The Two New York Exhibitions

I.

THE time has been when the kind of talent that insisted on doing the most repugnant things it could think of to the public taste expected to keep its works in its studio in an unbroken series, to lead a life of obscurity and painful vicissitudes, and wait for its triumphant vindication till twenty years after death. This plan, with such advantages as it had, is certainly at an end. The extreme eccentric elbows the regular practitioner on equal terms. He appears to see no reason why he should not sell his picture on the opening night, and demands his posthumous fame on the spot.

The Society of American Artists is chiefly responsible for the outburst of aggressive singularity of which there is reason to complain. It was not to its discredit at first, as a fresh and independent movement, that it should have been induced to extend its protection to some specimens whose only merit proved to be their strangeness. This year the tolerance reaches the point of an appearance of positive bias in their favor, and to a weakening of the society’s influence.

There is nothing American art needs so little at the present time as eccentricity. This ought to be written up in a prominent place, and constantly referred to It will be strange indeed if the new impulse, from which so much was looked for, is to fall into the decrepitude of morbidness and affectation the moment it is born.

The American public never has had anything like enough of straightforward work of the best kind; the time for eccentricity comes later. It only vaguely knows of the capabilities of artistic skill as developed abroad. What it needs more than anything else is splendid, accurate drawing, rich coloring, and scholarly composition of the most perfected kind. It will respect eccentricity in men who can do all this, and, because of human discontent and unsteadiness, feel that they have got beyond it and are searching for new ways; but it can hardly do less than despise it where it suspects it as a cover for gross incapacity.

The aberrations paraded for inspection this year present, generally all at once, execrable drawing, obscurity of subject, and a kind of ghoulish delight in unnatural juxtapositions of color. Great store is set by frigid crimson streaks in the midst of sulphurous and mineral greens. The mind reverts from what should be a smiling landscape to the interior of Vesuvius and deadly acids.

Two eccentricities of principle have been the means of creating in the metropolis a really considerable excitement, beginning with the appearance of Mr. Currier’s sketches in the WaterColor Exhibition in January. The first is the view that a picture is to be considered finished when the artist feels that he can do nothing more to improve it. The second may be called the five-minute principle in art. These result in the abandonment of work in very elementary stages, like the portraits by Russel and Miss Kibbe at the Kurtz gallery, — both quite nice as far as they go, — and the production of pictures in which only such merits are preserved as are consistent with lightning-like celerity.

A very obvious reply to the first proposition is that it depends altogether on the kind of artist. If he be one of little skill, and know not how to carry his picture farther without spoiling it, it is clearly his duty to go to somebody who does and can tell him, and not set up his incompetence as a new and superior order of art. As to the second, it may confidently be said that nowhere in the world, and here less than elsewhere, is the demand for pictures so extreme that such economy of time in their production is called for.

The disinterested outsider is half tempted to regard Currier as a purely mythical personage, like Mrs. Harris. He sends over from Munich, at long intervals, a few sketches bearing the impress of extreme haste. He has the air of saying, “Now, here is a rather neat thing I knocked off while waiting for a train,” and, “How are these for half a dozen landscapes while crossing the country on a steeple-chase? ” They are carefully framed and set up for the admiration of a distracted public with a complacency that —inasmuch as no sterling work has ever been sent or heard of, and the reverence cannot attach to them that belongs to the trivial doings of the great—begins, by repetition, to border on the offensive. What does he do, the query occurs, —if indeed he be not a mere cover made use of by certain persons to indulge themselves in vagaries,— with the remainder of his time in all these long years of study under the most advantageous circumstances?

There are certain qualities, possibly not all accidental, in these sketches, and were they put forward for what they are worth, and accompanied with the explanations that may be heard in an inner, knowing circle, they might be the occasion of useful reflections instead of wonder and alarm. The maker of them is described as an investigator. He is said to be experimenting at present in the exclusive direction of Force.

