Art

DURING the months of April and May, society in New York enjoyed a new experience. It found itself taking pleasure in one of the yearly exhibitions of the National Academy of Design. A long time had elapsed since it had cared to know even so much as that the exhibition was opened ; as for wasting its precious time in visiting it, and giving up to pot-boilers and experiments what was meant for shopping and the matinées — that was a thing that had long ceased to occur to it. And certainly no one could blame society for its indifference. The artists themselves had so long neglected the interests of their own institution, that it was on the very verge of bankruptcy ; they had wasted, in bickerings, the time that should have been used in hard work, and they had tried every scheme to mend the fortunes of the academy, and to put money in its purse, but the one scheme of painting the best pictures they knew how to paint, and making of them an exhibition that would at least deserve the respect that is due to well-meant endeavor. This being the state of things, who could wonder that the academy declined ?

There was a time when no one who knew the condition of affairs would have been much surprised to hear that the academy no longer existed; that it was hopelessly bankrupt, and that the building was to be sold. Yet, though the public was prepared to hear this, it is not to be doubted that it would have been unwelcome news. For, strange as it may seem to say of a great city like New York, yet it is true that the academy is almost the only historic link that connects the culture of to-day with the culture of half a century ago, when the city was just emerging from boyhood into manhood. As soon as the new academy was fairly established, it proved a centre about which whatever was educated, cultured, and refined in the city had naturally gathered; and the best society had honored, in the persons of the artists, the art which they served with all the ability they were possessed of. It is easy to speak slightingly of our elder artists, and to compare their work disparagingly with the pictures that are painted to-day, but it is only just to them to declare our conviction that in proportion to their powers they did more for the general culture than those that have followed them are doing to-day. There was not only a heartier and wider sympathy among the artists themselves, but they held by closer ties to the cultivated society of their time. That things are different to-day is neither the fault of the artists nor of society. It is one of the inevitable results of the great change that has come over the country at large, in the last twenty-five years, and which, perhaps, has produced no more striking change anywhere than in the city of New York.

All that we have felt a right to complain of has been that the artists themselves did not do what might fairly be expected of them. There was a general inertness in the whole body of artists; there were very few of them who accomplished in any given year either all the work they could have done, or work of as good quality as they were able to produce. We heard a great deal about “ receptions ” and “ private views ” and “ Saturdays,” and there was a get-up about the cards and invitations to these exclusive gatherings that was suggestive of heavy stationer’s bills, if of nothing else. But when one came to see the pictures to which all this satin paper, and double envelope, and gold printing, invited us, one too often perceived a sad discrepancy. There were elegantly furnished rooms, filled with ladies and gentlemen, the artist’s personal friends; there were flowers, and sometimes music, and sometimes refreshments and general enjoyment; but there was as little art as possible, while an uncomfortable suspicion that the whole affair was “ shop,” made itself felt. The truth is, the artists had a great deal to contend against in the indifference of the society in which they lived to culture and the arts, and, what was perhaps as serious an obstacle, in the influx of a great number of the more skillful, more showy, and more interesting productions of European painters. There can be no denying that these works, the product of a school accomplished by long years of training, not only satisfied, more fully than the productions of our own men, the demands of educated and cultivated Americans, but that they did an immense deal to elevate the standard in art of the whole community, at least so far as technics are concerned; and while this process of teaching was going on, our artists were suffering in their pockets, and were greatly discouraged. They could not please the people who buy pictures, and they could not stand up against the critics, and so it came about that they saw no other resource but to put out as attractive a bait as they could for society and the newspaper men, and try if it were only possible to make artists and art the fashionable thing.

Of late, matters have been sensibly mending. For one thing, the character of the foreign pictures imported into this country has greatly fallen off. The competition not only among our dealers at home, but also between these and the dealers in England and France, has been so great that for the last two or three years it has been difficult for the artists abroad to supply the demand for their pictures, and they themselves have in too many cases fallen into evil ways. But a more affirmative and more encouraging reason for the better state of things that has begun to exist among us is to be found in the fact that the artists themselves are showing more earnestness, and are beginning to take hold of things by the handle. There are enough of them who never bent the knee to Baal, and who, when “ receptions " were hottest, stuck to their craft, and loved the silence and the privacy of their studios, to come to the rescue now that the old order is changing, giving place to new. And we feel that with only a few men born artists, living in their vocation, and trained by serious study, a complete revival can be accomplished ; is, indeed, actually being accomplished.

