Punch (26.1854)

222

I

PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI


PUNCH AMONG THE PAINTERS. No. 3.

In the rooms at last—and recovering from the glare of gilt frames,
and the blaze of scarlet coats and red robes, and the supernatural lights
on ladies’ hair, and the dead white and carmine of naked bodies !

Oil for a dewy sward under my feet, green shade and silence about
me, and sweet air to breathe, instead of this blaze of canvasses, this
flush of spring bonnets—this buzz of low voices, and shuffle of many
feet—this villainous atmosphere of carbonic acid gas. What wonder
that my eye turns gratefully to that full-fed stream-bank, where the
water-grasses, and bushy willows, and graceful birches come crowding
down to look at themselves in the still water, leaden with reflection of
the thunder-clouds, from under which the sun gleams out with a
watery eye upon the summer fallows P

Here is the very landscape I was praying for; I need not look into
my catalogue to see that it is marked with the name of Anthony.
True, down to the leathern gaiters of that lazy old bailiff or keeper,
reclining, careless of rheumatism, by the young man in corduroy, to
whom he has entrusted his gun, and who, I regret to see, is basely
slouching for a shot at the innocent water-hens. May the dank grass
punish them both with aches and cramps, as it assuredly will, if they
lie there long. The painter has painted nobler landscapes, but never a
truer one, and the aspect of the sky, the character of the vegetation, and !
the whole “lay” of the place are faithful transcripts of English nature.

It is true that they lack the slippery conventional dash of Mr. Lee,
who writes It.A. alter his name, which Mr. Anthony does not; true
also, that to chasten any pleasure with which the recognition of honest
eyes and minds might reward the painter, the Hanging Committee
have rejected the other pictures he sent—“pour encourager les autres.” j

On the same paternal principle, too, it may be that Mr. Glasse’s
Desert March has been hung well out of sight over the entrance-door.'
But it serves him right. Has Mr. Abraham Cooper painted Arabs, |
and their tents, and their mares, and their “maidens,”—as I am sure I
he calls them—for every exhibition these twenty years, and is he to !
be faced out of countenance by a young whipper-snapper, who dares to
put desert ground under his horse’s feet, and a desert sun in the sky,
and to fling blue desert shadows over the hot ground—whose Arabs are

“ Long, and lean, and brown,

As is the ribbed sea-sand,”

instead of the sleek gentlemen at eighteenpence per hour, with whom
Mu. Abraham Cooper delights to people the Sahara? At their
peril who dare to attempt, and—still worse—to succeed, in Arab subjects
when Mr. Abraham Cooper is of the Hanging Commiltee ?

But one word to Mr. Glasse. Why paint Cceur de Lions and
Saladins, when you might paint Aim Youssoufs and Sidi El Hamets ?
Wherein is a March of Crusaders a more kindly subject for the brush,
than a Cafileh on its way to El Caaba ; or a Toorkman horde on chappow
—pardon my parade of Orientalism; but, I have been bitten by
“ Eothen” and Mr. Layard—or a Desert tribe shifting its quarters on
the Metidjah ? Why go back to the imagined thing, when the reality
subsists in forms as full of colour, and with the actualities of visible
existence about it, to boot ? 1 am the more urged to ask this question,
because I fancy that I can. see, in the Exhibition of this year, that our
painters are beginning to show an apprehension of this truth—that for
Art to be a living thing amongst us, she must deal with subjects and
themes from life, or at least subjects in which the universal life of I
humanity is reflected, though the garb and period be not our own. I
hasten with pleasure to note every symptom of this happy change, and
as the pleasantest and most masterly example, 1 do not need that dense
ring ot appreciating lookers-on—every one a critic—to guide me to
Mr. Erith’s picture of Ramsgate Sands.

Shake hands, Mr. Erith. Allow me to introduce you lo Mr. John
Leech, a gentleman who has been painting in black and white, year
after year, month after month, week after week, graceful, true, "and
homely pictures of English life, but not more graceful, true, or homely,
than this beautiful work of yours. Can I give you higher praise than
to say.that this is a picture after his own heart, (with the addition of un-
matched dexterity in the use of the painter’s tools,) alike exquisite in
colour, drawing, and arrangement. Mr. Ranch hails in you a brother
illustrator of the life round about us ; not by any means a heroic life ;
unromantic enough in its employments, tame and vulgar enough in its
amusements, poor and colourless in the cut and hue of its clothes, but
still human, after your fashion and mine—something every one who
comes here can understand and feel a living sympathy with, such as
was never yet felt for all the gallants of the time of Charles the
Second, and Louis the Eourteenth, and George the Eirst, on
whom you have been so long wasting your great skill and fine sense of
humour. Why not, having thus begun, go on and be the Hogarth of
our day and generation ?

