Art

BOSTON.

THE excellent custom of exhibitions of an artist’s collected works seems to be coming into favor. It is a fashion by which a sincere and honest painter, of however modest merit, can hardly fail to profit. There is sure to be something interesting in any full presentation of a talent. Certain frank weaknesses legitimate themselves and are accepted as the inevitable condition of its exercise, and scattered merit joins forces to demand proper credit. Mr. Foxcroft Cole has, during the last month, placed on exhibition at Messrs. Doll and Richards’s a very interesting series of landscapes. Hung in the presence of a masterly foreign work, of which more anon, they bravely hold their own. They are indeed themselves foreign works ; and if we had not been otherwise informed, we should have taken them all for the produce of a French studio. It is French nature, in Mr. Cole’s case, as well as French treatment. His subjects have an indefinable air of being meant, or at least of being used, to be painted, which has not as yet come to be a feature of American landscape. Theme and manner, however, are evidently so thoroughly congenial to the artist’s talent, and his look at nature is so direct and attentive, that he strikes us in no degree as one of those ineffectively imitative spirits who bloom feebly on the outskirts of genuine schools. Mr. Cole deals with the common facts of French scenery, that homely range of rural feature which gives at once so much of its poetry and its prose to French landscape art. His pictures speak for themselves as direct out-of-door work, in which the aim has been the general and immediate effect, unmodified by fancy or reflection. Taken together, they produce a singularly grateful impression of honesty and sensibility. The painter gives us, in some cases, rather less than we would desire, but he gives us nothing that we would wish away. We remember in none of his pictures the hint of an artificial or arbitrary effect. They have rather less of a motive—an imaginative or reflective germ — than we ourselves like to find in a picture, — that lingering relish for something in objects over and above their literal facts, which occasionally plays so happy a part in some of the smaller works of Mr. William Hunt. It seems a great pity that a painter should ever reproduce a thing without suggesting its associations, its human uses, its general sentimental value. Mr. Cole lingers little in this mood ; but, thanks to his modest veracity, his studies are little the less pleasing and wholesome. He sees Nature rather more in dense green and grays than seems to us altogether fair to certain delectable reds and violets and browns, of which she drops a not infrequent hint. It speaks well, however, for his accuracy, that a little American subject is pitched in a different key from that of its French companions. Mr. Cole’s art hovers, we think, rather too fondly just below the line which separates a study from a picture, and it decidedly gains when it shows a tendency to rise higher; as, for instance, in the charming scene representing the outer edge of a wood, with the breezy, cloudy sky and the sheep and shepherd wandering amid the high grass. Here and in the sketch of the green down, stretching toward a seaport, with the wall at the left and foliage massed above it, there is a commendable suggestion of composition. We confess that for a touch of intelligent composition we are heartily thankful. “ Arrangement ” in art has been much abused, but it is surely the soul of the matter ; the point is of course to make it include the fullest measure of truth. Is it for lack of arrangement, of composition, of invention, that Mr. Cole’s two large cattlepieces — the feeding of the sheep in those odd - looking farmstead vaults — are not interesting in proportion to their obvious merits of vigor and care ? The sheep are excellent, — lively, various, and expressive, and yet without that pedantry of texture so inaptly lavished upon these modest animals by many modern cattle-painters ; but the two scenes are, in general, somewhat vacant. We must not, however, ask complex effects of a thoroughly simple painter, — one who has the merits as well as the defects of simplicity. Mr. Cole’s work, as far as it goes, is altogether sound and successful.

