force of thought. Too much also is matter of mere memory; thus the clerk writing is but a bastard brother of Holbein’s Erasmus. Form and colour are vigorous, if hard also and heavy; and when all is said it must in the end be still accepted as a work of high and rare power after its own kind, and that no common kind, nor unworthy of studious admiration and grave thanksgiving.
It is well to compare this with the work that passes for historical in many English eyes. Doubtless it may be said that such things as some of these are not worth mention in a study so imperfect and discursive as this must be; that they were better passed by in peace and left to find their level. But it has been well said, “Il est des morts qu’il faut qu’on tue;” and though undesirous in general to take that duty out of abler hands, I will choose but one sample at random, on which I came by chance, looking up from Sir E. Landseer’s dog and deer, a work of brute ability, excellently repulsive as all brutish pain must be if duly rendered. This select sample of historic art in England is a picture of Mary Stuart about to sign her abdication. Posthumous parasites have often libelled her with praise of pencil or of pen; but retribution never yet fell heavier on her memory. She, the woman of such keen clear wits, such indomitable nerves, such pitiless charms and such tameless passions, that the very record of them can yet seduce and daunt men as she daunted and seduced them of old—the fairest, subtlest, hardest among women, with a heart of iron and fire—she shows here a fool’s face, doubtful between a simper and a sob, raised in pitiable appeal to a ring of stagestruck ruffians. The picture is worth notice as a tangible piece of proof that certain men do really accept this as the historic type of a figure so famous as hers. Another hand has drawn her portrait, perhaps somewhat nearer life, to this effect; (I take leave to cite the lines as a corrective, being reminded of them at sight of this picture. They may perhaps find place here, as the Queen of Scots figures thrice in this year’s show:)—