The New Gallery

The Speaker, 7 May 1892, pages 555-556, 1,535 words

If the New Gallery were extended to the size of the Academy, should I have been bored as much as I was at the Academy? I will not waste time considering matters so recondite and abstruse; suffice it for the purpose of this article to say that I was not bored at the New Gallery. I can even say that I spent there an agreeable morning. The first picture that caught my attention was Mrs. Swynneton's picture entitled "Midsummer.'' I have always praised this lady's work, even so far back as five or six years ago; it is therefore a. pleasure to find her painting better and better, and developing her very real and original talent. Her style is hard and tough, but it is her own, and she perceives and feels without assistance from others. The present picture is the best thing she has done – a small girl with red hair, wearing a reddish frock, leaning over a birchwood stile; behind her a strip of meadow and a field of reddening corn; on the right the white bloom of some elder-trees. Out of this material Mrs. Swynnerton has painted something which arrests attention. The colour is rich and ornate, the execution isl rugged, but it is vehement, personal, and virile. Close at hand there is a portrait of Mrs. George Garden Nicol, by Mr. Arthur Hacker. I have rarely seen anything more disagreeable or more vulgar. The lady is in evening dress, and the pink and creamy silks have been treated in such a manner as to suggest a mayonnaise of salmon or a tray of fancy soap. The execution is that detestable drawing and modelling which young Englishmen acquire in Paris – that drawing and modelling which are built up on a regular system, and into which the personality of the artist hardly enters at all. But to compensate visitors for the discomfort of this most unpleasant portrait, the directors have been kind enough to hang just a little to the left of it a most charming landscape, "Swanage Bay," by Mr. Moffat P. Lindner.

Mr. ,Watts' portrait of Mr. Walter Crane is very accomplished, and it is highly gratifying to find so old a man as Mr. Watts painting so firmly and so volubly. Voluble is a strange word to use, but I think it expresses my meaning; for the telling, if I may be permitted another unusual locution, is as clear and as cursive as if the painter were in his thirtieth and not his seventieth year. Certain statements have been made very boldly and freely, but the utterance seems to me to be without pith or concentration. It reads like a piece of journalism, and for this reason I was not quite sure that it was not a facile and fluent imitation of the style of the master. Mr. Watts' picture in the Academy completely baffled me, and I thought that the end of the great painter's career was at hand. The New Gallery has, I am glad to.say, proved to me that I was mistaken. The large picture, " Hic Transit," is as grave and imposing as anything he has done. The knight lies covered by a winding-sheet, through which we dimly trace the profile of the body. The shadows are collected with the beauty of gravity about the face, and the linen grows lighter until a subdued grey light floats about the feet; the armour and the musical instruments in the foreground are not drawn with any remarkable intensity of observation, the most that can be said is that they are adequately drawn, but they are assuredly painted in a solemn harmony of tone that could hardly be surpassed. So beautiful and appropriate is the tone that they lose all their natural triviality, and without emphasis or accentuation affirm in some strange, mute, and solemn way the painter's intention. But I cannot stop here in my praise of Mr. Watts, for just opposite the dead knight there hangs one of the most beautiful pictures that this great painter has ever painted – a very simple thing indeed, merely a Cupid floating in the sea. The rosy flesh of the Cupid, and the rosy head, beautifully executed in a faint wavering modelling, full of the painter's idea, are the perfection of sensuous beauty, and their beauty is enhanced by a sky and sea lost in golden mist. The picture, it is true, is painted in the Italian convention of 1600. But I have never yet been able to understand the desire to abolish convention in an art which is made up entirely of conventions and artifices.

As I moved down the Gallery, I noticed a picture of a girl feeding chickens in a wood, by Mr. Edward Stott. The wood is suffused with sunlight and mist, and the girl and the chickens are in the atmosphere. Mr. Stott feels the simple charm of light and air, and he tells his sensations in a simple and unaffected manner. A little further on I saw an Albert Moore, which, I am sorry to say, left me somewhat indifferent. I doubt very much if the painter had any very clear idea to express when he painted this picture. High above it hangs a portrait of a child in a blue frock, by Miss Alice Grant. It is to be regretted that Miss Grant had not quite enough strength to realise what she was striving for. The painting of the frock is excellent, both in colour and in quality, but the face seems to me to be somewhat crude, both in modelling and in colour, the lights seem chalky and vulgar, and the flaxen hair, though excellent in intention, does not seem to be quite satisfactory. Still it is a most meritorious piece of work, and ought not to have been "skied." Mr. Charles Hallé would have done well to have given to Miss Grant the place he secured for his somewhat absurd picture entitled “A Little Mendicant." It would be superfluous even to shrug one's shoulders in depreciation of it.

And the same criticism for the portrait by Mr. Hallé which hangs close to the door in the next room. In this room I noticed "The Moonlit Vale," a pretty picture by Mr. Alfred Hartley. The painter has realised some of the poetry and seduction of the moonlight, the blue illusive distance, and the strange night-life and movement of the flock. Mr.. Mark Fisher has two pictures in this room; both are good, but it will be some time before this admirable painter paints anything as good as the picture he exhibited last year at the New English Art Club. And underneath one of Mr. Mark Fisher's pictures hangs a charming picture by Mrs. Swan. Mr. Swan has not been painting as well as usual; perhaps his time has been taken up teaching his wife how to paint. If this be so he cannot be accused of wasting his time, for he seems to have found a most apt and intelligent pupil. The little girl sits so composed in her room, unwinding blue wool, the blue wool relieves the white apron, and the colour is repeated by the blue screen before the fireplace. On the other side there is a yellow table-cloth and a yellow green wall. The girl's face is modelled in half-tint, and unaffectedly without emphasis or accent of any kind. In the north room I was particularly distressed by two life-size portraits by Professor Herkomer: Sir George Gabriel Stokes, Bart., and the Rev. John E.B. Mayor. I am uncertain which of these portraits it would be most unpleasant to live with. The portrait of Sir George would drive me into a lunatic asylum, the portrait of the Rev. John E.B. Mayor would drive me to suicide. Suicide is better than lunacy, so on that ground, and on that ground alone, I should cast my lot with Sir George if necessity compelled me. Truly, it is impossible to imagine anything more vulgar than these portraits, and I do not readily distinguish how and where they differ from richly-coloured photographs. Tempted by an odious curiosity I examined them more closely, and I seemed to discover strange analogies between them and the well-known light and shade of photography. I do not mean that Mr. Herkomer is or should be made professor of the gentle craft of the camera, but he seems to be more than a platonic admirer of the machine. Besides the Herkomers there is a large canvas by Mr. David Murray, in which the painter has striven to the best of his ability to emulate Constable. And Mr. Murray's effort towards an ideal raises a curious question – Which is the most disagreeable, Mr. Murray when he aspires towards the heights of Constable's genius or Mr. Murray when he drudges in the lowly plain of his own native talent?

But it would be unfair to close this article with a conundrum that no fellow could be expected to answer. I will therefore ask the visitor to look at Mr. Macbeth's fine picture of an Alsatian flower girl. G.M.