There has been surely no finer landscape and no rarer piece of painting seen in America than the large Daubigny just mentioned. It is one of those remarkable works which not only provoke questions, but commandingly answer them, and have a general intellectual value as well as a special artistic one. Upon the muchvexed question of the importance of the subject in art, it offers the most interesting testimony. The work is really a great picture, and yet the subject is inordinately plain and meagre. We may fancy it indeed to have been chosen for its aridity, so that the painter might reasonably propose to wring from it every latent particle of truth and beauty. His success has been extraordinary, and the spectator has the rare satisfaction of standing before a complete work. The subject is an autumn twilight ; the scene a country road, which divides the canvas in the middle and slopes upward from the foreground to the high line of the near horizon. To the right, by the wayside, stands a line of meagre and stunted apple-trees, one of them, slightly detached, close to the front. Beyond these rolls a brown furrowed field, with a few tree-tops peeping over its edge, against the sky. To the left of the road the brown earth swells nakedly back in short perspective from a thin line of bushes ; the top of a hayrick protrudes above the dark embankment. On the same side, in the middle distance, is a scanty group of smaller trees — hardly more than big bushes. Down the road comes a peasant - woman leading a child, with a small flock of sheep and a couple of cows. These figures are small and obscure. The sun has just disappeared behind the trees, below the crest of the hill, leaving evening on the rugged earth and in the soberglowing sky. The elements of the picture are simple to baldness ; its beauty lies in their having been made to yield their utmost. M. Daubigny has forbidden himself even the most customary aids to effect that are not of the very substance of his subject. His road wanders away in the light dusk with nothing to emphasize or relieve its perspective, and yet with a spacious reach and length which is the perfection of truth. Nothing in the picture betrays that vulgar wooing of immediate illusion with which so many clever painters overstep the modesty of nature ; illusion comes, but it comes slowly, gradually, and leaves you not cheated, but persuaded. The painter has chosen Nature in a low-voiced mood, but he has won her secret without forcing her tone. The modelling of the clodded and furrowed surface of road and field is singularly rich and powerful, and may stand as a signal example of the possible beauty of treatment as treatment. It is not often, we fancy, that the eye finds rarer entertainment in a picture than it may enjoy in a leisurely perusal of this deep interpretation of a homely fact of nature, M. Daubigny’s sky corresponds admirably well with his earth, — a sunset without color or cloud or non essential incident of any sort ; a composition of pure light and atmosphere. The stages and gradations, the fine tremor and evanescence of this tranquil glow, are rendered with a masterly certainty and temperance of touch. The painter has “ indulged ” himself, as we may say, only in his line of forlorn little trees which bristle against the sky. The mellow concentration of light about their meagre foliage is one of the few “ picturesque ” passages in the work. Their unfruitful scrubbiness, as the level light penetrates and exposes it, is one of the most powerful notes in the picture. The figures in the foreground are vague in the gathering dusk, but they complete the spectator’s impression of the close of a day of arid rustic toil. Along many such a stretch of naked road, beneath just such a common sunset flush, in the history of human weariness, must heavy sabots have trudged to hovel doors. The whole aspect of the scene is one of unrelieved gravity and penetrating sadness.

These remarks may fairly suggest the great merit of the picture, —its almost mystifying union of the common and the rare, its rich and comprehensive simplicity. Its great charm, to our taste, is not that of its parts, but that of its spirit, —we had almost said of its moral. In every strong work there lurks some passionate conviction; and the lingering observer feels that he has done but half justice to M. Daubigny, unless he has risked a guess at his artistic creed. That art is thoroughness and intelligent choice, that beauty is sincerity, that Nature is so infinitely rich and mysterious and elusive that the artist who would not be superficial must deal with her simplest and most familiar phases, that this same superficiality is the only vulgarity and the only immorality, and that to be broadly real, in any case, is to be interesting, — some such lesson as this seems vaguely to syllable itself in M. Daubigny’s masterpiece. And yet to the out-and-out realists it affords but partial countenance ; for it is to our sense an eminently sentimental work. Its strong point is neither the scraggy and wind-nipped apple-trees, nor the luminous sky nor the heavy soil, but the indefinable dignity and solemnity of its total character. In the old-fashioned sense of the word, it is not a composition. Pictorial tradition is violated; the parts are not distributed ; the centre is full and the circumference empty. But the pathos of natural poverty and the poetry of an evening hour find supreme expression. The menace of unillumined night and of the morrow’s toil, the sense of autumn chilling toward winter, the sadness of the lowly hillcrest and its bleak exposure, — these are the true subject of the picture, and along this scale the composition ranges. Art, too, is philosophy ; M. Daubigny has fixed and proved something.