Here, it is true, you have chosen a subject which confines you, mainly,
to the trivial.and common-place ; a cockney dolce far niente is all you
can make of it, with such touches of humour and satire as that admits,
but with very small room for emotion or affection. Yet even in this
way something might have been done without jarring against an

untruth. Suppose that in the midst of all this lazy enjoyment of
sunshine and sea air, these lounging ladies and flirting widows, and
vacant old gentlemen, and fussy old ladies, and happy sand-pie-making
children, and their suite of Savoyards, and mountebanks, and donkey
drivers, you had introduced, say some pallid, sickly darling of a young
mother, brought from the reeking city to the sea-side in the faint hope
of bringing back the blood to the pale cheek, and the fullness to the
thin pulse, with the mother hovering about it, absorbed in her feqble
charge, forgetting all the gaiety and movement round her, or only
remembering it in the effort to kindle interest and amusement in her
ailing little one. By this or some such incident, you might have
supplied the note of human affection which is wanting to make up every
complete harmony of common life, and by help of this the gaiety and
enjoyment of your full-grown folks and the lusty gladness of your chil-
dren would have acquired a double value.

H aving done so much, however, I have no right to quarrel with you
for not having done more, nor do I mean what I have said in the way
of disparagement or dissatisfaction. On the contrary, I am thankful
to you, and so is the public. May their delight cheer you on to better
things of the same kind. More skilfully rendered common life cannot
be, but you may find deeper themes in it, and chapters that shall
awaken a profounder and more wholesome mood in those who come
to look ana to admire.

THE MUSICAL OPERATIVES.

E have now two
operas in full swing
—or, rather, in full
play ; one an opera
for the millionnaire,
and the other an
opera for the mil-
lion. Both are suc-
cessful, andyet both
are distinct from
each other, thf
Royalltalian Opera
being distinguished
by its distingue air
while Drury Lane
appeals to a public
of a less exclusive
character. We are
quite sure there is
room for both, and
we are disposed to
welcome the estab
lishment of a cheap
opera such as that
at Drury Lane, where, if everything is not quite first-rate, it is excellent
for the money.

We must warn the directors, however, against creeping away by
degrees from their original plan of a “ cheap opera.” Already an extra
shilling has been rather suddenly added to the price of one tier ot
boxes, and there are symptoms of a small disposition to ape the
“ fashionable arrangements ” of the other house which, though all very
well at the Opera, par excellence, are not likely to improve the prospects
of the cheap establishment. An announcement has been put forth about
enforcing the rules as to evening costume in certain parts of the house
according to the plan adopted at Her Majesty’s and the Royal Italian
Opera. If people are to be victimised by having to resort to all the
inconveniences which make up what is called “ evening dress,” entailing
“low necks” on the ladies and “light kids” on the gentlemen
rendering it necessary to make an expensive and uncomfortable, thing
of what ought to be a cheap and pleasant amusement, the affair will
sink into a hollow sham, and a very empty one too, instead of growing
into a successful reality.

People who have plenty of occupation in the day, don’t want an
hour’s work in getting themselves up, regardless of outlay, iu order to
hear a little good music in the evening. We are not the advocates of
muddy highlows and bearskin coats as an appropriate costume for the
theatre, but we have also an aversion to tawdry finery on the women,
and mosaic jewellery on the men, with gloves on the hands of both
which reveal, by a terrific odour of turpentine, the cleaning process
which has been resorted to.

By the way, wdiile we are on the subject of operatic costume, we
must protest against the admission at either house, of individuals
wearing round their chests leather straps, such as the Police regula-
tions require to be worn by busmen and cab-drivers. The pretence
■with which these leathern straps are worn at the Opera, is to carry a
case for an opera-glass ; but the arrangement savours so thoroughly of
the cab-rank, that we trust some regulation will be adopted at both
houses to put an end to the practice.