The Sun.
London, England, 1864-04-04 00:00:00

Mr. Simpson's Water Colour Drawings,

(THIS DAY.)
This afternoon there has been opened to the
general public at the German Gallery, No. 168, New
Bond-street, a collection of Water Colour Drawings
of a very remarkable character indeed—a collection
that we had the gratification of examining in detail
at the Private View on Saturday. This collection,
which is among the fruits of three years' persever-
ing and often-interrupted labour on the part of the
artist, labour to him often interrupted, that is to say,
by reason of his extended travel, may be pronounced
at once, we believe without any risk of exaggeration
in our so designating it—one hitherto, wholly and
absolutely, unparalleled. Mr. William Simpson, the
artist in question to whose skilled and unassisted
right hand we are alone indebted for these beauti-
ful and varied water colour drawings, will be
remembered by many thousands of the lovers of art
in this country as hawing already won for himself a
high reputation at once as a Traveller and as a
Painter by his wonderfully vivid and realistic
series of illustrations of the Crimean War.
Putting his implements of art again into his
knapsack, he has now in a tour of three years'
duration "done" ladle, Thibet, aaa Cashmere. The
collection of drawings resal",ing from this tour will
eventually, it is a7/nounced, number some two
hundred and fity altogether. Of those two hundred
and fifty-158, fully completed (the rest are in pro-
gress at the artist's studio), now adorn the walls of
the German Gallery. Visiting that gallery, taking
a luxurious stroll around it, catalogue in hand,
examining one by one those charming wateracolour
drawings of Mr. Simpson, to the Number already,
as we have said, of more than one hundred and
fifty it is for all the woad like taking an
easy hop, step, and a jump across the chief
part of the width of this eastern hemisphere of
ours : that interval, namely, called by an ab-
surd misnomer the route of the Overland
Journey, the over land part of it being just infinites-
eimal as compared with the extent of the sea
voyage—it is for all the world, we say, like taking
allying hop, step,and a jump across the whole width
of that route (measured as the crow flies) and alighting
upott the far-off soil of Hindostan ! Aided by our
artist we are (there at 168, New Bond-street) enabled
to make one at the gorgeous Barber held by the Go-
vernor-General of India—in Mr. Simpson's time
the late Lamented Lord Canning. We are gazing,
not without emotion, at the lovely gothic memorial
now erected over that ghastly well at Cawnpore,
we are watching the fierce contest at the direst of
the gates of Delhi. We are gazing in wonder
and bewilderment at the Buddnist devotee
whirling his devout cylinder, in other words
(literally) praying by machinery ! We are being
trotted along (half asleep) in the torch-
lit dooly—the Indian palanquin. We are being
jolted (not half asleep) along the Grand Trunk
Road at the tail of the Oriental post horses. We
are listenieg to the whirr and clatter of treddles and
shuttlesin the weaving of the pushm into the famous
shawls of Cashmere. Now we are loitering inside,
now again outside, one of the Anglo-Indian Bunga-
lows, dropping in at tiffin and being faintly cooled
as we sit at table by the flapping of the punka over-
head, The whole of the beauties, splendours, pecu-
liarities, eccentricities, habits, customs, costumes,
architecture, landscapes, street views, &0., &a., of
Hindostan are portrayed upon the walla of this ex-
hibition, by the magical brush of our great travelling
water-colourist. When we attended on Saturday
afternoon at the Private View, it was interesting to
note there, among the crowd of fashionable visitors
to the gallery, the keen bright face of perhaps the
Master Diplomatist of the Age—now unhappily
shelved in the midst of all this diplomatic con-
fusion, born of meddling and muddling, " the Great
Eltchi," as Mr. Kinglake loves to call him, other-
wise Lord Stratford de Redcliffe.

Mr. Simpson's collection, we obsejve, is to be sold
either as a complete whole (the Nation ought to pur-
chase it I) or it is to be scattered piecemeal among a
crowd of purchasers, supposing no One Purchaser
should present himself. Meanwhile the Messrs.
Day are preparing the work for publication, as
another of their costly and magnificent specimens
of chromolithography. A thousand subscribers will
thus have the opportunity of obtaining the work in
a serial form, that is in forty-two monthly parts,
each part, price two guineas.

THE SOCIETY OF BRITISH ARTISTS.

(THIS DAY.)

