Art

IT would be impossible, in the space at our command, to notice in detail all that may have merited attention in the March exhibition of the Boston Art Club. The water-color department was hardly as strong as that of the January exhibition, but the average of the whole collection did not fall far below that of the previous one. Among the foreign pictures was that of a slim-waisted girl, reputed to be a work of Hogarth, a Madonna and Child attributed to Annibale Caracci, and a tumultuous rout of fallen angels, of the school of Rubens. But all these, as well as some beautiful bits by Troyon, a Uaubignv, and one of the usual deep and drowsy woods of Diaz, with its touch of sunlight in the midst, thick with medium and glistening with glaze, must be passed over, in order that we may surrender our eyes more freely to the work of the American painters represented. Chronologically, the first mention should be given to a portrait of General Warren, attributed to Copley ; though we confess the face which would hardly have satisfied us, had not the illustrious names of painter and subject cast about it a certain radiance of national antiquity too seldom found to be neglected. But two small portraits hanging below this, and apparently of equal antiquity with it, attracted one as well by their color and quaintness and sturdy individuality as by the pleasant uncertainty in regard to authorship with which the parenthetical, questioning “ Who ? ” of the catalogue surrounded them. The arrangement of these portraits was in the highest degree conventional; and yet there was almost an agreeable naïveté in the substitution of green, in the background curtain that relieves the venerable gentleman in marroon coat and gilt buttons, for the crimson of that which hangs behind the lady, his companion, and, as we take it, wife. A smaller portion of distant landscape, too, is allotted to him than that which she enjoys. Altogether, she comes off with a richer endowment from the painter than does her husband, whose grand white wig, and purple cloak thrown carelessly over his shoulder, do not distract us from our admiration for her dress of ancient, rich brocade, and her long black veil of lace, drooping back from the hair to a point below the arm of the square-backed chair in which she reposes. It would, however, be difficult to say which enjoys the more rubescent complexion ; and we suspect that this fine, vital color, so strongly laid in upon the cheeks of either, is the very charm that has kept us so long before a pair of mere picturesque reminiscences, while the fresh-faced canvases of to-day hang waiting farther on. Two landscapes by Mr. F. D. Williams, Clearing off Warm, and Clearing off Cold, have especially interested us. They are artistic presentations of two differing phases in the dispersion of stormy or cloudy sky,—fleeting and every-day transactions of light and air, cast in little coloridyls. Mr. Williams is not, it strikes us, completely successful in this instance; but all his pictures appear to have issued from a sincere and direct personal communion with nature, and these two make no exception in tins regard. The first-mentioned is the better achievement, however. A moist and maculated sky — pale whiteyellow, gathered here and there into a faint mauve-tint and slate, which again diffuses itself into the former hue — constitutes the real field of action, above a dim stretch of woods, brown and blue with distance, containing a running hint of dark green; and a placid water between it and us. A group of distant elms define themselves on the right ; and three birds hover over the lake. In the other piece, we feel too acutely the rawness of the time and condition represented, despite the merit of its cold whiff of chimney-smoke, spinning off on the chilly breeze, the water blown in spray from the wayside-trough, the pale blue sky strained sparsely through gray clouds. It may be questioned whether a picture should send an atmospheric chill down the back of the spectator : for this is neither pleasing nor nobly moving. American scenery abounds in effects of color that, by reason of its inherent northern coldness, appear to tremble on the verge of discord ; but they never actually pass into it. When a painter fails to catch its delicate strain, then it is probably owing to some mistake in his seizure of relations, or to a strong inclination, for the moment, toward imitation, which disturbs the balance of creative apprehension. Mr. Norton shows a mistake attributable to something of this sort in his twilight scene on the sea-shore. His Wing and Wing, however, a schooner laden with hay, and riding a smooth sea, is an exquisite triumph in every particular, though in quite another region of effects. This picture is struck