A FEW WORDS ABOUT PICTURE

EXHIBITIONS.

Ar this season we are all much occupied with galleries, exhibitions, and high art in many forms; and we hear incessant discourse, from men and women more or less competent to direct our taste, as to the merits of painters, schools, and styles, as to good and bad technique, as to the true and the false, the 'precious' and the foul' in art. I sometimes ask myself, a plain layman who presumes not to have an opinion in these difficult matters, whether we reflect enough upon the limits, sphere, and subjects of painting, on the relations of painting to life, to thought, to religion; whether our painters are as clear as they ought to be on these great antecedent problems:-What can be painted, what ought to be the end of a picture, what, in great ages of art, did the artist regard as his business and function?

Is it clear, to begin with, that the custom of holding Exhibitions of paintings really tends to the advancement of art? With very few exceptions, all modern pictures are painted on the assumption that they will be, or may be, ultimately exhibited. An immense number of modern works seem painted solely in order to be exhibited: and one hopes at the close of the Exhibition that they are at once painted out. We are so familiar with the institution of art Exhibitions that we take them to be as necessary to the painter's art as his canvas and brush. And we seldom reflect that in no great epoch of art were Exhibitions ever imagined.

Can we conceive of Pheidias and Lysippus, Zeuxis and Apelles carting their works into a gallery, as the month of April came round, and all the young æsthetes in town, in new chiton and chlamys, noisily criticising the folds of Nike's' drapery, the curves of Ilissus'' ribs, the soft limbs of Aphrodite,' and the proud glances of Athene'? Fancy Giotto, Angelico, Bellini, and Giorgione, closely crammed into long galleries, numbered 3785 and so forth, and catalogued with little snippings from Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio! And did ingenious youths in the Gazetta di Firenze, or the Giornale di Roma, publish vehement attacks or insidious puffs of the School that each affected? Was the 'Sposalizio' sky'd by the Hanging Committee; was the 'Madonna di San Sisto' jammed between a

'Storm at Sea' and a 'Portrait of a Gentleman'? Were Titian's 'Assumption' and Tintoretto's 'Paradiso' ever rejected by the Academy of Venice as unsuited for exhibition and difficult to hang?

A picture, like every work of visual art, is, or ought to be, designed to fill some suitable space and to be seen with harmonious surroundings. An altar-piece has to fill and dignify a chapel. A battle-piece may be in place in a public hall. A portrait, according to its scale and style, may suit an ancestral corridor or a domestic parlour. A vignette from the West Coast' or 'Kittens at Play' may give sweetness and light to the cottage boudoir. But an Annual Exhibition is almost the only spot conceivable where no picture ever can be in its place, where the local environment of every picture is turned upside down, where every note in the gamut of art is sounded in discord. Suppose an Exhibition of musical instruments where from eight till dusk the makers continuously played on their own instruments such airs as each thought best to bring out the tone of the piece! To one who had studied painting only in the Campo Santo of Pisa, in the Arena Chapel, in Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, in the Sistine and the Vatican, in the School of San Rocco and the Doge's Palace, to be thrust into a modern exhibition and told to judge the works there, would seem as strange and as painful as to be asked to judge of musical instruments when all were being played upon together in the same room but with different airs.

How vastly does genius loci, the placing and the setting of a picture, deepen the impression, when we gaze on the portraits of Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto in the Doge's palace, or on the Vandykes in the Genoese palaces, or on the prophets and Sibyls who keep eternal watch in the vaults of the Sistine, or on the Mantegna' in San Zenone, or the last rays of the 'Cenacolo' in the Refectory of S. M. delle Grazie! How different are Pisano's 'Pulpit' or Michael Angelo's Notte,' or Ghiberti's Gates,' as we see them in Pisa or in San Lorenzo or the Baptistery, and as we see them in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, or the South Kensington Museum! And yet year by year we cram side by side, as close as frames can be set, in a wild pot-pourri of pictorial discord, Holy Virgins, washerwomen, Rapes of the Sabines, scenes from Pickwick, Ledas, Dr. Johnson with Boswell, and Lord Mayors in robes of office. And on the first Monday in May we rush to Burlington House and expect to find new Titians and Raphaels cheek by jowl with a crowd of works which deliberately aim at the kind of success attained by a popular music-hall song or a shilling dreadful.

