Art

APROPOS of the establishment of a free system of elementary art education in Massachusetts there has lately been an exhibition, at the rooms of the Boston Art Club, of drawings by pupils of schools of art abroad. The English system as pursued throughout the United Kingdom, under the direction of the science and art department of the Committee of Council on Education, was illustrated by a series of carefully finished drawings exhibiting all the twenty-three “ stages ” embraced in their programme, covering the whole range of art from the construction of geometrical figures to architectural composition and design, and from simple outlines of ornament or of natural objects to painting in oils. These examples, collected by the friendly aid of the South Kensington authorities, are the property of the city of Boston. The French system, as pursued in the municipal schools of Paris, was illustrated by a series of crayon drawings from the admirable school of M. Sequien, exhibiting the eight or nine stages of progress through which the French students pass from “ the flat ” to “ the round,” and from the round to the living model. The Belgian system of M. Hendrickx, as explained by a set of outline drawings of ornament and half a dozen drawings in crayons and in sepia from the Kreling Art School at Nuremburg, completed the show. All the Continental drawings were from the collections of the Institute of Technology.

The various drawings were not without their individual merits and attractiveness, but the chief interest of the exhibition came, of course, from the opportunity it offered of comparing the methods and results of the three systems of popular art education most likely to serve as an example in our own case. The German drawings were too few to enable one to judge of the method pursued. The Belgian work, though not reaching beyond the drawing of ornament from flat copies, was interesting and pertinent to our own case as showing what can be done by class-teaching through the medium of the blackboard. But the English and French work formed the bulk of the exhibition, and was in every respect the most important, representing, as it did, the two chief systems of industrial art education in the world. The French system is that by which the long-continued supremacy of the French in all the industrial arts has been maintained. Whether it is to be regarded as the efficient cause of this ascendency, or only as the means adopted by the most artistic of nations to develop and keep in vigor their artistic powers, in either case it is eminently worthy of study and imitation by ourselves, now that we are proposing to do what we can to discover and develop the germs of artistic power that may exist among us. The English system, on the other hand, is even more germane to our purpose. It is the method by which a nation of our own blood and with mental habits identical with our own has managed in the space of twenty years to raise its manufactures from the lowest rank of art to a position next to the highest. It would seem that here was an example that we could not err in following.

In comparing the methods and the results, nothing could be more unlike than the two systems. In the first place, as we have intimated, the English scheme is much more ambitious, too much so, one may safely say, for a scheme intended to train artisans and mechanics. The fine arts and the industrial arts, however intimately related, are practically distinct. The discursive culture appropriate to the Royal Academy and the Ecole des Beaux Arts is out of place in a school for workingmen. The French schools, though intended for just the same class of persons as the English, recognize this distinction, and limit the range of work to their practical needs. They are simply schools of drawing, and proceed upon the theory that good drawing, the accurate representation of form by contrasted light and shade so as to bring out, whether by a rude or by an elaborate process, its essential characteristics of form, is the beginning, middle, and end of what an art workman needs to know. To attempt more than this in an art school is to waste strength upon irrelevant matters.

But it is not only in this difference of scope that the French and English systems as contrasted in this exhibition are at variance. They differ equally in their way of treating the subjects they treat in common. Half a dozen of the English stages are occupied with the drawing of objects in outline, and in light and shade, in black and white. But while the French begin with charcoal or crayon, on rough paper, exacting at first only an approximation to accuracy, trusting to the educating effect even of inaccurate drawing to sharpen the student’s perceptions and lead him to establish for himself an ever-rising standard of excellence, and introduce shading almost from the outset, that the drawings may even at first resemble the object drawn as nearly as may be, the English system enforces an introductory discipline in outline work, using a hard fine point, and exacting a degree of finish and of precision which a beginner has hardly eyes to see or knowledge enough to understand. It is not surprising that with these beginnings the English work has a general air of painstaking, of faithful and laborious effort, while the French work, some of which is exquisitely finished, has freedom and spirit and an artistic charm. The English drawings are, many of them, very admirable, yet hardly any of them make one wish to go and do likewise, as French work does.

The difference in the scope and character of the work done has long been recognized in England, and the most intelligent of the art masters have urged it upon the department so far to relax the regulations as to allow them to ongraft upon the English organization, which is by far the most efficient in Europe, the best points of the French methods of work. Among other testimony to the same purpose, we find abundant confirmation, of this statement, as well as of what we have said respecting the characteristics of the two systems, in a couple of articles printed in the “Builder,” shortly after the close of the exhibition of 1867, and written by Mr. Walter Smith, for many years Head Master of the School of Art at Leeds, and now holding an appointment as General Superintendent of Drawing both from the State of Massachusetts and from the city of Boston.

It is matter for congratulation that in endeavoring to profit from the example of England by putting the whole matter of art education into the hands of an experienced art master thoroughly versed in the administrative work of the English system, We should have happened upon the one man, perhaps, in all England, most thoroughly alive to the defects of that system, and to the necessity of engrafting upon it the best methods of the Continental schools. We may hope that when there comes to be an exhibition of the results of the Massachusetts system, this combination, which Mr. Smith successfully effected in his own schools at Leeds, will be found to have been carried out upon a new and larger field.

