The Sun.
London, England, 1861-05-13 00:00:00

THE MAZER COLOURISTS.

A second visit to the East (5), and West (53) of
Pall-mall, has doubtless enabled us to form a more
accurate opinion, to arrive at probably a more
judicious, certainly a more deliberate estimate of the
varied merits and demerits visible during this sea-
son upon the walls of our two popular Water Colour
Exhibitions.

Seniores priores—and therefore we now cross the
threshold first of—.

THE OLD SOCIETY.
Here, as usual every springtime, are distributed
round the four sides of the apartment, and upon
the sides too of the four screens still further ad •
miring it, as nearly as possible three hundred sepa-
rate productions. There are for the present year
295 pictures altogether. And as we saunter round
the gallery, catalogue in hand, we care not much to
turn over the leaves of the latter—recognising
among the miscellaneous paintings on the walls the
familiar tints and touches constituting the distinc-
tive style of many an old favourite. Yonder—
Frederick Tayler, the Society's President, with his
picturesque hunters and sinewy dogs of the chase.
Yonder—Joseph J. Jenkins, the Secretary—agree-
ably reminiscent in the alliterative initials of his
name of the well remembered " J.J." of Mr. Thacke-
ray's .2Veteconzes—j. J. Jenkins with his rustic
lasses and their pretty fair-haired children. Here,
Topham, with his Irish peasantry. Here, Bran-
white, with his refrigerating snow-scenes—his
name almost a pun upon his reputation, for the frost
that drops from his brush is ever fresh and ever
new. Now, we are almost " enhaling" the fragrance
of the flowers, scattered about by Margaret Gillies and
Valentine Bartholomew. Now, our mouth is almost
watering with a zestful relish as we look upon the
marvellous fruit, still pouring out annually from W.
Hunt's inexhaustible cornucopia. The sunlight
of Fripp, the delicious river views of Evans of
Eton, the exquisite little woodland glimpses
of Birket Foster, the wonderful archi-
tectural glimpses of Carl Haag—are we not all
intimately acquainted with them by this time, and
yet are they not, if only for that very reason, all the
more 'welcome to us, when we revisit their familiar
haunts each returning season to scan their contri-
butions to the new year's collection ?
We have scarcely entered the Gallery when John
Callow has carried us far out on the windy waters
(No. 11), we are there in "The Chops of the Chan-
nel," watching the sailors signalling for a pilot.
In the little oblong, numbered 15, and called " Bab-
el-Machgaming," Carl Haag portrays for us with a
luminous pencil the " Gate of Justice at Jerusalem."
Further on in the Gallery (No. 83) is a noble pen-
cilling from the same hand, another peep into the
architectural mysteries of the capital of Palestine,
a subterranean view it is, "The Ancient Vestibule
to the Southern Entrance beneath the Temple
Area," with some marvellous time-worn pillars of
gigantic girth dwindling away in perspective.
Carl Haag has further adorned the room, in
No. 105, with a vivid and poetic delineation of
" The Acropolis of Athens," a glorious pyramidal
cluster of reddish ruins with the purple hills spread-
ing around it in the background. Upon the fourth
screen, marked No. 284, the same artist has an
admirable group of Oriental figures, entitled " A
Rehearsal—Cairo," though why so entitled it were
difficult to conjecture. What possibly can we say
of A. P. Newton's (No. 24) " A View of Menton"
recently ceded to France by the Prince of
Monaco ? What ? but that the green, blue
violet, purple sea rippling up on the beach
is, in the literal meaning of the word, more than
any passage of music we have ever heard—chro-
matic. F. W. Topham's (No. 25) " The Angel's
-Whisper," illustrative of that pretty little poem
of Samuel Lover's, so often suggestive be-
fore now of pictures upon pictures, though charm-
ingly fanciful in its three divisions, would have
been all the more charming—because all the more
natural—if " Dermot returning" had been less of a
smooth-faced boy, and more of a bronzed and hardy
fisherman. Worthy of W. Evans, of Eton, is (No.
40), " Windsor from Dornly Common,"—with the
flock dusting up tho road in the foreground. Plea-
sant, too, to look upon is (No. 45), C. Davidson's
" Sussex Farmhouse " in early spring, with its old
ricks half sliced away, and the young budding
foliage. S. P. Jackson, in (No. 70) "St. lye's Pier
and Bay," has limned with admirable truthfulness
the washing-up of the tide upon the level sands.
As to Samuel Read's (No. 129) " High Altar in the
Church of St. Augustine, Antwerp," we are left
to wonder what possible rite can be in course of
celebration, seeing that there is but a thurifer visi-
ble, with his smoking thurible. Frederick Tayler's
happiest work this season is (No. 137) " Game-
keeper's Cottage on the Ist of October." We should
have been all the more pleased with Walter
Goodall's (No. 149) " Le Chapelet," but that the
incidents upon either side of the young mother, in
the centre of the picture, spinning, are too exactly
balanced—here, the little child playing with the
baby; there, the cat gambolling with tht, /Rio
A large framework, containing within it (duly
numbered) 30 clever little vignettes from the hand
of Joseph Nash, will be found worthy of par-
ticular examination. They would have gladdened
the eyes and heart of old John Bunyan, could he
have seen them—being illustrations of as many scenes
in his incomparable allegory of " The Pilgrim's
Progress"—Christian appearing, of course, as the
hero of each scene throughout. This elaborate
contribution will be found mentioned in detail a
N 0.162 in the catalogue. A little further on (No. 169