His contributions to the display of the Society of American Artists are the portraits of a man and a boy. The former is a bony head of a goblin-like, haunting type, colored in burnt sienna, and immersed in a sticky, bituminous ground. The other is conceded to be a “ frowning boy,” but he is much more than frowning. He ought, by his age, to be a chubby, pouting little fellow, but he has purple patches in his cadaverous complexion, and looks alarmingly ill. It strikes one as a Force allied to that of the man-eating African monarch, whose

But let us turn to pleasanter things. There are eccentrics, to call them so, of an agreeable kind. Wyant, Thuyer, Inness, LaFarge, Bunce, Saint Gaudens in sculpture, are odd enough, but their oddity is a form of originality. It consists in an attempt to find new ways of looking at material which all admit to be beautiful and worthy of interest, instead of filling its place with monstrosities.

The little portrait heads of Saint Gaudens, in low relief, are exquisite. They are cast on thin bronze plates, to which a quaint character is given by leaving the ground rough and darkened, while the faces are brought clearly off it, and by the use of some horizontal lines of decorative lettering, above and below. O’Donovan and Warner, both of whom do very good work, might learn of him, the one distinctness, the other softness, so exactly does he realize the happy medium.

The sculpture of the year, for the rest, is Hartley’s well-composed life-size group of a young mother and her child, — a subject likely to be more popular, perhaps, but nothing like so original as his striking Whirlwind of last year, — Kemy’s wolves and buffalo, and Kelly’s Sheridan’s Ride, all at the Academy. The wolves and buffalo as here treated seem too woolly for sculpture, in which any considerable quantity of that kind of texture is offensive, and very much better adapted for painting. Kelly, a fresh man, known heretofore only by his dashing drawings in the illustrated magazines, continues the same traditions in a horse and rider, showing, besides great spirit, careful modeling and conscientious study of equine anatomy in headlong movement. The general’s mouth is open with a cry, as he swings his hat. The horse has the peculiarity of being wholly clear of the ground, held up, not by the customary clumsy impalement, but by supports at one side, — it is doubtful, of course, how it would work on a larger scale,—contrived in the scattering foliage past which he seems to be hastily brushing.

Duveneck has given a sufficient taste of his quality in times gone by to have a warrant for singularity. He avails himself of it copiously. For the purpose of a comparison, he and Chase may be looked upon as men of equal ability. But how different are the courses these two compeers of Munich have marked out for themselves ! The one, touched with some fatal lack of sentiment,—a perfected Currier he might be called,— can gain but a few adherents, of jaundiced vision. The other appeals to a wide, cultivated circle who love the beautiful part of life. He seems likely to gain from their sincere approbation both fame and fortune. Duveneck has a half-length portrait-like figure, and another of three-quarters length. The first is a stout, short-haired lady, called Gertrude. It is very much of the Rubens manner and type. The second, Lady with a Fan, might be, by the mode of her dress, a German princess of 1830 from some grand-ducal gallery. Jet-black ringlets, uniting indistinguishably with a background of the same depth, cut off her face so sharply that it looks like a mask. The features, and particularly a clear, intelligent, hazel eye, to which it has been thought worth while to give attention, are excellently painted, and the leaving of certain other parts, as the hands, merely blocked in is not uninteresting, since it shows his manner of work, — and we know very well what he could have done if he would. What we remain curious about is whether it is the deliberate judgment of a painter of this rank that such are the most desirable selections and arrangements, and whether a fair face is the better for being thus chopped off at the side, like a mask. His third piece, a Munich apprentice boy, is not open to the same animadversions. Strong, however, and good, it is not at all as successfully treated as was the same subject by Chase.

Chase’s principal work is a great fulllength portrait of Duveneck himself. It represents him as a man in gray, including a wide gray hat with the flap somewhat impudently turned up in front, sitting sideways on a high-backed chair and holding a long-stemmed clay pipe, like a good-humored Dutch burgher in an ale-house of the time of Van Ostade and Jan Steen. It can hardly help seeming puritanical and starved in color from its peculiar scale of drab and brown tones, the face forming the only spot of genuine warmth, and will not be so well liked as the Preparing for the Ride of last year, though equally good in its way. His warm color comes in the bit of the sacristy of St. Mark’s. The not well-shaven old sacristan polishing his utensils of gold, silver, and bronze; the greenish bronze door at the top of the well-stained marble steps; the undulating, tessellated pavement, are so softly natural that an illusion that it is Baedeker one’s neighbor reads instead of a catalogue, and hangers-on are waiting to annoy you about the ducal palace when you step without, is half created. There is a notable, free, and splendid Venetian quay close by it, by Zwachtman. The effect is got, strangely enough, without any of the usual conventional Venice stock in trade. It is a tangle of entirely modern shipping. The rich spot of scarlet and orange in the midst is found to be merely something connected with the painting of an ordinary boat drawn up on the stocks.

