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those works where the artist had shown a clear interpretative and illustrative intention; the former where he had striven to arrive at the very heart of things, and had painted what we should commonly call an ideal picture. Below these, again, would come the two correlative schools of pure realism and unessential idealism-the one where the artist had simply copied nature as well as possible; the other where he had chiefly impressed some passing sentiment of his own upon the scene. From these we should descend again to records of picturesque incidents and picturesque places, treated in a more or less pictorial manner, and to scenes from history or social life treated after academic principles, which latter may be briefly defined as the attempt to do by rule what can only be done by intense feeling and perfect knowledge. Then we should have pictures of pretty dresses, or old books, or ginger pots, or any other artificial productions which happened to give a good opportunity for placing pretty colors or agreeable forms in juxtaposition. And, lastly, we should have pictures which were not even beautiful or pleasing, but simply attempts to exhibit the master's skill, and to surprise the spectator into admiration.

Enough has, I think, now been said to show the point of view from which this criticism is written, and without further delay I will now speak briefly of the main points of difference between the works of the two schools, and give a few examples from this year's exhibitions in Paris and London.

On first entering the picture-galleries of the Salon, we notice that we are in a different atmosphere altogether from that of an English exhibition, and the first impression is to most people by no means a pleasant one. On every side we see large, even gigantic pictures, any one of which would be considered as a landmark in our Academy if only from its size and the importance of its subject. But most of these works are more daring in conception than they are beautiful or interesting. The amount of labor bestowed upon them is enormous; but it is rarely equally or wisely distributed, and the painting, the mere brush-work of the pictures and their coloring, is almost invariably deficient in delicacy. Size appears to be sought for its own sake, and often at the expense of other qualities of greater importance, and the artist appears to have been more intent upon astonishing the spectator, than delighting him. The composition, too, of the pictures is apt to be of a kind which is more skillful than it is interesting, being based upon strict academic principles. Thus one of the largest pictures in the exhibition is one by Debat Ponsan, entitled "The Piety of St. Louis toward the Dead," in which the King is raising in his arms a

putrefying body, in order to set the example to his knights, of giving burial to the dead soldiers who lie about in the foreground of the picture. The King's knights are grouped behind him picturesquely enough: two enormous horses, the king's and his standard-bearer's, form an impressive dark mass in the center of the picture, and give the pyramidal form to the composition which is considered necessary, and the cliffs on either side slope down toward the center of the picture, in the most orthodox manner. The work, however, is uninteresting in the highest degree; there is no sign that the artist has understood the spirit of the scene, or cared anything about it. The one little bit of naturalism in the whole composition is in one of the crusaders' figures on the extreme left, and he is-holding his nose. Now, it is worth while to dwell a little on this picture, as it exemplifies another of the French errors in painting, besides that of supplanting feeling by arrangement. This is their liking for choosing repulsive subjects, and not only liking to paint them, but painting them in the most ordinary matter-of-fact way, as if they would, of course, be beautiful to the spectator, if treated according to the artistic laws. Pictures such as this, and "La Tentation" by Jules Garnier, and "La Femme de Putiphar" by Schutzenberger, and "Mort d'Orphée' by Gustave Doré, are all repulsive subjects, treated in an unpleasant manner. Let me not be misunderstood. I do not assert that art is only concerned with pleasing things, but that it is no part of an artist's business to deal with what is in itself coarse, horrible, loathsome, unless he does it with a clearly evident purpose. Now, in the pictures we have mentioned, and in dozens if not hundreds of others in this gallery, it is quite evident that the artist has had no such purpose-nay, that in the picture of "The Temptation " he has actually reveled in the coarseness of his conception. The reason for these pictures is curiously enough connected with the reasons which give French art a certain supremacy over that of our own and other countries-namely, the fact that painting, when it is truly alive, reflects the opinions and practices of the people among whom it flourishes. Given true feeling for art throughout France, given also the life of a certain considerable number of Parisians, and pictures of the sort we have mentioned follow as the night the day.

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And we should have them in our own country were it not for two causes: the first that the majority of our artists only paint subjects which are pleasing in themselves; and, second, that art has never as yet really grown up in England and become a power, but is allowed only to work under certain restrictions, and is even then jealously watched. A coarse man in France will paint

coarse subjects coarsely, because such subjects please him. A coarse painter in England, dependent entirely upon public favor, will, as a general rule, be afraid of public censure, and will paint subjects alien to his nature. The result of this is a very curious one; for it follows that while in France one sees the coarse subject, and the reverse, side by side, in England we see subjects of one kind only, that approved by public opinion, which shakes Falstaff, Hamlet, and Hotspur all into the same little mold.

