Art

THE Boston Art Club opened the first of its winter exhibitions in January, with a muster-roll of nearly one hundred and fifty pictures and sculptures, about one third of which were the productions of foreigners, the rest of American artists.

As for the pictures, one scarcely knows what to begin with, as usual in looking at collections. The first glance into the two galleries makes us aware of the large canvases only; and we discover a number of these. From the end wall of the second gallery a late twilight of gray-yellow stares out at us under the boughs of a great, dusky tree, with the stamp of some foreign hand upon it; and beside that there is a fresh and rather hot-colored Spanish scene, The Billet-Doux, by C. Becker. Nearer, there is something from Koeckoeck, Jr.,— a lugger dragging over a rough and muddy sea, under a useless spread of feebly stormy cloud. There is also to be found a Sunset in Damascus, by E. L. Weeks, in which the artist seems rather to have masked any sentiment he may have begun with, in the heavy layers of paint through which he has attempted to express it. The sun has just gone to rest behind the Mosque of the Dervishes, which sits in the background, with one large dome and a brood of smaller domes around it. But the sun at Damascus must have a strange trick of color which it never exhibits in these latitudes, for on either side of the big dome, just where the luminary may be supposed to have sunk out of sight, there is seen a faint rosy glow, while all the rest of the sky, up to within a short space of the frame-top, is suffused with an intense, motionless yellow, partially graded off into blue. Now, in this country and in Europe, it is customary, we believe, for the sun to produce quite a different effect when it has this sort of still, cloudless sky to work upon. The rose could never come next to the sun, for there would be gold, and it could not come next to the gold, for there orange would appear; so that it is commonly forced into the third place in the scale that leads into blue somewhere at the zenith. A road comes out from the right background into the left foreground, and along this a caravan approaches, which fatally resembles in its unreality of appearance the triumphal entries of domestic circus troupes we arc familiar with. The riders seem scarcely to have been drawn from lay figures, even, — much less from the life. And the horse in the foreground has either only been allowed three legs, or else he is lifting two legs on the same side at once. Under a sticky and bruised tree on the right, squat some figures in blue and red, which are reflected at hap-hazard in a little pool just below them. On the whole, the large canvases do not attract us. Nearly opposite to Mr. Weeks’s picture, it is true, there hangs a work almost as large, by Chierici, which affords some genuine enjoyment. A little Italian boy has rushed into the kitchen where his mother or sister is cooking, and, with a grotesque mask held before his face, has hugely scared a little girl, who has dropped her doll, and clings to the young woman’s skirt in terror. The latter opposes an attitude and expression of stormy reproval to the little masquerader. It is a pretty subject, and painted with great care, — an almost extreme nicety, in fact. The countless details of the cooking range alone might easily absorb our attention, distracting it from the real drama. Not a stain or grease spot on the iron has been omitted ; and every atom of the dust and ashes, the remnants of shavings, and the half-burnt matches, appears to have been painted with a separate self-devotion. The smoke-besmirched and variously disfigured wall, too, is done with the same exactness. But the impression conveyed soon comes to be that the artist could not keep his hands off from anything. In this there is at once a timidity and a self-indulgence, faithful as the effort has been to be absolutely true. But, in fact, we never do become aware in one instant of so many things as are here painted, each without the chance of concealment or generalization.

When we come to the pictures of medium size (for it appears we have naturally classified them according to extent of surface], we find a clever piece by Rosa Bonheur, two peasant women raking in a field. They are coarse, cloddish creatures, whose whole conformation, and the very shadows on whose rough garments, make one feel that they are less human beings than a species of bipedal live stock capable of handling rakes, who have been turned out into the fields along with the rest of the cattle. The artist has, in fact, not troubled herself to make anything more of them than a pair of curious, tough animals belonging to the type of man. Accepted as such, they are capable of giving a certain wholesome, earthy pleasure, apart from the satisfaction which must be felt in the artist’s genuine appreciation of them, and her vigorous use of the brush.