Shirlaw comes finely to the front. His Gooseherd may be counted perhaps the most thoroughly satisfactory piece of work he has done. A trifle more of detail in the middle distance might have done it no harm, but it is doubtful if even this is a flaw. Rich, deep, and golden in tone, it is yet not cloying. The gooseherd is a smiling, stout peasant girl with a long stick grasped, with a slightly diffident, ingratiating air, behind her. Some stranger is approaching. She is smiling, and the six agitated geese in front of her screaming at him. One of their raised white wings cuts sharply against her dark skirt, below which shows an honest, broad-soled shoe. The rustic grace of the attitude, the delicate humor and rendition of character, the rich and harmonious coloring, the accentuation of interest by the increasing finish of the different planes up to the front, make up a work quite inimitable.

Many of the strong names of last year are absent, and others, like Bridgeman, represented by less important works. The tame nude of Wyatt Eaton, an insipid woman reclining on rounded, expressionless drapery without a single crisp angle in it, goes but little way towards replacing the vigorous Last Plague of Egypt of Pearce, and the dancing group of Miss Dodson. It happens that Mrs. Cassatt’s good portrait of an elderly lady in starched muslin reading a sharply-creased newspaper hangs just above it, and contributes to its peculiar floridness and lack of vigor.

Beckwith’s Jeanne, — a baby girl, — Humphrey Moore’s aged Spanish Beggar, and Dewing’s Slave and Young Sorcerer help to save the day. The latter two, a studio female model and a fillet-bound Greek stripling performing with reeds over a small censer some such incantations as went on in the eclogues of Virgil, are strong and agreeable small figures, real flesh and blood, lighted by real daylight.

The Spanish Beggar is notable for the artistic disposition of the light, which falls white upon him from above, and throws deep shades under his grizzled beard, gaunt ribs, and doubled-up limbs. Its undoubted power and success point to a very much higher field of activity for its author than the second-hand Fortunyism and Orientalism with which he has so much pleased himself.

Hoesslin is the new acquisition upon whom the society has the best reason to congratulate itself. He sends from Munich a Flemish Beauty of the Seventeenth Century, on a life-size scale. She is in black, with point-lace cuffs and an enormous ruff, in a high-backed chair against a black ground. It is like the Flemish masters, of course, and one is a little prejudiced, perhaps, thereby at first. But when it is seen how charmingly it is done, and yet with what force ; what delicate, human expression there is in the sweet face, isolated in its formal paraphernalia; how the high light touches on the great crinkled ruff only in a single spot, and all the rest is in skillfully managed shade; how a quite phenomenal finish, for the time and place, is made to consist with the most satisfactory breadth, he has a profound respect for a talent that Could so arrange and portray a model, no matter what may be the tradition followed. A little shield, with red and blue quarterings, set in the upper right-hand corner, repeating the faint Colors of the embroidered flowers in the lace cap, is one of those touches of nice feeling and craving for exact justness of harmony that indicate the stuff of which a colorist much out of the common is made.

Frank Fowler’s Bacchus is good fleshpainting, character and color combined. It shows a wine-flushed, untrustworthy, handsome face against a rich winecolored ground, the head crowned carelessly with vine leaves and purple clusters. This artist goes on to make an ideal study of Mrs. Frank Fowler in blue silk and roses. Mrs. Frank Fowler in turn, in a pleasing kind of artistic family duet, presents an excellent portrait of Mr. Frank Fowler, — dark on a ground of Naples yellow, not altogether unlike some religious effects.