With regard to the historical pictures in the Salon which are not concerned with subjects unpleasing in themselves, there are many that impress us with their ability, but few that please us as pictures. Flameng's large work of "L'Appel des Girondins" suffers intensely from that dreary classicalism which is the bane of the more serious French artists, and the color can hardly be criticised as that of an oil-painting. It is simple, hard, and cold, and resembles more a gigantic cartoon for a fresco than a finished picture. The figures and faces of the Girondins are well drawn, and not without character; but when the composition and the grandeur of the conception have been admired, there is nothing left to say for the work. It is a great solution of difficulties, but not a great picture. Very much the same may be justly said of Lecomte du Nouy's enormous work, "Saint Vincent de Paul secourt les Alsaciens et les Lorrains après leur réunion à la France." Here the color is of a less ghastly hue than in the work of Flameng, but it still appears to be seen under some cold electric light which renders all tints of the same effect. There is much more action and variety of sentiment than in the former work, and there are difficulties of drawing and composition attempted which are not to be met with in the former picture; but, on the whole, it suffers from the same faults. The flesh is cold-gray in the shadows; the arrangement of the picture is elaborate, but hardly productive of a natural effect; and, above all, the dreary allegorical figures of Alsace and Lorraine, at the top of the picture, take us back to what Mr. Wilkie Collins, in one of his novels, calls "Art Mystic," and defines as always producing a great depression upon the mind of the beholder.

Let us take another example, and this time it shall be one of the works of the greatest French religious painter, M. Bouguereau. His chief work in this year's Salon is a classical, or rather mythological subject, entitled “La Naissance de Vénus." The subject is treated in the usual style. In the front of the picture, rising out of and swimming on the waves, are Cupids on dolphins, nymphs and Tritons blowing conch-shell horns; in the background rises a train of Loves, leading the eye from the groups of nymphs far into the

sky. In the center of all stands Venus, on a rosy shell, in an attitude of languorous exhaustion, both arms raised to the rich masses of her chestnut hair. The whole is painted with a smooth perfection of finish that no English painter can rival, unless it be Sir F. Leighton in his best moments, and the execution throughout is unfaltering and thorough. The first moment's glance is almost necessarily one of extreme admiration. The picture seems so perfect in its subtilty of composition and refined grace that one is tempted to ask whether it can be possible to excel such work. If, however, we reflect that it is an almost invariable quality of great art that it does not reveal its worth at the first hurried glance, and so fall to examining this work in detail, it grows momentarily less attractive. After all, have we not seen this, or much the same thing, though not perhaps in such perfect treatment, from our youth upward? In what do these Cupids and Tritons differ from those that we remember in half a hundred pictures? In what is this round-limbed beauty more of a Venus than any other fair woman? If there is nothing very new in the forms or the arrangement of the figures, is there anything in the coloring? Still less is this the case; there is little if any positive color in the picture, and the brilliance of the whole is not the brilliance of sunlight. Where the light falls upon the bodies of the nymphs it whitens them with a cold radiance of which we know nothing in nature, and in the shadows there is no warmth, only a pale, chill gray. Again, the light and shade of the picture are hardly to be accounted for, except by attributing them to the painter's caprice, and the effective relief gained thereby is gained at the expense of truth, and adds to the artificial impression produced by the whole picture. The composition throughout is of an intensely academical character, carried out with a skill to which we have, as far as I know, no parallel in England; but the effect of this arrangement is rather to draw the attention of the spectator to itself than to heighten the interest of the picture. Directly one notices it, it becomes apparent that the subject was chosen to afford the painter an opportunity of displaying his skill, rather than because he wanted to tell us something fresh, or because he was possessed with the beauty of the incident. feeling of the scene has not been grasped, and the best proof of this is that it is with extreme difficulty that we can turn our eyes from the beauty of the painting to the consideration of the subject. We keep returning, in spite of ourselves, to the artist's ability, to the beautiful balance of parts, to the exquisite arrangements of line, to the manner in which every detail leads the eye to the principal figure.