Next in our way there is a picture by Meyer von Bremen, called Departure. Two peasant women, very well modeled, are standing on a rocky and grove-grown bank above a lake, a little patch of which appears in the right-hand lower corner, where there is a boat with some imperfectly drawn and dauby figures, one of which rises with a gesture of farewell. One of the women stands with her face from her companion, looking after the boat, while the other turns a brown and clearly-cut face toward her, as if to soothe and encourage. The sunlight strikes roughly and blindingly upon the rock whereon this girl sits, and catches some sprays of foliage in its passage. The sentiment is tender, but it is a case of sentiment originally good being mixed with technical insincerities. The trees are very disingenuous, and the sunlight strikes ns as sensational. There is just a touch of the stagemanager in the whole composition, and the trifling work with the distant boat seems to lay bare the slight pervading insincerity. Still, the figures of the women impress us as every way genuine, and they are very much to be preferred to the little school-girls in the two pictures in the second gallery. These are in the painter’s earlier vein,— two waxen children imprisoned in brown ami gray surroundings of an old room, one of whom sleeps over her task, and is called Repose, while the other, having discovered how to do her arithmetic problem, cocks her eye theatrically at the spectator. This is called Inspiration.

W. Mark Fisher has, in this neighborhood, a still-life remarkable for its good, naturalistic rib of beef, string of onions, and couple of fish. In arrangement, it is much superior to Mr. Brackett’s correct but stiff and unattractive fishes. Mr. Fisher, however, appears to better advantage in his landscape, Château of Montmorenci, and his picture of a Girl and Sheep, both examples of landscape in the modern French style. The best piece of still-life to be seen is undoubtedly that of W. Hahn, embracing a velvety brown hare, well drawn and flung upon a table, with his legs up against a basket containing celery and a fine blue cabbage. A blackbird and a yellow-breasted bird of some sort lie on the table beside it, lending a touch of beauty usually lacking in this kind of composition. Mr. J. Foxcroft Cole follows close upon Herr Hahn, with his brace and a half of white rabbits, softly and sympathetically painted ; though the background is too conventionally dark, and is marred by a defective and baggy tree-trunk. It is noticeable that one sixth of the collection under review, numerically, consists of still-life or flower and fruit pieces. Among the latter we find none that may be called successful, with the exception of one by Miss M. Carter, which bears the bronze medal award of the South Kensington Art Training School. Here are grapes pouring in a graceful torrent over a high-stemmed gilt patera, down upon a slab of sham marble (the like of which, we must urge in passing, should not he permitted to appear in the work of any student at first-class art-schools), with a blooming peach and a big-veined musk-melon hard by, and a large bronze kettle behind. There is nothing convincingly beautiful about this composition ; but the grapes are well modeled and lighted, and there is some resource manifest in the management of the paint. Technically, it is much better than the average of fruit pieces offered for sale in this country ; but it is apparently devoid of that freshness of impression from the subject which must exist in order to insure beauty and originality in an artist’s work. Though much is discoverable through this picture as to excellences of the Kensington method, it is also to be feared that it shows a tendency in that method toward sinking the student hopelessly in the physical and mechanical means of art. It is to be hoped that this tendency may be watched in the establishment of the present system of art education in Massachusetts, and, if necessary, curbed in time to prevent an undesirable labor of reform in the future. In general, the pictures of fruit and flowers at the exhibition must be set down as monotonous. Fruit-pictures seem to be in the same case with still-life, which has been nearly motionless for so many, many years, that it seems at last about to stagnate utterly.

