Studio: international art (13.1898)

Studio- Talk

EXPOSITION

Wilsons, Turners, Romneys, Gainsboroughs, and to have been made to edit the collection, so as to
the Other inexpensive canvases by the then rising show only the best side of the artist's capacity, and
artists, have enormously enriched their families : a reasonable proportion of his failures have been
and the same chances are open to the present-day included as well as most of his greater successes,
buyers if they could only have the wit to realise it. The result is to afford a really adequate oppor-
To encourage contemporary art is certainly better tunity of estimating exactly the extent of his claim

to rank among the greater masters <>l
our native school. He is revealed as a
magnificent manipulator, full of vitality
and virile energy, and able to cover the
widest field of technical expression ; but
he is also proved to lack some of those
greater qualities of sensitiveness and
aesthetic judgment which are necessary
to raise craftsmanship to the higher level
of artistic mastery. His place is among
the realists rather than the imaginative
painters, for his instinct led him always
in the direction of literal imitation and
away from those subtleties of decoration
for which he had comparatively little
feeling. Nothing was impossible to him
in the way of expressing personal charac-
ter or in the treatment of textures and
accessory details ; but with few excep-
tions his pictures are more interesting
on account of their acuteness of obser-
vation than because they reveal a great
intention. In his landscapes, too, he
was always concerned with the more-
obvious side of his subject, and seemed
to appreciate hardly at all the elusive
charm of atmosphere and the exquisite
variety of open-air effects. Yet, despite
his limitations, he ranks beyond dispute
among the greatest painters of this cen-
tury ; and the position he occupies in
the record of British art is one that few
others would pretend to share with him.

CHAMP de MARS

poster by car an d'ache The idca which has apparently

governed the arrangement of the winter
exhibition at the New Gallery is the
than to support the manufactories where spurious assertion of the kinship between painters of dif-
"Old Masters'' are turned out by the hundred to ferent schools and periods. No attempt is per-
satisly a senseless demand. ceptible to exhaustively illustrate any particular

- school, and no artist, with the exception of

There is no want of completeness in the collec- Rossetti, to whose works one room is entirely

tion of works by the late Sir John Millais which given up, is represented by any great number of

occupies the Royal Academy galleries this winter. canvases. What has resulted is a curious, but

Nearly all the pictures by which his reputation was very instructive, series of juxtapositions. In one

established have been secured for the exhibition, room Van Dyck, Rubens, Holbein, Ruysdael,

and the various stages of his development are Rembrandt, Cuyp, and Paul Potter are associated

quite convincingly illustrated. No attempt seems with Paul Veronese, Piero della Francesca, Luca

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