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If we turn to our English Academy, we may find some points of comparison between this work and that of "Elijah in the Wilderness," by Sir Frederick Leighton, though we must premise that there is in the work of our president a depth of color far superior to that of M. Bouguereau. This picture of Elijah is probably well known to our readers, and I need only remind them of the main details of its composition: Elijah on the right of the picture, half reclining upon a mass of rock, and on the left the angel bringing him the heavenly food, a landscape representing a rocky desert and a sky of deep blue, and heavy, white, cumulus clouds. Whatever praise is due to this picture and, in truth, it is not a favorable specimen of the President's work-is due to the solution of the problems of drawing the naked figure in such a very difficult attitude, and arranging it so as to give a fine combination of lines. There is no success, probably no desire of success, in depicting the spirit of the scene, or inspiring the beholder with any emotion in regard to it. The prophet is not a famished Hebrew, but an athlete rather out of condition; and the angel, so far from showing in her face any of the divine love or pity which one might suppose to be appropriate to the occasion, is smiling cynically. In so far as sentiment and feeling go, the picture is a tabula rasa; in so far as skillful drawing and composition are sought for, it is a work of great merit. Think for a moment of the "Atalanta's Race," by Mr. Poynter, in last year's Academy, and you will find exactly the same merits and drawbacks. There Milanion's figure was simply a study of the nude, and Atalanta's an attempt to depict arrested motion, and a difficult piece of foreshortening. None of the intense emotion of the man who was running for his life and his bride, or of the woman whose fate hung upon the result of her exertions, was attempted to be shown. It is to be noted that the French are much more consistent in this academic rendering of a subject than are the English, for, as a rule in these large pictures of theirs, they never attempt to represent the glow of actual life. The tints used are broad and simple, the shadows usually gray, and the effort is frankly one to gain dignity of composition and grandeur of outline at the expense of a surrender of the more vital human emotions and interests. English painters, however, can rarely bring themselves to treat subjects thoroughly in this manner, and the consequence is that they select scenes like these of Atalanta and Elijah, where the human element is, or rather should be, distinctly the great thing in the composition, and then reduce it to a nullity by the style of their work.

French art, their battle-pictures, and see where they differ from those of our own country. It is almost unnecessary to mention that they are ten times as numerous, for we have never cared in England for pictorial records of our fighting. The truth is, that we are not at heart, whatever may be said by Lord Beaconsfield, or sung by Mr. Macdermott, a fighting nation. We do it thoroughly, when we are about it, in the cool, business-like way in which we conduct our other concerns, but we have no national equivalent for the La Gloire of France; and, when the fighting is over, we like to forget all about it as soon as possible, carrying the forgetfulness sometimes so far as to postpone paying the bill for the little expenses we have incurred. But there are other very notable differences between the battle-pictures of the Salon and the Academy than the greater number and size of the former; for we find, on looking at the French pictures, that they represent war as it is for the nation, and that the English represent it as it is for the individual. To the Frenchman, a picture of Waterloo means the confusion and carnage of an army with the thousand details of conflict, suffering, pursuit, and retreat; to an English painter, it means the feelings of a group of young recruits as they await the attack of a handful of the French cavalry. I have taken this instance from the Academy of two years since, when Philippoteaux's Waterloo and Miss Thompson's "Quatre Bras" hung almost side by side; but it might be equally well shown by any other example. I think this different way of painting battles comes from the feeling which I have already described as prevalent in France-that of looking at the abstract rather than the personal side of a question. They can bear in their pictures, and even glory in, details of wounds and suffering, looking beyond them to the victory gained thereby; whereas the Englishman, with a more sluggish imagination but a more feeling heart, forgets the gross result of victory or defeat, but lingers lovingly over the elements of terror, humor, or pathos which he can find in the individual soldiers, and throws a veil of oblivion over the horrors of which he could hardly endure the representation. Here there is no question of superiority of painting, but merely one of feeling. Is it better that we should enjoy, as do the French, the idea at the expense of the individual, or minimize our records of great victories till we produce only a few pathetic incidents, such as "The Roll-call" and "The Remnants of an Army," instead of representations of the war itself? I must confess that to me the latter is the preferable method. The range of painting is so enormously wide that it may well omit from the pages of its record one Let us look at another great department of phase of pain and sorrow; and I do not believe

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that all the battle-pictures with which Horace Vernet has lined the walls of Versailles ever strengthened one of his countrymen in endurance, or roused him to compassion.