from a high scale of color, but the profundity of the blue foreground-water is given with a delicate intensity that is all the more powerful for not employing intrinsic depth of hue. The aerial recession of the perspective must be noted, wafting into graceful prominence an advancing schooner, lighted on its starboard side (to our left), its spankers spreading one to right and one to left, the jib illuminated, the bow in shadow, — a delicate structure of chiaroscuro. In the background, at the left, is a steamer ; at the right, three distant ships, the first of which is white, the second and third being farther away and of a slaty blue. High at the left, the white light of a shaded sun is admitted, and falls softly into the lower part of the sky,—a sky that nurses gentle glooms of gray, grading into palest green, — and there is re-echoed, less and less, until at last it dies away into the dream of distance at the farthest right. It is perhaps worth while to mention two large pictures of woods in autumn and winter, by Mr. T. L. Smith, as showing how much labor, expended in the statement of multitudinous detail, may be lost by the subjection of nature to a theoretic method of reproducing leafage. There is a certain fine spaciousness about these two scenes; but, by some means or other, which it must be left to more technical students to point out, they have been transformed, from fresh leaves out of nature’s book of witchery, into pages of dry sylvan statistics, as it were. Mr. George Inness’s small picture of a coming thunderstorm has all that these lack. The prescient dread of the darkened trees in the foreground, the sulphurous dimness farther back on the right, the threatening blue of the hills on the left, and the dusty gray on the tops of the approaching clouds, all purple-black beneath; the sheaves in the foreground, with three men in white, red, and dark blue shirts ; and the last shifting gleam of light on a space of red earth, a little farther back in the valley, — these things demand recognition as genuine and sympathetic reproduction. Two larger and later works from the same hand, though praiseworthy, were hardly so pleasurable. In the View on the Tiber, below Perugia, the lines of an ancient olive-tree, lifting its warped and slender limbs against the distant valley, were especially notable for ease and grace ; and the whole composition was full of the gray luxury of Italian air. But in this later style of Inness there is a certain severity of purity, that gives his work something of hardness, despite its superior refinement over his earlier manners. Perhaps, indeed, it is an over-refinement which causes it, a dryness of finish caught partly from the air of Italy, and a long abode among the chief examples of purist landscape-art. A. Jourdan’s picture of a lady reading, and called The Latest Novel, offered an instance of less conventional disposition in a portrait (if such it be) than we are usually treated to. A finely formed and beautiful woman sits before us, in a carefully arranged négligée, with a book open upon her knee, resting on a dress of pale mauve silk, just dimmed here and there by some reflected light, that gives it a hue of hazy blue. A kind of elaborated corsage of white satin, with a tuft of leaves and a rose at the top, leaves the graceful arms exposed, one of which lies in full and delicate roundness on the lap, very pleasingly and, as it seems to Us, truly drawn. Upon the substantial and gracious neck hangs a slight chain of little pearls. There is a lack of richness in the coloring, though a certain agreeable silvery lightness and mystery is achieved. We may venture the opinion, however, that something of needful force has been lost, in the search for a soft harmoniousness, that reminds one of Huntington’s manner in portrait. Perhaps the most thoroughly satisfactory head in the exhibition was that of a Capri girl, by Mr. Ernest Longfellow. The rich and mantling cheek, remarkably vigorous in its vitality, lost nothing of its lustrous charm by the close proximity of a deep magenta cloth tied over the head, knotted, and richly embroidered behind. A line of small, close curls of deepest black, peeping out from under its front edge, furnished a potent contrast; and, from this, one’s glance descended with keen relish to the beautiful, alert eye of the profile. Such a maiden brings to our revery a tinge of early morning, and its first pure touch of fire ; breathing a positive aesthetic balm of semitropical richness and rest upon our meagredieted Northern senses. We may be honestly thankful to any one who renders so sweet a head so simply. Mr. Frank H. Smith contributed a quiet and careful little picture of a Marquise in a garden, — a lady with an odd type of face ; that