No really great picture can be seen in an Exhibition, and the greater the picture the more it loses. Nearly all pictures are nowadays painted with a view to possible exhibition. But some are not; and we all know how much in these very rare instances the painter

gains. A large part of Rossetti's reputation was no doubt due to the fact that he never exhibited, and promiscuous exhibitions of his works, even in the absence of discordant surroundings, has hardly enhanced his peculiar vogue. Those who have seen the pensive fancies of Burne-Jones or the President's bright visions of Greek poetry in the studios or saloons where they are at home, or for which they were designed, can hardly believe that they are the same works when they are seen jammed into a gallery between a portrait of His Royal Highness and an arrangement in ultramarine.' We might as well. expect to find Andromache, Phryne, and Galatea, looking natural, goddess-like, and Greek, if they mixed with the public on a crowded Saturday afternoon.

But it is more the moral effect on the painter's mind than the discordant effect on his exhibited work, which is the real evil of Exhibitions. Some painters are strong enough and honest enough to withstand temptation. But the tempter is always at work. An Exhibition is necessarily more or less a competition, and a competition where for the most part the conspicuous alone catches the public eye. Il faut sauter aux yeux, and that in the eyes of the silly, the careless, the vulgar, in order to be popular. And the painter who never becomes popular runs great risk of ceasing to paint at all. The diapason tends always to grow higher, and unless an air is given at concert pitch, and something more, it is in danger of sounding somewhat flat. Every device that colour, size, form, title, subject, frame, can give to attract the eye, has been exhausted by the ingenious painter, and not always by the worst. No man who respects his art stoops to such an artifice, and the honourable artist rejects it with scorn. But it is unworthy of us to subject men to competition with such degraded rivals, and to expect that we can make new Titians and Raphaels by a process which, like that of Exhibitions, smothers the great qualities by discordant surroundings and stimulates the activity of the vulgar qualities.

In far other modes were works of art 'exhibited' to the public in all great ages of art. They were shown in the studio in which they were produced, or in the place for which they were designed; in the first to the few whom the artist chose to admit, in the second on the public and ceremonial completion of the work. Were Pheidias' Athene of the Parthenon, the gods and heroes of the pediments, and the Panathenaic procession, Centaurs and Lapithæ, sent about from gallery to gallery, and jammed between 'Scenes from Aristophanes,' 'Geese on a Common,' and a presentation portrait of the Right Worshipful the Archon Basileus. When the chryselephantine Athene was finally set up in her Parthenon a great festival was made, and the citizens, magistrates, and priests, with youths and maidens in procession, went up to the Acropolis and gazed on the Goddess; and there amidst hymns, sacrifices, and solemn offerings, the whole city

rejoiced and wondered at the marvellous handiwork of the god-like sculptor. And when Cimabue had finished his 'Madonna' all Florence attended the ceremony wherewith it was set up above the altar as we see it still; and Florence that day kept holiday as at the Feast of the Annunciation. And when Raphael lay dead in state, his 'Transfiguration' stood above the bier; and all Rome came and gazed in wonder and reverence at the dead painter and at his last work on earth. Such were Art Exhibitions in the great ages of art.