Sargent justifies the good opinions he won for himself on his first appearance. A white - waisted, pink - skirted, brown girl of Capri meditates in an olive orchard, leaning against a crooked stem across which her arms are nonchalantly thrown back, disclosing a crease between the slender shoulder-blades. There are usually masters to whom the strongest of the new men can be traced. This one recalls Michetti, a charming, quaint bright-colorist whom some want of appreciation has kept thus far from being much imitated. This is not cited in depreciation, but to aid those knowing the greater to comprehend the less, if by chance there be any prevented from falling in with him. The resemblance extends to a striking of the same kind of note. It is in the olive orchard, the kind of a peasant girl, the — what an English equivalent should be found for as soon as convenient — chic of the whole.

Before Sargent’s other picture, at the Academy, Neapolitan Children Bathing, Michetti’s very singular Springtime and Love, at the Paris Exposition, cannot fail to be remembered. This is not at all so full of figures, and they are boys instead of girls, but the same bluish and violet shadows are scattered about among them, and it is the same vivid blue sea against which the rosy flesh tints are projected. Such groups are seen of a blazing July day from the window of a train to Castellamare. The chubby little fellows, and one particularly who has two bladders, shining with water and giving out shell-like reflections, attached to his shoulders, are made to look like young cupids.

Thayer does not equal his down-hill procession of cattle last year, exceptionally good as a subject, but he surpasses it much in other qualities. He may well be recommended to show to tyros how the dreamy, mysterious effects at which they aim are consistent with knowledge and painstaking accuracy. A soft white cow of large size, repeated by others at a distance, stands knee-deep in a pool of the river Moselle. The surface is so glassy still that none of them can have stirred for a long time. The absence of a single curving ripple indicates absolute calm. A heavy atmosphere clings about the principal figure, but does not make a ghost of it. It emerges with a delicate clearness when scrutinized. The colors are demure and unusual, hardly more than some drabs, white, and pale green. The animal is of a homely type, or else it is the fault of the point of view that the serrated backbone and hollow hips, from which the barrel - like body is swung, appear with such prominence. Cut off at the knees, too, by the opaque water, it has an awkward shortness, which the reflection thrown below has not counteracted, although evidently relied upon to do so.

What was considered settled by the first display of this society was that the new men coming from abroad were possessed of excellent technical ability, — that they knew how to paint. A natural form of succeeding curiosity was as to what they would do with it when they got home. J. A. Weir is the principal one who attempts to find something here on which to exercise it. His large picture is attractive, and has a Courbet kind of air across the room. What is the American subject that an artist who knows how to paint has selected—for Eakins’s life-size Clinic, being a commission for a medical college, cannot be considered a deliberate choice — as the best thing he knew of for a six-feet canvas? It is a crowd about a bench in one of the paths of, apparently, Washington Square. The intention evidently is to take a group from every-day life and show what can be made of it. Now this is the kind of theme that requires the talent for the hitting off of character, and Mr. Weir does not show here that he possesses it strongly. It does not seem an American group. The loafer leaning on the back of the seat is like a Teniers’ boor; the flower-girl is of the conventional pallor that hardly occurs out of Sunday-school literature; the tall young lady in blue looks very German. Nor is it at all probable that the gentlemanly person in the cloak in front would ever be found sitting cheek by jowl with the squalid, blind beggar and the rest except for the purposes of this very exhibition. But there are more elementary faults. The composition is without climax or agreeable balance, and the drawing is so obscure that the people appear to be marching in procession. Only after a long while is it realized that they are sitting on the bench. The best point is decidedly the head of the young workingwoman listening to the loafer. She is a jolly, bold girl, with a scrap of crimson scarf around the neck, over her black dress. She is shown to even better advantage in a special study close by. That is capital. She laughs, and her teeth show. Done in creamy smears of paint, with a high light on the round near cheek, she is as fresh and cheerful as a polished apple.