long, slender nose above a somewhat wide mouth, and touching at the bridge the lines of wide-arched eyebrows, which, without being precisely pretty, belongs to a peculiarly and we might say pathetically, feminine character. In a deep wine-colored dress, she sits upon a stone bench, the arm of which stares out in a griffin’s face under her elbow, and clutches the ground with a stony claw. Her hat, full of flowers, lies at her side, and a black lace shawl is drawn upon her head; so that, thus capped, and fretting a guitar with long and graceful frngeis, she receives a certain slight inflection of Spanish suggestion. The abundant foliage behind her is, perhaps, a trifle too vaguely treated ; but a cool gray luminosity picvades the picture, which is accordant with the leafy seclusion of the place. A large picture of a ram standing, and a lamb lying down, upon a greensward, under an uncertain sort of apple-tree to the right, and lent by the Union Club, does not show Mr. J. Foxcroft Cole at his best. It is but air expansion of the severe and almost unimaginative simplicity of pastoral greenness, matched with grays of cloud and the smoked white of sheep, which distinguish his very acceptable smaller pictures ; and appears to lack something which is essential to masterly life-size representation. Among the chalk-drawings was a portrait by Rowse, hardly so captivating, however, as the fascinating, almost fantastic, head of a child, in oil, at the last exhibition. Mr. Bellows’s water-color study in New Hampshire showed what may be accomplished with such simple native elements as a dark, still pool ; an old gray barn with a glowing window ; some purple logs lying near, yellowred at the ends ; and a surrounding growth of quiet green saplings.

The habit of buying directly from painters, or through the exhibitions organized by them, will have to be much more generally cultivated than at present in American communities, before artists can take the independent position they should be allowed to occupy, or exhibitions be made thoroughly successful. When the present disadvantageous state of things in this regard is remedied, we shall not find painters gathering in an informal association, like that which proposes from time to time to hold an auctionsale under the name of Boston Artists’ Sale. One of these took place last month, and among the hundred and odd oil-paintings offered on that occasion were many excellent ones by Messrs. F. H. Shapleigh, J. Appleton Brown, Frank H. Smith, and others. Mr. Shapleigh, a disciple of Lambinet, distinguishes himself by an acute and sensitive grasp of mountain-forms ; though as a colorist he may, we think, make still some considerable advances. His view of the Matterhorn, from Zermatt, gives with much strength and nicety not only the rugged bulk of the mountain, — a pale mauve mass of rock, under light layers of snow, — but also the fine deflection of the peak, like that of a candle-flame bowed by the slightest imaginable breath of air. The elastic woodiness of some willows, too, in a small Yosemite scene, should be noticed. Others of his contributions showed some unevenness ; but Dixville Notch throws itself into a very graceful composition, appearing before us as a receding mountain-gap, lined by sheer, light-purple rock-walls, with woods and a road in the foreground, and a serene but scattered company of clouds poised in the blue, behind. We must speak of Mr. Brown’s little twilight episode, near Kenilworth,— a dark brown water, with bare-branched trees behind, against white clouds involved in a delicate suspicion of rose. The artist inclines strongly to trace again and again these beauties of tree-lines thrown forward by a white, opaque sky, and in this field he is often happy ; but we should be glad to see a little more responsiveness to climatic changes in his coloring than was instanced by the scenes at home and abroad here exhibited. Mr. F. H. Smith’s Venetian scenes we should be glad to recall in words ; but it can only be said that both eye and hand have, in turn, answeied with unusual grace and fervor to those resonances of rich red and gold and crimson, those gleams of rare pale green and blue, which echo in our memories of Venice and her silent water-ways. We have only time to hint the fresh clearness and good faith of some seaside studies by Mr. Norton ; one, in particular, showing an exquisite, sunny cumulus, glooming underneath, with a long, thin slip of slaty cirrostratus against it, looming stately over an inky sea,— a sign of storm. Nor can we describe, here, the fine group of sheep on a desolate wold by the sea, with soft gray clouds rolling here and there into white, which does Mr. Robinson credit. The vigor and variety in the entire collection are most encouraging.