This brings us to what is really the key of the matter. The discordant hubbub of modern Picture Exhibitions is the least part of the evil. It is the divorce of art from the highest religious, social, intellectual movement of the age which is the root of decadence in art. It is the substitution of democratic license and personal caprice for grand traditions and loyal service in the larger forces of life. Here is the root of feebleness, far more than in deficient training, crude technique, and picture Barnums. In all great epochs of art the painter frankly accepted certain great canons of religious, social, or artistic convention. He thoroughly felt his art to be the expression of the religious, social, and intellectual movement of his time. He took it to be his business to give to that movement colour and form. His art was not at all self-sufficing and detached. It was simply one of the artistic modes of expressing what was deepest and most commanding in the spiritual world. The painter was the servant; the free, willing creative servant, but the servant, of the priest, the thinker, the poet and the statesman. Pericles, Ictinus, and Pheidias laboured at the Parthenon in one common conception: a work by Lysippus, Polycleitus, or Zeuxis was an affair of state a great statesman of Rome has identified his name with the Pantheon, one of the most original conceptions in the history of art. Giotto worked in the Arena Chapel under the eye of Dante, and apparently under his inspiration. Ghiberti, Brunelleschi and Mantegna lived on the topmost wave of one of the most wonderful outbursts of the human intellect. Leonardo and Michael Angelo were two of its mightiest forces, even had neither ever touched a pencil. Raphael, Benvenuto, Titian, Velasquez, Jean Goujon, Rubens, Reynolds were the intimates and the equals of all that their ages possessed of brain, of knowledge, of force.

Painting, which is a secondary and not a primary form of human skill, cannot sever itself from power, from religion, from thought, without becoming at once feeble and wayward. The note of too much of modern painting is to be at once silly and bizarre. It has flung off all guides, teachers, and traditions; repudiates any sort of connection with religion, thought, or rule; decides everything out of its own head; and regards everything and anything as a proper subject for a picture, from the Day of Judgment to a mushroom. Individual whims, any crude hobby, are thought to be quite enough to enable VOL. XXIV.-No. 137.

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a man to choose a good subject for a painting, and to emancipate him from the conventions which condemned Raphael to eternal 'Madonnas,' Titian to perpetual Europas,' Ariadnes,' and Aphrodites,' and Murillo to innumerable cherubs. The modern painter holds himself to be as absolutely free to invent his own subject, to improvise his own canons of art, to humour his own fancy, as Mr. Gilbert when he makes a new burlesque, or Mr. Rider Haggard when he sketches a new novel.

But a picture is not a novel; for the painter's art is immeasurably less fertile and elastic than the written art of the poet or romancer. No genius can enable the painter to compete with the storyteller in versatility, in subtlety, in profusion and continuity of effect. The painter has his own resources in vividness, in colour, in harmony, in suddenness and unity of his blow on the imagination-it may be also in beauty. But of course he buys these resources at the price that he cannot, by the conditions of his art, touch anything but what is seen, that he is rigorously limited to one moment of time, that he cannot possibly impart anything which is not known, that he can never explain, never continue a story, tell nothing which it requires words to tell, and by the very instrument he uses he is forbidden, except in partial and exceptional ways, to touch the loathsome, the horrible, and the spasmodic.

These obvious truisms are trampled underfoot in our modern Exhibitions, where half the figure subjects are painted novelettes, whereas these conditions were strictly respected in all great ages of art. The necessity for respecting them, and the instinctive sense that the painter's art is a corollary of larger forms of human power, and not a substantive and self-sufficing force, compelled the painter, in all great ages of art, to limit himself to a definite range of subjects, to follow loyally the current ideals in religion, in poetry, and in manners, to use perfectly simple and familiar motifs, to shun whims, conundrums, eccentricities and fantasias, very seldom indeed to be comic, and almost never to be disgusting. The great painters painted only a few score of subjects-absolutely familiar to all who saw them and these almost without exception grand, ennobling, obvious types of religious, mythological, and social ideals. Ninetenths of the painter's aim was, as it should be, beauty.

Nowadays a large part of the modern Exhibition seems to have no other end but to raise a laugh, to invent a rebus, to puzzle, to disgust, or, mainly in France, to excite the animal sense of blood and lust. When we walk through a gallery of fine old masters, we need no catalogue to describe to us the subjects. We do not require to read half a page from Boswell's Johnson or Macaulay's History of England, it may be from Coventry Patmore or Ouida, before we can conceive what it all means. No ancient master would have tried to paint Shelley's Skylark or Swinburne's Songs before Sunrise. In