Passing to the water-colors, we find a small but very enjoyable piece from Boughton, The Gossips — two white-capped old French women encountering in front of a gray-green wall, with a flourishing thicket of green boughs behind it. One of them props herself with an umbrella in one hand, while holding out the other in discourse. Her friend is just opening a snuffbox. A little girl in black, who does not appreciate their conversation, tugs at the skirt of the latter, with a pretty, pained, yet unobtrusive impatience. The green at the back is carried gracefully into the foreground through the right-hand woman’s dress and umbrella, getting a bluer tinge in the transit. It is an excellent example of recent English water-color painting. Of a similar character are F. Lathrop’s two contributions in tempera. One of these is a girl’s head; a green dress appearing on the shoulder, against a background of green and pale rose hue. The other is a view of Windsor from the Meadows, and, while well laid out in the drawing, gives preëminently only the first and general impression of the scene. A notable instance of the old style of water-color, still prevalent in other schools than the English, is Fortuna’s sketch of an ancient crone with a red nose, a red bodice, a coral necklace, and a red band at the bottom of her kirtle, who has just descended the stairway into a courtyard near the Roman Ghetto. A hen pecks drearily at some refuse on the pavement, and an arched passage leads off with a long vista of blue on the right. Mr. Bellows shows two scenes with the same thin use of water-color, but his tints are more carefully and smoothly manipulated : A Nook near Lancaster, and Christmas Boughs, — the latter an English subject, apparently. The same painter has in the second gallery a large oil-color, Sunday in Devonshire. In both these English scenes, we notice a purplish log with yellow ends marked by the axe, the recurrence of which is perhaps one of several disadvantages attendant on painting successive finished pictures from old studies. The people in the street of this Devonshire village, too, look much as if they had dropped down at appointed intervals and in available groups, with a view to being photographed. Still, there is something amiable about the picture, and it gives unmistakably the effect of a quiet English village with its thatched roofs and church-spire, its thick trees and quiet pond, on a silent Sunday.

Proceeding with the water-colors, again, we find in Carl Werner’s Ruin in Sicily a careful architectural record, and at the same time a very pretty scene deftly executed in the best manner of aquarelles. We can not avouch that Herr Werner has confined himself to fact, in this case, but the excellence of the architectural record consists in the minuteness and patience with which he has reproduced, or imagined (whichever it be), a long-deserted Byzantine basilica, standing close to the yellow sand and blue sea, with scudding sails in the background. Of the body of the church only one or two arches remain ; but these are richly decorated in red and blue and gold, with saints looking out here and there in medallions, while the capitals of the supporting pillars unfold their tortuous and florid carving below. A pool of water washes about the bases of the shafts, and broad-leaved waterplants and grasses thrive upon its borders. On the hither side stands a sole and silent column suggestive of the fallen arch that once spanned the space between it and the others. On the farther, the water creeps in among the stones and weeds that block up the chancel ; and the curved wall of the apse bears, in gold-surrounded fresco or mosaic, a forgotten Christ and his twelve Apostles. A ray of light, falling from above, glints dimly down this pictured wall, and flowers and grasses flourish on the crumbling roof. The mosaic on the pulpit at the left is scaling off; the steps are awry with age, and a red fox prowls at the base ; while just without the shattered edifice, on that side, grow cedars, and a stonepine slimly rears itself into the air. One might almost write a poem on such a picture. Yet we are not sure that it is so thoroughly excellent an architectural painting as the Chapel of Henry VII. (Westminster Abbey) by Turner, a yard or two away on the same wall. Here we must admire the wise generalization of the carving, by means of which the result of multitudinous detail is given not so much through a slurring over of particulars, as through a compression of the value of each particular into this terse and pregnant statement of the whole. Werner could not apparently count upon himself for any such masterful faculty, and lias given each detail with absolute distinctness, slightly at the expense of the general pictorial effect. How exquisitely, too, does Turner’s faint gray light stream in at the perpendicular windows, losing itself in the multiplied and delicate richness of that fantracery which spreads itself over the groined ceiling, and drops into great pendants at the convergence of the arches !