Eakins, who has shown heretofore a considerable talent for making a naturally attractive subject disagreeable, — like his woodeny Philadelphia belle of last year, supposed to be standing as a model for the sculptor William Rush, — has in a ghastly scene in a dissecting-room a subject to his mind. It is a swarm of surgeons and assistants performing an amputation in a lecture-room, the surrounding air of which is faintly full of student heads, like attendant spirits. It is powerful work, and there is a fine seriousness in the principal figure, lifting a silvered, intellectual head momentarily from the grim labor. For its purpose and from its point of view, it is doubtless right, but for any less special destination the realistic dwelling on the raw, quivering limb, the gory hands that hold the scalpels, the blood spurted in jets over the white wristbands, would be horrid and inexcusable. The subject is but too impressive in itself, with these details withdrawn as much as possible from notice.

II.

The Academy exhibition, the fifty - fourth in the annual series, opens as the other closes. It cannot be recommended to the public to attend an exhibition on varnishing day, because it is not, as it were, expected; but if it has happened, it is interesting for once to have been there. It is the time of final adjustment, set for a day or two before the opening. Contributors arrive in the morning. They note how they have been treated, and what adaptations, if any, the work needs to its new quarters.

It would hardly take a profound student of human nature to separate from the throng on varnishing day the benign and generally interested artist whose picture is found to have been set upon “the line.” Yonder darkling man, on the contrary, is one who clearly divines whose personal malice it was that caused his cherished work to be placed so high above the ordinary range of vision.

It is the custom to hang the pictures at the Academy about three rows deep, in a belt of perhaps twelve feet wide, beginning at the top of the wainscot, two feet and a half from the floor. On the magic line there is no flicker on the varnish. The texture of the work, as well as its effect, can be examined at leisure. The next zone is not unfavorable. The topmost, though many a good picture goes there, and they are sloped at an angle to counteract the distance, it must be agreed is not well seen by the middle-aged eyes that buy. It is not strange, therefore, that the line, or something as near to it as may be, is an object of solicitude. The hanging is conceded to be good at the Academy this year. It may not be unimproving to make a section of it — the principal wall of the south (main) room— the object of a little special study. It would hardly be thought that so much symmetry could be secured with so heterogeneous a collection of materials.

Supposing the four hundred rejected contributions eliminated, and the six hundred and fifteen accepted ranged about the receiving rooms, face outward, what does an enlightened hanging committee proceed to do? It makes a selection from the largest pictures, — a large picture of a certain merit has an advantage from brute size alone, — and places them in the centres, the secondary centres, and the cut-off corners of the rooms, the positions of honor. Points of departure thus given, the intervals are filled up in keeping.

If the work be very large it must have an end wall, since the width of the room alone is not enough for a clear view. Thus Thomas Moran’s Ponce de Leon, a band of small, gayly-caparisoned figures in a malarious-looking Florida everglade, is at One end of the long south room, and Inness’s wide stretch of country from North Conway in Spring at the other. In the last a commonplace figure of the artist in a sketching attitude shows much too conspicuously in the otherwise, rather vacant foreground. Both appear to better advantage in smaller works elsewhere.

For the side of the long gallery mentioned there were found, in the first place, two life-size, full-length portraits: Beckwith’s, in the late French manner, in which a lady is effaced in a gorgeous crimson dress; and Huntington’s, of a lady in black, in his well-known style. These, spaced a quarter of the distance each from the end of the room, were first set for two nuclei. A large landscape of McEntee’s, a strange, melancholy scene, made up of absolutely nothing but a treeless and desert moor with rolling gray clouds dragging low down upon it, is set in the centre of the side. Over it a shrimp girl of the Normandy coast, pleasing in all but the rainy coldness of its color, by Edward Moran. The three figures constitute a kind of pyramidal structure when looked at together.

On one side of the landscape Fuller’s Gypsy Girl offsets Porter’s portrait of a lady. There is not absolute repetition, of course, since one is standing and the other sitting, but just the agreeable resemblance that gives balance. The frames are of about the same dimensions and the heads the same height. On each side, again, a pair of horizontal landscapes of the same size superposed, — Wyant and Bicknell against Minor and Tait, —and a pair of smaller ones on top. This brings us to the fulllength portraits. It takes three pictures to go to the corner from Beckwith’s against two from Huntington’s, because the latter is the wider. The balance is less here, but by no means abandoned. A sitting old gentlemen in black in the upper row of the one is over against a sitting middle-aged gentleman in black in the other.