There has, however, been danger this year, that in the general pleasure at the improved character of the exhibition, the proverbial good-nature of our public might work some mischief. We are still too much like children, easily depressed, easily pleased, and the artists have been making it so uncomfortable of late with their yearly exhibitions, that a show even a little better than usual seems a great improvement, and we talk and write about the exhibition of the present year as if it left very little to be desired. But, after all, when we come to look at it with coolness, we find that the excellence of the collection is reflected over the whole from a few really good pictures, and from a few whose authors tried hard to make them good ; while there is the negative recommendation that there are very few of those pictures that in former years made the exhibitions of the academy a mortification to its friends, and a laughing-stock to its enemies. Mr. Rossiter and Mr. Leutze are dead, Mr. Lang has returned to Europe and paints no longer, and Mr. Bierstadt has gone West and finds, let us hope, among Pikes and Diggers more congenial and unsuspicious spectators of his wonderful works than he could hope for in the sophisticated East. Lest we should forget him utterly, however, he has sent one picture to the present exhibition, of which we refrain from saying anything, since his friends deprecatingly assure us that “it is a long time, you know, since Bierstadt saw any good pictures, and he could not tell how this one would look, and, beside, it was not fair to hang it in so conspicuous a situation.”

There are, however, signs enough that people are still ready to welcome any one who can make “ a sensation,”and the most popular pictures in the present exhibition have been Vaini’s Veronica gazing upon the Head of her Dead Rival, S. J. Grey’s Going to the Opera, and Schenck’s Lost: A Souvenir of the Auvergnes. Schcnck is a well-known contributor to the Paris Salon, and his pictures of sheep — sheep are his spécialité — have been often photographed and engraved. He is not an American, but a native of Holstein, and he has long been a resident of Ecouen, where he is one of the favorite members of the artist society of the little village Edouard Frère has made famous, and whence he often comes to Paris and seeks the society of Americans, for which he has a particular liking. It is worth remarking, by the way, that the group of American artists associated with Ecouen, and, indeed, the French-American artists in general, are but little known among their own countrymen, while deserving better than to be wholly unknown. Yet how many of us have ever heard of Bacon, or Meyer, or Helmuth, or Bridgman — names not famous, we admit, but every one of them a name that was once at least rich in promise; nor is it easy to understand why we have not from some one of them received a work or works that might have justified the early hopes they excited. Schenck’s picture (the French pronounce the artist’s name, Shenk) is a striking and spirited representation of a group of sheep overtaken by a whirlwind of snow in the mountains of Auvergne. It has, in one sense, no right in the exhibition, which ought to be made up of pictures by American artists exclusively, but it is well to have smuggled in so strong a work under any pretense. There is thoroughly good drawing and effective composition in this picture; in color it is nothing, being indeed not much more than a drawing in black and white. Its size and the vigor with which it is painted have secured for it the place of honor, in the middle of the long wall of the large south room.

Mr. Vaini’s pictures are the first appearance among us of an Italian artist who has lately settled in New York, and technically speaking his pictures have no more right in the exhibition than that of Mr. Schenck. And it is really a pity that so convenient excuse had not been accepted for rejecting such morbid and disagreeable performances. The Veronica represents an Italian lady, of whom one of Guerrazzi’s romances tells us that she had the head of her rival cut off and sent to her faithless husband done up in his week’s wash. The picture is meant for horrible, but it comes only so near it that our gorge rises at it. Veronica is a weak little woman, who is scowling in make-believe passion of some kind, she does not, exactly know what. She clutches the arm of her chair with a hand out of drawing; the head of the other lady lies on the table in a garnish of ruffles, and a bloody cloth with some bloody straw, in which the head has been wrapped, lies on the floor. At the opening of the exhibition this picture made considerable talk, but after a while the public reasoned itself into a better state of mind, and came to the sensible conclusion that such pictures could not be pleasing to the gods and ought not to be pleasing to men.

Mr. Grey’s Going to the Opera disappointed all the friends of this really clever and skillful artist, who for his part must have felt also disappointed at the reception a work on which he had spent so much time, and on which he had built so many hopes, met with from the whole body of responsible writers for the press — a body, we may say, with whom Mr. Grey has been a particular favorite. The picture contains at least fifteen figures, all portraits, and they are grouped in a composition intended to show us a family gathering on an ordinary evening when some of the party were to go to the opera. The grouping is forced and unreal, every face stares, and every figure has the ease of attitude communicated by the head-nipper of the photographer to his sitter, while as if to impress us with the fact that the photographer’s part had been no small one, the head of the family is shown sitting apart in the foreground, timing the whole group with his watch as if he were bathing a negative. The time of day is represented by a lighted chandelier of the most hideous design, painted with make-believe realism, and looking, as too many of these monsters do, like a locomotive after a collision.