It is not without profit to pass from this work to the large view of the “ Grindelwald Valley,” by Mr. J. Appleton Brown, lately exhibited in Boston, and now placed in the Athenæum, — a forcible example of the school of art which holds that a “ rough likeness ” is better than none at all. Mr. Appleton Brown’s picture is a capital specimen of what the French call dà peu pràs treatment. He has chosen his subject with an audacity which nearly approaches temerity, and he is in the nature of the case, as it were, pledged to be superficial. His philosophy is evidently not that of M. Daubigny, nor even that of Mr. Cole. His scene is the long vista of the Grindelwald valley, on a morning, we should suppose, of early spring ; in the near distance rises from base to summit a broad section of the Oberland chain. The composition of the picture is simple, if anything in such a subject can be called simple ; the long green hollow of the valley with its narrow flats and its concave acres of forest, and across it the great ice-wall of the Jungfrau and her sisters. No one who has gazed at leisure on Alpine snow-fields and summits, and been charmed, perplexed, and oppressed by the vision, but will sympathize with a clever painter’s impulse to attempt a sketch of the matter. A sketch, however, in this case, is vain ; the theme is a problem and to be treated as a problem. A mountain, we take it, is the most difficult object in nature to paint. Mr. Appleton Brown’s work is a huge sketch, which would be decidedly pleasing but for its incongruous air of pretention to being a picture. The incongruity lies in the absence of the look of study. The Jungfrau—is it the Jungfrau? — rises with a certain superficial effectiveness, but its divine and dazzling mass is altogether unmodelled. Those stupendous reaches of snow, of glacier, of pinnacle and chasm, have the unpardonable defect of being thinly painted. The same reproach holds good of the sky that lends them its light ; it is shallow and vapid. Reverting to M. Daubigny’s solemn treatment of his wayside earth-bank, we cannot but fancy that it is better to do a small thing richly than to do a large thing meagrely. We speak the more frankly because, very properly, the author of the “ Grindelwald Valley ” is sure of a number of admirers. By a large class of observers refined artistic work will always be unheeded ; they are satisfied with broad hints. Such observers will derive a great deal of innocent pleasure from the belief that Mr. Appleton Brown has done justice to the great sweep of an Alpine valley and the light-bathed majesty of an Alpine peak.

NEW YORK.

THERE was a time, and but a few years back, when the Annual Exhibitions of the National Academy of Design in New York were representative of the art of the city and State. The younger artists looked forward for months with interest, often with eagerness, to the Exhibition rooms, as many young ladies look forward to the first ball of the season. To get their pictures admitted, to have them well hung, was something of an event for that year. “Varnishing-day” was a reunion of brother-brushes from far and near. It was on a good hanging that much of their reputation depended. It was from the Academy walls that they hoped to sell their works to rich amateurs. The art-critics of the newspapers reserved their thunder or their sunshine for that occasion above all others. That time has gone by. The Academy Exhibition is no longer one bright particular star, but one among several luminaries.

And yet the Academy of Design, in its standard of excellence, in the character of the works exhibited, in the thoroughness of art-tuition in its schools, and facilities afforded to pupils, is far in advance of what it was twenty or thirty years ago. Neither is there any diminution, but rather an increase, in the number of visitors attending the Exhibition. What is the reason of this decline of centrality ? We know of none that proves anything against vitality and progress in the institution itself.

Perhaps the chief reason why our artists neglect to send their best works is the obvious one, that there are other exhibition-rooms in the city, such as Goupil’s, Snedecor’s, Schaus’s, Bogardus’s, and others (to say nothing of galleries in other cities), where they think they have a better chance of disposing of them. Then the custom among the artists of having receptions on regular days through the winter, at their studios, may be another reason.

It is certain that the Academy does not succeed as it once did in getting together thoroughly representative collections of painting or sculpture, and this notwithstanding the efforts of the council to obtain the best within reach.

Until within a year or two there was but one exhibition a year, — in the spring. Now they endeavor to keep open a nearly continuous exhibition through the year, but still making the spring occasion the strongest. To this only fresh pictures of living artists, or those not before publicly exposed, are admitted. But to the fall and winter exhibitions, works old or new, fresh or well known, are sent, and can be withdrawn at the pleasure of the artist.

In the gallery this winter there are not many works of much interest. Mr. Bierstadt sends one picture, among the best, which would be a large picture for any but Bierstadt. For him it is small. It is called “ In the Rocky Mountains ” ; probably no particular spot in the Rocky Mountains, or he would have specified. For it is known that Mr. Bierstadt, even in his largest and most popular views of that region, is not over-scrupulous in adhering to exact literalness, but aims to give the characteristics of such scenery, — a great error, in which Mr. Church preceded him in his “ Heart of the Andes.” One would think that when artists go so far, and into unexplored regions, for their material, they would take pains to bring back the exact reality, as nearly as possible, and be careful not to indulge too much in composition. This picture represents a lofty, precipitous mountain region in the upper and background, partly hidden by cold gray stormclouds, which cover one quarter of the whole canvas. Below the clouds, the sunlight breaks on a portion of the craggy mountain-sides, and on a lake, which extends, very still and clear, to the foreground. In the middle distance are forests of lofty trees, above which, on the left, rise a few bald cliffs, painted in muddy opaque gray. In the foreground are a few deer on the brink of the lake. Like many of Bierstadt’s less extensive canvases, the picture is cold and inharmonious in color, and wanting in transparent and luminous quality. There is an appearance of unreality, — of being too much composed; a striving after effect, without the power in color to produce it. In artistic skill it is inferior to another large but by no means remarkable picture by Sortel, a Frenchman, which hangs in the same room. The subject is similar (Alpine), and though colder in tone than Mr. Bierstadt’s, yet, we think, is superior in harmony and in truthfulness of drawing.