A considerable continuity of tone, rather gray and temperate on the whole, is also preserved through the side. Each piece, abandoning being an object in itself for the moment, plays a part in a general decorative scheme. Even Beckwith’s crimson lady does not destroy it. How good it all is can be better appreciated by finding a corner where perhaps the effort has been given over in the haste of finishing. Heads, landscapes, still-life, and action, of all shapes and sizes, are thrown together helter-skelter.

The picture of Thomas Moran’s which is better than his large one is a very luminous, pearly view towards New York across a surface of New Jersey shore, full of sparkling shallows. The commercial features of the scene, a looming pier of the Brooklyn bridge, and even a smoking locomotive and train, wrapped in a moisture - surcharged atmosphere, lend themselves to the picturesque purpose easily.

Inness is better in a hazy morning, over a quiet river winding up to distant woods touched with the first hues of autumn. A man of remarkable originality in the study of nature, he throws a strangeness into its more ordinary aspects. He particularly delights in it at moments of transition. The gleam which strikes between the rolling clouds, now in the foreground, now the middle distance, of his peculiar olive-green landscapes is to rest but a moment. He shows here a sunset entirely unlike anybody else’s. It is one of those that change from instant to instant. The sun is a great ball going down behind impressive masses of foliage, and sending light, catching along the furze, to the front. There are half-defined rays, the sun “ drawing water,” as a common expression is. Small clouds against the light are purplish and crimson; others above it are orange. Through rifts some patches of sky are seen, clear green, suffused in radiance and immensely distant.

Miller’s view at Wehawken is the landscape for which the highest price — it may be interesting to state it, two thousand dollars — is demanded. This is a sunset, too, but of the more regular kind. It is in the woods in autumn. The light is all reddish. Miller is adopted among the progressive men, and exhibits at the Kurtz gallery, too. His pictures are like both Dupré and the more remote Roussean. There is a russetness, and a texture over them comparable to tree bark. The compositions are undoubtedly of merit, but labored and artificial. There is too little out-ofdoors in them. His cows are conventional spots, whose only purpose is to allow the resting of desirable spots of illumination on their backs.

It will be hard to reconcile us to the slipshod treatment of the small figures, either animals or human beings, in landscapes, however long the practice may be continued. Elaboration to the injury of the purposes for which they are needed is not demanded, but examples like Macy’s show that this is not necessary. His figures of this kind have all the requisite breadth and freedom, but each an individuality, as if studied from a living subject.

Such a one is the brownish - clad girl going along the path in the scattering shadows of the great tree which frames the prospect of his fresh and lovely Early Summer. There is a rather remarkable absence of blue to indicate distance. Its place is filled by drabs. The bold yet tender treatment of the young vegetation, which begins to be luxuriant and to envelop the two brown and white Bavarian cottages in its midst, the taste and sentiment of the scene, are admirable. Here again is a happy medium. It is a reproach to W. T. Richards, Fitch, and Hetzel on the one side, who model the forest interior and all the stratifications of the rocks as finely as if they were but reproductions to a microscopic scale, and yet leave us cold, as well as to all the tribe of feeble and disorderly on the other.

The two Harts continue their even work. James, who paints the larger cattle pieces, displays especially good draughtsmanship and extensive general knowledge. One concedes all that is claimed for them, but some tameness and formal respectability in these excellent pictures prevent the outburst of ill-regulated enthusiasm. A suspicion of something of the same kind hangs about Dana’s fine sea-weed gatherers on the coast of Brittany. Perhaps it would please better were it less perfectly composed,—if there were a suggestion of something more angular in the forms, a hint of something transitory in the attitudes. The heavy cart horses seem too rounded and resignedly drooping. The sails of the fishing-boat droop, too, as though no breeze should ever blow again. One finds it enervating.

Next to it Clement Swift throws out three large figures of Breton wreckers crawling up a bank to watch the coming of a distressed craft in the offing, with a rugged simplicity and boldness that is an example of exactly the opposite feeling.