These, if we except Mr. Page’s unfortunate William Shakespeare, were the chief attractions of the exhibition to the great body of the public, but even the crowd came to take pleasure in Mr. W. T. Richards' noble sea-piece, in Mr. Whittredge’s fine landscape, A Home by the Sea, in Huntington’s fine portrait of Mrs. Tibbits, — the best portrait in the exhibition, — in C. C. Coleman’s Street in Rome, and the Chapel of the Cambio at Perugia, in Mr. S. R. Gifford’s Sunset on the Sweetwater, and not a few others, that did yeomen’s service in redeeming the year from the fate of its predecessors. The attendance was unusually large from the opening of the exhibition to its close, and, what is of importance to the artists, more pictures were sold, and at good prices, than were ever sold before, certainly at any one exhibition, and more we suspect than were sold in at least the five preceding years put together. This is encouraging, but we earnestly hope it may not prove too encouraging. Our artists are too easily satisfied, and the public is not exacting enough. The exhibition contained less than a dozen first-rate works, and not one work of high imagination or even of masterly technical skill. The finest works were Mr. W. T. Richards’ Sea-piece and Mr. C. C. Coleman’s Chapel of the Cambio; but, beautiful as both these were, they showed only in Mr. Coleman great manual patience and dexterity, and a highly refined taste, and in Mr. Richards an equal patience devoted to a grander subject, and a strong sympathy with nature. But these things cannot satisfy our craving for some one who shall carry out for us the promise made so long ago, in the days when our world was young, by Allston, whose wand seems buried fifty fathom deep. Is it a mere chance or is some fault in us at home, that we have no one among us who can be to us what our strayed children might have been to us, and what they have been to the land they preferred to ours ? We have given England our Stuart Newton, our Leslies,— father and son, — our Boughton, and our Whistler.

— The necessities of magazine publishing have prevented our referring earlier, as we should have been glad to do, to a service rendered early in March by the New York Tribune, in printing a letter from Mr. Bayard Taylor giving an account of Dr. Schliemann and his recent discoveries in the Troad. A few days after the publication of Mr. Taylor’s letter, we received from B. Westennann & Co., New York, a copy of Dr. Schlietnaun’s book with the accompanying atlas of 218 photographic plates, illustrating not only the objects discovered in the diggings at Hissarlik, but the localities themselves. The atlas, so long looked for with lively expectations of a renewal of the pleasure received from the Di Cesnola Collection of Cypriote Antiquities, is certainly disappointing at first sight. The photographs themselves are rude, in many cases nearly impossible to make out, and what is worse, they are in great part taken, not from the objects themselves, but from (Dr. Schliemann’s?) drawings of the objects. Let us say at once, however, that these drawings are not open to the suspicion of being dressed up to make them attractive. They rather give the notion that they do injustice to their originals, by showing them less shapely and less highly finished than they are. On closer examination, however, and on comparing the photographs from drawings with those from the real objects, it is plain that the drawings sufficiently represent the reality, the articles found by Dr. Schliemann betraying a very rude state of civilization, akin to that of the lake-dwellers, or of the people who made the rudest of the objects in the Di Cesnola Collection. So far as beauty of form or a feeling for design are concerned, we are in no way gainers by Dr. Schliemann’s find. The jewelry is savage, recalling the wampum of our own Indians, there is no glass, and among all the specimens of pottery there is hardly one graceful shape. The most interesting objects are the so-called disks, which must to many persons recall the sea-urchin, and the arrangement of the lines (scratched?) upon them, in astonishing variety, is evidently based upon the figures so delicately, and with such beautiful and symmetrical design, pricked upon the flattened side of the sea-urchin. The interest of Dr. Schliemann’s discovery is almost purely archæological, but in this field it is one of the most important and widely interesting finds that has been made in modern times.

— One of those slanders of American artists abroad, which appear from time to time, has just been extinguished, perhaps more effectually than any former falsehood of the kind. A Mr. Stephen Weston Healy, studying sculpture at Florence, wrote to a New York paper charging that Mr. Story, of Rome, and Messrs. Gould, Mead, Connolly, Park, Turner, and others, of Florence, were in the habit of having great part of their modeling done for them by a Florentine named Mazzuoli, and declaring that certain other sculptors would substantiate this charge. The friends of each of the artists accused have appeared in his defense, and satisfactorily vindicated his good fame. The sculptors to whom Mr. Healy permitted himself to refer for confirmation have denied all complicity in his charges. Finally, Signor Mazzuoli has made oath that he never did the work imputed to him, but simply cut draperies designed by the sculptors. Such is the fate of Mr. Healy’s slander, which, we take pleasure in assuring the American sculptors in Rome and Florence, was never entertained in America except by prejudiced or ignorant people.