At this popular Gallery the annual " private
view," so walled, is about the absurdest of misnomers.
On Saturday afternoon, when we attended (haying
a remembrance of the past) with a very faint hope,
indeed, of finding the opportunity for ones of any-
thing at all like a " Private" view, the noble suite
of five rooms constituting the Suffolk-street Gallery
proved to be fairly crammed full of fashionable con-
noisseurs. The merest glimpse—as at the Royal
Academy exhibition—could alone consequently be
obtained of the most important pictures of all
in the collection—namely, those hung in the place
of honour, namely (where Pope tells us the spider
" lives," that is, feels and thrills with a subtle
sentience) along the line. Any deliberate ctitieism,
therefore, as the result of a Private View, after
hustling among a throng of crinolines and black
coats, peering at momentary intervals of the most
tantalising brevity between perpetually alternating
spoon-bonnets and chimney-pot hats at works of art,
now oil, now water-colour--any deliberate criti-
cism, as the result of a view thus obtained in the
midst of so much babble and confusion, would be
idle for anyone seriously to adventure upon.
Occasionally, when the throng of visitors would
for a while thin, almost disperse, so as to afford
one the opportunity of an instant's observation
of some picture thus accidentally brought within
reach of anything like appreciation, we were re-
warded for our perseverance in " doing" the gallery
—that is, inienduring the crush unavoidably.having
to be encountered by anyone making, as we
perseveringly did, the tour of the whole five apart-
ments. The old familiar exhibitors were there
in as strong force many of them as ever. The
President, Mr. Hurlatone, insisted upon recogni-
tion by every one entering the gallery—and this,
as usual, by reason of those obtrusive Family Por-
trait groups, in some of which we are almost fain
to look for—an orange in the hand of each of the
children—as in the instance of the famous family
portraitures in the Vicar of Wakefield. Mr. J.
B. Pyne this year appears to greater advantage '
than he has done now for many past seasons—
holding his own vigorously, as, in one department
of landscape painting, an artist wholely unrivalled.
A single picture is alone cortributed to the
gallery this year by J. J. Hill, but it is an ex-
quisite work—simple as simple can be in the
idea of it—yet, for all that, an exquisite work
a work worthy of the gifted artist when
at his best. " The Gleaner" is the title of
it—this same gleaner being a charming specimen of
rustic English beauty, a poppy in her hair, a bunch
of corn ears in her hand. There is a wonderfully
animated, but for a reason immediately to be men-
tioned, a wonderfully eccentric and. even ridicu-
lous painting, upon a large scale, by Roberts,
entitled " Beaching the Life Boat," the odd thing
in which is that every creature represented, the
savers and the saved, in all the drench and whirl of
the boiling surf is as dry as a bone, clothing and all,
in spite of the world of waters through which one
and all of them must have passed ! Holmes has a
capital bit of humour in humble life, in " A Sana-
tory Commission," particularly as the fun of the
incident is expressed in that half profile of the fat
blonde boy who is scrubbing the poor wretch of
dog in the tab—a boy so fat that he can hardly, one
might fancy, kneel. Cole's "Harvesting in Surrey"
is a wonderful effect of level sunset glory, shining
over the harvest-fields under a black cloudy sky,
bringing to view a myriad mystic lights and sha-
lows, and setting one or two of the picturesque old
farm-house or old manor-house windows in the back-
ground all ablaze ! There appeared to us—through
the throng—to be several charming contributions to
the gallery this season from the Bouviere—both
from J. Bouvier and J. Bouvier, senior—
but one only among the works emanating
this season from any member of that accomplished
family could we on Saturday obtain anything like

a satisfactory view of. And that one, as it hap-
pened, one that was hung very low down
namely Miss Bouvier's sweet little cluster
of —" Wood Violets," she calls them, for the
title applies, we take it, more to the pretty
little lassies who have been gathering those " rath
violets" than to the lovely flowers themselves.
Numerous pictures besides the few here
mentioned claim our attention, of courge- in a
collection numbering (wits the water-colour
drawings) upwards of one thousand. There were
gorgeously coloured Woolmers, reedy pellucid
country, brooks by Williams and Boddington,
flowers, fruit, forest scenes, one ambitious scrip-
tural scene, one oppressively "goody" picture of
an old grandsire, apparently in a very maudlin
state, listening to " our pastor," as the latter reads
to him, in the oddest attitude for reading, surely,
than any visitor, lay or otherwise, could well choose.
Enough, however, when we have said this for the
mere glimpse caught by us at the "private view"
on Saturday.