Mr. De Haas, who has some reputation as a marine painter, exhibits two large canvases. The larger of the two represents “ Farragut’s Fleet passing the Forts below New Orleans.”It is a night scene, calm, with a smooth sea, which is crowded with large ships, steamers, and monitors. A good deal of firing is going on, and there is a fire blazing up from the shore. The scene is picturesque, but suggestive somewhat of scene-painting.

The other is a far better picture, in many respects, — “ The Ruins of Grosner Castle.” A high rocky promontory juts out on the right, with an old castle on its summit; the rocks and the ruin bathed in the red light of the sinking sun. The sea rolls in with tremendous waves. A sloop is dashed, a wreck, upon the rocks. The sun nears the horizon, and glares beneath heavy masses of ruddy clouds, and tinges the distant waves with a fiery glow. The conception is admirable. The spectator feels the awful dash and roll of the heavy billows, which are admirably painted. But the sky is harsh and violent, as Mr. De Haas’s skies too often are ; and this injures the picture, which otherwise would be very fine.

Mr. Shattuck’s “White Hills in October ” is another large picture of a good deal of artistic merit. The sky is soft and delicate, the clouds tinted with the sunset. The distant snow-clad mountains are dreamy and tender. A mountain stream, with breaks of waterfalls, come down toward the spectator. On either side are hills, forests, and rocks. A portion of the woods is clothed in the crimson and vermilion tints of October. The lower half of the view is in shadow. The light across the hills in the middle distance is not managed with sufficient force and clearness. A bit of rainbow on the left hardly harmonizes with the gay autumn hues, and cannot well be accounted for just there ; for one sees no rain-clouds. Nor do the red tints of the trees quite harmonize with the cool shadows in the lower half. The foreground lacks strength of handling. But on the whole it is a very agreeable picture, and carefully painted.

Mr, Kensett, though always good, is never so good as in his out-of-door studies. Especially in his larger pictures he fails to reproduce the spirit and truth of his studies. The “ Mountain Gorge ” here exhibited shows that he conceives and feels his subject, —for Kensett never paints without feeling, — but it lacks something of the mystery he would convey in the gloom of the gorge itself. On each side of the chasm rise steep mountain-sides, broken with rocks and trees, just touched with autumnal variegation, gradually disappearing in the gloom below. There is a glimpse of a waterfall far up the ravine, also in shadow. Above the shadows rise distant aerial mountain-peaks, one behind another (the best part of the picture). The composition is very simple. We miss the strength of handling, especially in the foreground, that is so notable in the French school. This has a tendency to flatness and thinness.

Mr. Hall wearies us with his endless repetition of his one face, in his Spanish girls. He himself is not conscious of this sameness. Can it be that the Spanish peasants all resemble one another so strikingly ? It is a pity that so genuine an artist should hurt his well-earned reputation by lapsing into his present style. He is becoming extremely mannered, and has fallen into a hard waxy style of flesh color, far less agreeable than his earlier manner. Mr. Hall’s forests and flowers maintain their reputation, and we always greet them with pleasure.

There are two female heads that are noteworthy. One by Mr. Greene, a profile of a young girl, is extremely delicate and refined and charming in color, though somewhat conventional: the other is a strange head by Mr. Vedder, which certainly is wholly unconventional ; a wide-eyed sibylline-looking creature, such as one might have met in a dream. It is remarkable, too, for a very skilful artistic treatment, in which there is no shadow, and just such a dubious light as one sees in dreamland.

The Annual Exhibition of the Artists’ Fund Society was opened to the public at the Summerville gallery on the 22d of January. This society was organized in 1859, and its objects are the accumulation of a fund for the aid of its members and their families, in case of sickness and distress. Each member is required to contribute on entrance a picture as initiation fee ; and after that a picture annually, valued at not less than $ 75. The pictures are exhibited and sold at auction for the benefit of the fund. All pictures selling for over $ 100 return the surplus to the artist. The society numbers at present, I think, something over fifty members. The fund arising from these sales has accumulated to at least $ 60,000. At the death of any member, the interest of $ 2,500 is paid to his widow or heirs.

The exhibitions are always respectable; but most of the pictures are small, and, as a general thing, not the very best efforts of the artists. The present collection is of about average excellence. Among the best are those by Kensett, Whittredge, Loop, Pope, Bristol, Casilear, Cranch, Guy, J. G. Brown, and others.