Boggs’s Street Corner in Paris is a very attractive, dashing piece of work, one of the best of those into which art for art’s sake enters for a legitimate share of enjoyment. It is in both the subject and the free, vigorous manner of handling. The corner is possibly one of those on the upper side of the Boulevard Clichy. Its wine shop, around which hangs a group of blouses taken out of the kind of life of Zola’s Assommoir,— it might be the Assommoir itself, though it is lettered the Chariot d’Or, — is pale green; the end wall of the building rising above it is time-stained gray limestone and plaster. There are two vulgar little shops, a fruiterer’s and a second-hand-furniture dealer’s, in the low, yellow-washed block running off to the left, and a leafless tree sprouts from the curb-stone in front of it. A sewinggirl is crossing the street, an old fellow sweeping it, and the end of a loaded omnibus just disappearing out of the picture. There is nothing whatever that needs going to Paris for. The art is in the maker, who has the talent to put the old cavalry jacket depending from the line, the basket of lemons, the open joint in the paving-stones, just where it will do the most good, and to leave out as much more that does not consort with the agreeable patchwork he has a mind to frame of this every-day life.

It is the commonest of subjects. A hundred thousand as good or better will be found in New York. There are subjects in the transition state of the upper part of the island a French painter would give everything for. If the wild shanty life, the goats, the fragmentary forts, the cemeteries, and the colonial mansions among the great bowlders, the bold trace of the engineering improvements cutting through them, the market gardens, the gleams of color in isolated brick and red stone blocks rising in the midst, be allowed to pass away without some transmission into art, it will be one of the crimes of the age.

A much more unlikely subject has come into art in the person of no other than Jim Bludsoe, by A. W. Willard. We behold him in the attitude of keeping the nozzle of the steamboat Prairie Belle agin the bank, till the last galoot’s ashore. He is not pretty, in the coppery light which the conflagration is made to throw over him as he clings to the wheel, but the head looks like an excellent rendition of a type of about the probable kind, under circumstances of strong excitement.

Guy gives us this year the same serious little girl who was last year reading to herself a Sunday-school lesson, now seated on the side of their bed, in the evening, reading a story to two little children. If it be the object to put them to sleep, it does not seem in train to be accomplished. Two pairs of round little eyes peep above the coverlet, wideopen with wonder at the tale. The perfection of finish, the effort at illusion, are made to consist, as is not often the case, with higher qualities. If it were, the style would have less said in disparagement of it. The masses of light and shade are most agreeably distributed. Though the very threads of the textures are discerned, the illumination of the gas-light falls in a broad and mellow flood across them.

Gilbert Gaul’s returned sailor lad showing some orphan - school boys his tattooed arm through a railing is scarcely worked out with the skill that befits so good a subject. Burns, in his young fisherman coming down the beach calling Halloo-o-o! well gives the action he intends. Magrath’s Irish farmer smoking his pipe on a hill-side, contentedly overlooking his estate, is a graphic piece of character set into a landscape of a charming, temperate color. One feels inclined to a superlative at once, —to say that it is the best thing he has ever done. J. G. Brown repeats, in an accurately individualized strolling German band, a composition similar to the row of newsboys pointing at a passing show, so well received at Paris.

Homer is sure to have enough in anything he may send to save it, even if it be not successful. His Cotton-Pickers is thoroughly so. The shepherdess, of the Little Bo-Peep style, bearing up against a stiff breeze, and the girl in yellow sitting on the beach against a breaking wave, of the solid dark blue the sea takes on some lazy days after an agitation, are both nice; but the former and her landscape are frigid, and the purplish and leaden sky of the latter does not seem to consort with the afternoon light that throws so long a shadow from the girl’s figure over the crest of the ridge. The field of tall cotton-plants, crossed and tangled in front, and spotted with the large, soft, white pods, with two women of the African race half shrouded in the midst, is very decorative; and there is made to be something mysterious and sphinx-like about the women against the sky.

The two Smillies are much to be congratulated on the odd and pleasing inspiration they have found,—the one in a simple hill-top crested with cedars, to which a goat path winds, the other in a snow - covered, climbing road, across which the bluish shadows of cedars are cast.