The exhibition of the works of Mr. William Hunt, at Doll and Richards, struck us as not fairly representative of the painter. It contained, indeed, one of his most ambitious, but not most successful pictures, the “Hamlet ” ; but, in general, the works present suggested invidious comparisons with various absent companions, which those who have seen them associate with the artist’s best powers, — the “ Girl at the Fountain,” the “ Belated Kid,” the portrait of Chief Justice Shaw, and various charming portraits of women. A critic who should judge Mr. Hunt on the evidence of this collection would, we think, distinctly underestimate him ; though, on further information, he would be compelled to regret that the artist should tend increasingly, as it seems, to identify himself with his inferior manner. The trouble is that, while his talent is pre-eminently delicate, his method has taken a turn toward coarseness, so that in the case of a number of these recent pictures, the spectator was vexed by a sense that they deserved to have been better. Delicate talents cannot afford to be reckless, and Mr. Hunt is interesting, in every case, just in proportion as he has been careful. The thoroughly agreeable works of last month’s exhibition were neither the ‘ Hamlet,” nor the “Boy and the Butterfly,” nor the portrait of Bishop Williams, but half a dozen small canvases, chiefly landscapes, of the most charming quality. We may instance especially the two companion-pieces, representing respectively a bit of French garden and a couple of quaint French houses. Into each of these the very 'genius loci has been cunningly infused. Why should the artist who painted that admirable patch of sky in the latter picture have been content with the sky which forms the background to the young girl in white ? It must be confessed, however, that in spite of her sky, this young lady stands up in the open air with no small reality and grace.

Messrs. Williams and Everett have exhibited an excellent Gérome ; none other than the well-known “ Combat de Coqs.” Though small and of simple elements, this picture is a capital example of the master, and presents in remarkably convenient shape the substance of his talent, — that indefinable hardness which is the soul of his work. The present picture is equally hard in subject and in treatment, in feeling and in taste. A young man, entirely naked, is stooping upon one knee, and stirring two bristling game-cocks to battle. A young woman, also naked, — more than naked, as one somehow feels Gérome’s figures to be, — reclines beside him and looks lazily on. The room and the accessories are as smartly antique as Gérome alone could have made them. The picture is of course painted with incomparable precision and skill; but the unloveliness of the subject is singularly intensified by the artist’s sentimental sterility. There is a total lack of what we may call moral atmosphere, of sentimental redundancy or emotional byplay. The horrid little game in the centre, the brassy nudity of the youth, the peculiarly sensible carnality of the young woman, the happy combination of moral and physical shamelessness, spiced with the most triumphant cleverness, conduce to an impression from which no element of interest is absent, save the good old-fashioned sense of being pleased.

The most interesting name, to our mind, in the same group with this Gérome, is that of Zamacois, although the one small canvas bearing it is but a slight example of the artist’s powers. This young Spanish painter, who died a year ago, had created a brilliant specialty of his own by his mediæval dwarfs and court-fools, his monks and gallants and other historico-romantic figures. What he might have lived to accomplish further, it is hard to say ; it is possible that a certain precocious firmness and hard perfection had indicated the limit of his development. But as he stands, Zamacois is a very pretty figure of a master. He is the model of the painters of letters and culture. No one, surely, has possessed a more delicate sense of the historical picturesque, of the value of odd lingering testimonies to bygone manners and individuality of costume, place, and scene. The picture which suggests these remarks is little more than a sketch of miniature size ; a tall, gross Spanish monk, in some warm-toned sacristy, some high rococo ecclesiastical parlor, standing at a music-desk and practising upon a quaint bassoon. Minutely sketchy as it is, the picture reveals the master ; in the distinct expression of the big, bloated, hooded face, and still more, perhaps, in that of the hand, in the happy firmness of the figure, placed there in three touches, in the rapid frankness and delicacy of the whole treatment. It is a work to hang under glass, in its massive gold margin, on some dark library wall, and be relished after a good dinner, while the host fondly holds up the lamp.

More of a picture (though by less of a painter) is the admirable Vibert exhibited by Messrs. Doll and Richards. It bears no title that we know of; the spectator may baptize it to suit his own fancy, and if his fancy has been half as charmingly mystified as ours, he will find a pleasure in his very wonderment and doubt. The scene is the verge of some hoary forest of Italy, with the trees thinning away behind to the crest of a hill which commands a glimpse of blue sea. The hot light of a sinking summer sun turns their green to a transparent glow and lies red upon the stems and trunks. Within the wood, toward the front, begins a lovely mixture of forest gloom and gathering dusk. To the right stand, half huddled, a dozen sheep, timorously nosing each other’s wool. To the left, on a stone, against a massive tree-bole, sits a little shepherdboy, in sheep-skin jacket, with his bandaged legs hanging helpless, his hands in his lap, and his big, childish eyes fixed and expanded with a sense of some terrible influence unseen by the spectator. At his feet— the centre of the little mystery— lies a dead ram, the pride of the flock, staining the sod with a gush of blood. Does the poor little boy see the wolf or does he fear the padrone ? He is, perhaps, afraid to be alone with a corpse, even of the ovine order. It is a most pathetic little story — pretty in its delicate complexity of theme, incomparably pretty in its treatment. As with many of the young French painters of the day, M. Vibert tends rather largely to sacrifice truth of detail to mere delight in manipulation per se ; and with the less excuse, as his handling, though graceful, is decidedly thin and superficial. He has none of the delicious depth of Diaz. The picture has that familiar air of being painted too much in-doors, in an arbitrary light ; but it is, nevertheless, a model of ingenuity and taste.