The Fifth Annual Collection of the American Society of Painters in Water-Colors opened to the public on the 26th January in the rooms of the Academy. The exhibition strikes us as one of their very best. It comprises about three hundred and forty pictures, few of which are positively bad, while one might set down at least three fourths of the collection as positively good, and well worth seeing frequently.

We must confess to a feeling of cheerful exhilaration in stepping out of the room devoted to oil-paintings, into the watercolor department. It is like a change to a brighter key and an airier and lighter movement in music.

The establishment of this young watercolor society has had one wholesome effect in art-development; it has offered to the painters this very change of key, and has proved that some of them can do better in watercolors than in oils. It has brought them out of the old ruts in which they were running. It seems to have opened a field for color and effect, and a free brush, in a department where they are less fettered than in oil-processes and oil-subjects ; and are better able, by clear washes of tint, to express their more evanescent and rapid passages of thought. At least so we incline to think. Yet water-color is more limited in power than oil-painting. It is less favorable to larger paintings or (unless by great labor and skill) to great force of actual representation of life and nature.

Among so many clever pictures, and charming “ bits ” of painting, Mr. S. Colman’s are of the best. Besides a number of admirable morceaux from the East and from the West, there is a larger and more elaborate picture, which arrests the attention, representing a “ Spanish Bull-fight in the Seventeenth Century.” In a wide arena, whose seats are filled with gay crowds and surrounded by magnificent architectural piles, rising in warm rosy light, is what purports to be a bull-fight. The fight, however, is not the point of interest here, as perhaps it should be. Mr. Colman has made it accessory to the elaborate architecture, the gorgeous color, the effect of warm sunlight and shadow of a Spanish afternoon. The dominating idea is in the surroundings. The bull-fight is only thrown in for the sake of the figures ; which, however, are not much better than landscape-painters’ figures generally are. But the ensemble of the scene is striking.

There is a charming picture, of good size, by George H. Smillie, “Under the Pines of the Yosemite.” Two large brown pine-trunks rise about thirty or forty feet to the top of the picture. Indians are encamping beneath. The twilight is stealing over the scene, and in the distance tower the crags of the Yosemite, picturesque and grand, and bathed in the last rays of the setting sun. The work is full of artistic skill and of poetical feeling, and gives us delightful associations with this romantic and unexplored region.

Several small pictures by Mrs. S. T. Darrah impressed us as exceedingly artistic in treatment and feeling. One is a rough but very suggestive bit of brown autumnal landscape, with leafless trees, — an old deserted hut, and the sea beyond. Another, “ By the Sea,” is admirable for the impression it conveys to the imagination by the very simplest means. There seems to be little more than blots and washes of color, rough and sketchy, and yet so suggestive, so effective ! Nothing but a bit of sandy sea-coast, dotted with tufts of brown dry grass ; a dash of dark color representing a stranded boat, “ old ocean’s gray and melancholy waste ” beyond, and over all a dull gray melancholy sky. Here is little to describe, yet how much that little expresses !

Among the oil-painters who do better in water than in oils may be mentioned Mr. Kruseman Van Elter, who exhibits two excellent works,—“ Evening on Lake Henderson”; a simple lake scene, with rocks, and tall, overhanging beeches, and distant hills in an autumnal sunset : and “ Home Scene in Holland,” composed of old lowroofed cottages shadowed by trees, and flanked by hedges, with well-arranged figures of old women weeding, or hanging clothes.

Mr. R. S. Gifford contributes some interesting studies of Arabs, and Eastern boats; and Mr. L. C. Tiffany, who was his companion in his Eastern voyage, has some picturesque architectural pieces, and one very vigorous study of an old monk.

Miss Eddy exhibits an admirable study of“ Nasturtiums,” and another of “ Trailing Arbutus,” and other flower-pieces, which are admirable in color and in artistic effect. Mr. W. T. Richards has two or three seacoast views of high finish and truthfulness, in a very low gray tone. Mr. J. W. Hill has never done better than in two of his landscapes, “ On the Nyack Turnpike,” and “View from Gallows Hill, Connecticut.”

Among the water-colorists here represented, but whose works we have no space to notice, may be named as worthy of honorable mention Mr. H. Fenn, Mr. Gilbert Berling, Mr. A. F. Bellows, Mr. Charles C. Ward, Mr. G. A. Gilbert, Miss F. Bridges, and Mr. D. Fowler. This last artist (a new name to us) contributes a large number of studies of flowers, game, etc., which are very bold and striking for color and effect.