It is, however, well to recognize how limited is the scope of our battle-paintings, and that really such pictures as those of Mrs. Butler (Miss Thompson) stand in the same relation to those of such artists as Philippoteaux, Dumaresque, Regnart, Regnier, etc., as the pattering of the summer rain does to the torrent of Niagara.

Having spoken, though very inadequately, of the two great departments of French art-the historical and the warlike—and having shown that in both of these we must confess to some share of inferiority, if it only be an inferiority by choice, we now come to the romantic or idyllic school, one which, perhaps, is larger than all the rest put together, for we must include under this head the great mass of the figure-paintings here which do not belong to either of the above classes. Illustrations of social life, illustrations of sayings, illustrations of poetry, novels, and the drama, and so on, all come under this heading. Throughout the whole of this class there runs one damning fault which goes far to utterly nullify all the cleverness and originality of conception which we find here. This fault is the one which we have spoken of before as want, or perhaps rather artificiality, of feeling. There are dozens of pictures here of home scenes-parents lecturing sons, mothers instructing their daughters, old ship-captains smoking their pipes with their children on their knees, young lovers strolling through the woods or sitting in sunshine, barges being towed up the river by slow horses, grandfathers bringing presents to the youngsters, and so on, through infinite varieties of simple incident. Now, in all of these, in my opinion, the French art fails, and falls far short of our English work. Such a picture, for instance, as that one of Mr. G. D. Leslie's in the Academy this year, of the two sisters in the fruit-garden, would be impossible to find in the Salon: the atmosphere of peace and rest and simple kindliness is foreign to the French mind. Two exceptions, however, must be made to this statement. The first is where the artist, in painting one of these simple scenes, has been able to connect it in his mind with some more or less abstract sentiment, and so make the incident the vehicle for conveying a wider meaning; as, for instance, where Lobrichon, in his picture of a mother taking her child to the bath, has expressed very tenderly and beautifully the sentiment of maternal love; or, where Bastien Lepage, in the little idyl called the "Season of October," has managed to combine the labors of the poor with the sentiment of his landscape very perfectly. The second exception

to the want of feeling in these pictures is where the emotion suggested is one of sorrow or pain in humble life. It is a most extraordinary fact that, if we wish to discover pictures in which a true note of sympathy is struck with the poorer classes, we can not find it in English painters, but shall constantly find it in France. We must not dwell upon this, as space is already failing us, but would suggest that it may in some measure arise from the truer light in which poverty is regarded on the Continent than in the United Kingdom. Here it is a disgrace, there only a misfortune; and the intense snobbery of the English nation with respect to the class it belongs to, every one wishing to appear as if he or she belonged to the next rank above them, is almost entirely unknown in France. Whatever be the reason to which the fact is due, it is certainly true that an English picture of the lives of the poor is almost invariably a false one; while the French painters are not afraid to grasp, or ashamed to paint truly, the hard lives of the laboring classes. There is a picture here by Raffaelli, called “La Rentrée des Chiffonniers," which is quite perfect in its simple truth of feeling; and of such kind, too, though touched with a far more elevated meaning, are the works of Jules Breton and Israels, though it is not fair to quote the latter as belonging to the French school.

Before passing to the consideration of the landscapes, I must say a few words about the portraiture of the Salon. If we take it throughout, it possesses a degree of excellence to which we can not even approach; for one good portraitpainter that we have, there are in Paris at least a score. If we look at the highest developments of the art, I think we need not fear comparison. Marvelous as is the power of Bonnat and Carolus Duran, in neither of them do I find the strength of penetrative insight, or the sympathy with their subject, which is to be found in all the finer portraits by Mr. Watts. They are superior to anything that Watts has done if regarded from one point of view. The presentation of a great man, with his greatness legibly written on his countenance, is, I think, better done by Bonnat than it has ever been done before, and this is where he excels Mr. Watts. Mr. Watts never makes one start back from his picture with the mental exclamation of "What a wonderfully lifelike portrait of Victor Hugo!" No; the unique power of Mr. Watts's portraiture consists in this, that one looks at his picture and says: "Is that Soand-so? I never thought he had all that in his face." In a man's face there are two series of facts. One shows what he is on the outside, perhaps even what his ruling desires and passions are, and that series every one can read. The second shows the man's inner nature; it re