The mention of Turner leads us on to a sketch by a more recent English worthy of less note, though to a certain extent renowned — David Cox, namely. This is a sepia-drawing, and represents a meadow traversed by a brook, where cattle are grazing ; and there are trees, a hill, and a rambling castle in the background. A tall, aristocratic tree in the left arches its masses of foliage gracefully, and some birds wing away over the castle behind. It is very loosely and somewhat blotchily executed. In fact, the aristocratic tree seems almost dropping into flakes, and it only emphasizes a certain indolent hauteur and amateurishness characterizing the whole sketch. Another sort of cleverness, higher in point of neatness and completeness, characterizes two water-color studies by Tissot. The first is a young woman of decidedly Parisian type, in a black and white cambric dress, who walks jauntily toward us with a plaid shawl on one arm, a parasol dangling from the other (held by her yellow-gloved hand), and on her head a flattish hat covered with plaited white muslin. Her complexion is of a singular sugar-of-lead hue, yet without being altogether abnormal. In fact, the red lips contrast rather prettily with it, in a way. The second sketch represents the same young woman, apparently, reclining now in an invalid’s chair with a bamboo back. The plaid shawl is thrown over her knees ; she wears a hat trimmed with soft, tumbled black lace ; and her white cambric necktie, so spruce before, is here twisted limply aside. Her expression is wistful and melancholy, and we seem to catch from it a history of disappointment and premature decay. One might imagine these figures set in a story of Balzac, or a play of the younger Dumas. The artist has dwelt lovingly on a picturesque misery, here, and with that sort of enjoyment which seems now and then to reveal a trace of absinthe in French art and literature. Nevertheless, as being freshly felt and ingeniously depicted, the pictures have their value; and if one looks carefully at them once, they exercise thereafter a fascination which it is difficult to resist.

Among the landscapes, we must not pass over F. P. Vinton’s Forest Road in October Twilight, — the woods prevailingly gray-brown, a cold, blue-gray sky above, and a spot of orange after-glow in the distance, happily interfused with the dusky trunks of trees. A woman drives sheep along the road. It shows the modesty of an earnest beginner, and is colored harmoniously. A head of Jacopo Cavanaro by the same painter has considerable vigor and humor. Mr. Vinton is subjected as yet to the tyranny of French skill, and would profit by study in London, and rather in some studio there than in the art schools. J. Appleton Brown’s landscape is perhaps the freshest and most spiritual of the landscapes in oil. Four clumps of trees recede into the distance, from right to left of a flat meadow, with a pool in the foreground. These are balanced by two single trees sloping in an opposite direction ; while a line of sunny white cloud in the background, varied by pale blue shadows, unites these opposing lines, and corresponds with the small foreground pool. Mr. Brown has also studied a storm at the Isles of Shoals with good results ; his picture contains a thunderous strength and a swiftness of movement worthy of the subject. F. D. Williams is represented by several pieces ; but they are fettered by a good deal of mannerism. He has brought ns some cool sea-color from York Sands, in Maine ; and a sunset in the first gallery comes near being a successful burst of lustrous color. His Devious Ways is a humorous incident, — a small drove of cattle going lamentably astray, regardless of a monitory sign-post; while the drover leans against a fence, a little at the left, talking with two young women. Ernest Longfellow displayed three landscapes, one of which, Manchester Shore, was remarkable for the structure and color of its rocks, of a sunny salmon tint. Below it the sea is spread in a windy blue; and a tall pine-tree rises above, with its lower boughs wrenched by the wind and covered in their drooping sweep earthward by a heavy vine. Of Alfred Ordway’s three landscapes, we like that best which brings a leaden-colored stream before us, in late afternoon, with dark chestnuts rising beside it in the still air; though there is a feeling of coolness and openness in his green lane, crossed by dark green shadows from the trees that border it. J. W. Champney, or “ Champ,” makes no less than five contributions, one of which comprises five sheets (catalogued as “ plates”) from his note-book at the South. They bear witness to the same ready and knowing skill with which the readers of Scribner’s Monthly have been made acquainted; but they are frequently embarrassed by unnecessary strokes and flourishes of the pencil. They abound in commonplaces, at the same time that they evince considerable alertness in observation.