The flower painters appear with a whole odorous bank of blossoms, and almost all good. They have learned at last to replace the old stiffness with easy, “artistic” arrangement. As pleasing as any, in the peculiarly decorative way, were Helena DeKay’s pansies and roses, at the Kurtz gallery, thrown flatly against a mottled canary-yellow ground. Quartley has apparently been browbeaten out of mingling rich color in the waves of his marines by being called Ziem-like. He had much better have brought the reflections of the scarlet band on the smoke-stack, the stripe on the waist of the yacht, the bright-shirted fishermen, in his view of Norfolk, scattering down among them, as before. Without it he loses one of his principal charms.

One wonders if the point of view for this kind of writing is sufficiently kept in mind. A false impression ought not to go out, from the difficulty of qualifying all one’s qualifications. To use only a little praise while a great deal is meant is more common than to make a little fault-finding stand for all that is deserved. It is often the sole fault. The picture may be better described by it, while its merits are only covered in the same terms that are common to others.

Millet, artist and war correspondent, the American member of the fine art jury at the Paris Exhibition, is represented by a portrait which deservedly finds a place on the line. It seems a speaking likeness of the grizzled, middle-aged gentleman who forms its subject. The somewhat ruddy complexion is made an agreeable thing in itself. A faint smile hangs around the mustached mouth and the wrinkles of the keen, business-like eyes. This is a straightforward piece of work; the affair in hand is the portraiture, and little else.

Wyatt Eaton’s No. 138, on the other hand, a young woman’s head of a marked character, aims to be, and is, a beautiful study of light and shade. It is far better than his work at the other exhibition, and in part redeems it. The features, in almost profile, emerge out of soft shadow. The whole advance, from the gloom of the ground to the dot of light on the tip of the nose, is brought forward by a series of the more delicate and satisfying gradations.

Fuller’s pictures have the continuance of attractiveness belonging to mystery, not to be found out at once, if ever. He is a painter about whom there is controversy. It appears that there could rightly be little controversy apart from a certain tone to which he is devoted. It is a peculiar yellowish-green, slightly sulphurous, extending to portraits and landscapes alike. This is one of those de gustibus matters, but for me his subtle and pensive conceits would be far more charming in an atmosphere of the pale, soft grays. We do not see our visions in such a florid light. He favors the hearts of lonesome woodlands, with a rustic girl walking mistily through them. His And She was a Witch is a young girl of the Puritan times entering, with a beautiful, terrified face, her cottage in such a wood. The bailiffs are leading away, at a distance, a feeble old woman, possibly her grandmother. The woman further in the background who appears to have denounced her stretches out her arm, with comments of the strident malignity that may be imagined. The nightmare horror of the fatal hallucination, in which the victim so often joined herself to the ranks of her accusers, is powerfully conveyed. Fuller’s portraits fix one with a strangely intelligent expression through their mistiness. There was a young woman and a pretty boy at the Kurtz gallery, but the picture of chief importance is the Romany Girl at the Academy. She pauses in the yellowish wood, with a bunch of grasses in her hand, to glance out at us. In her dark eyes, lightened by beads of sparkle, a shy, wild character, fawn-like but savage too, is expressed, and enlists increasing interest. One who does not take to Fuller on the instant still feels that he might very easily be led to do so, and that then the taste, like that for certain condiments, might become a passion.

In Porter we have a portrait painter who falls short only by a tendency to over-prettiness at times of being great. He aims, like Guy, to reconcile great smoothness and reality with artistic qualities. The attempt is not unwarrantable in the hands of a master, but only with a tyro. His charming, clear-eyed child, recalling a little Reynolds and Gainsborough, is simply perfect. His larger portrait, of a beautiful matron, is easy and winning, too, in expression, attitude and color. She sits, with a rose in her lap, against an amberish-hued curtain. Her satin robe ripples over her knees like a pearly cascade. There is no conspicuous effort to be decorative, but an accomplishment of it, easy and natural like all the rest.

A portrait ought to be so good — would that it were borne in mind once in a thousand times!—that any other family would be as glad to buy it as the one it belongs to, and this is one of them.