veals to you what the man is in his finer moments, when he is less crushed by antagonism and less thwarted by circumstance-not only what he is, but also what he might be. This is to be read by only one or two men in a generation, and this it is the painter's final triumph to see and interpret. It is in this way that Mr. Watts stands above all living painters of portraits. If we had to seek for the nearest approach to Mr. Millais among the painters of the Salon, we should probably be right in selecting M. Bastien Lepage, who, although he paints in a very much slighter key of color than our English artist, has yet very much of his power of delineating brilliant fleshtints, and is as subtile and delicate in his arrangements of color as his rival is powerful. portraits of Tripet, Saintın, and especially the portrait of Gérôme by Glaise, are all first rate of their kind, and painted throughout with a care and a simplicity very rare in similar work in England; their chief fault is a certain hardness of flesh-painting.

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We must pass over with slight mention the various decorative works of the Salon, for their discussion would lead us into quite a new field, decoration in France being understood in a far wider sense than it is in England, and embracing the most dissimilar schemes of color and modes of treatment. In this, as in most other branches of painting, the French aim at perfection, and that on the grandest scale; designs for decoration in pure bright colors and of a gigantic size, such as the composition of the Genius of Industry (or Peace, or the Republic, we forget which) inaugurating the Exposition Universelle from the tower of the Trocadéro, having no parallel in our Academy, or any other English exhibition. The style of dusty coloring, and arrangement of beautiful forms in pale, delicate hues of color, in which Mr. Albert Moore * is such a proficient, has a parallel in the Salon in the two large decorative designs of "Nymphs on the Seashore," and "The Prodigal Son." It is to be noted that M. Pavis de Chavannes, the painter of these works, is perfectly aware of their limitations, and indeed describes his picture of "The Prodigal Son" as a design for a decorative panel; while, in the work of Mr. Moore, the decorative tendency of the pictures is not frankly acknowledged, but there is somewhat of an attempt to give them the qualities of deliberate oil-painting-an error which only draws attention to the artist's shortcomings. In the delicacy of his arrangements in gray, pink, and palest buff, M. de Chavannes ranks as highly as Mr. Moore, and there is, besides, an amount of subject and thought in his pictures which is decidedly greater than that of our artist. The

* See his works at the Grosvenor Gallery.

execution, however, is somewhat slighter, and there is not that delicacy of invention in the arrangement of transparent drapery which is always the most attractive portion of Mr. Moore's work. The enormous painting of M. Laugée, of “The Triumph of Flora," may be mentioned as another style of work of which we have none in our own country-a style where there can hardly be said to be any distinct pictorial motive, save to introduce as many Cupids and nymphs as possible into the picture, and arrange them in the most picturesque manner.

In Mrs. Barrett Browning's "Aurora Leigh," there is a passage where Aurora says:

"The English paint a thistle and an ass,

Because they love it and they find it so."

This really gives the key to the great gulf which is fixed between the landscape of the two countries; there is in the Gaul none of the peculiar love for nature, qua nature, which exists in England. A Gallic painter will paint a brilliant effect of sunshine, or a grand effect of storm, and paint it well; he will even paint quiet scenes of nature, if they are such that he can arouse in himself any specific feeling, dramatic or contemplative, by them; but in no French picture with which we are acquainted has the painter sat down to quiet, deliberate reproduction of nature unmoved by any specific emotion or conception, and only desirous to reproduce to the utmost of his power the facts before him. He will carry the study of details as far as he thinks is required to help his design, but he will never carry it as far as he possibly can for the sake of getting out of each separate detail all the beauty possible. To a nation that habitually views everything in the light of some broad idea, which is accustomed to leave no fact ungeneralized even for a moment, there is a distinct barrier to landscape-painting on what may be called the English system. I call it the English system; for though it is, perhaps, not followed by the majority of English painters, yet it is the one which is gaining ground day by day, and is, besides, distinctively English, being followed out at present by no nation but our own. I have shown elsewhere, and have no space to repeat here, how this style of landscape arose in England; how it was that we came to paint things with the utmost fidelity we could master, instead of continuing to treat them in a more or less superficial manner. The extraordinary artistic movement which is known as preRaphaelite, if it has done nothing else, has taught us one fact of the most vital importance to art; and that is, that it is only by following Nature that we can ultimately conquer her-that it is hopeless to try and paint an ideal picture before you can paint a real one.

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