is " Winter—The Ice-cart," an admirable Bran-
white. A beautiful thought, very happily expressed
by the pencil, is No. 174," The First from Him,"

by F. Smallfield—a fair young maiden in her night

dress reading her earliest love-letter at her bed

room lattice by moonlight. Breathing freshly of
" Spring" (the title of the picture) is No. 204, by
G. Rosenberg, with its litter of lilac, appleblossoms,

eggo, and laburnum. We long for akeen-bladed

dessert-knife when we pause before No. 238, W.
Hunt's " Pineapple." And what can we say suffi

ciently in praise of the underside of that currant
leaf in his other fruit piece (No. 255), " Grapes,

&c."P The same artist has, upon the opposite

screen, two or three pictures of a very different
character ; one of them (No. 258), " A Chick," a
wonderful little gem, " one of a series painted for
J. Ruskin, Esq., to be presented to schools of art ;"
the other (No. 259) the " Study of a Head"- .-a young

mulatto. One of the most vigorous heads in the whole
gallery, moreover, ,is upon the same screen, and

loses nothing of its power by that dangerous juxta-
position. It is No. 275, " AM. 1660—The Old
Ironcide," by Frederic W. Burton—a buff-coated

Puritan who is just reading his bible, and is look-
ing up from it thoughtfully. The Secretary's (No.
287) " N'aie pas pour," would have been all tho

more commendable but that it is a repetition of a
better picture illustrative of identically the same
incident—a mother cautioning her little bairn to
tread bravely after her, over the stream, upon some
stepping-stones. John Gilbert has several careless
but gracefully pencilled works reflecting, as usual,
more credit upon his hand than upon his
brain : the most ambitious of these being No. 248,
" The Return from the Expedition." Birket
Foster reveals to us in (No. 237), his peep
amongst "Burnham Beeches"--the slow and gor-
geous burning out of autumn. Alfred Fripp, in
(No: 241)—a blithe little portraiture of a Boy-Tar
—giving to view a happily selected symbol of
Young
England.
Bat, our diminishing space warns us that we are
13
loitering too long in the Eastern Gallery among the
Old Water Colourists. We must hasten Westwards,
therefore, without more ado, and take another
glimpse, however cursory, of the

THE NEW SOCIETY.
Here—whether because of larger space or greater
industry, of higher hanging or of smaller pictures
upon the average, we know not—the contributions

are more numerous than in the rival collection.

Counting those upon the walls and those upon the
screens there are as many as 339 altogether. Seve-

ral of the artist-members having been singularly
industrious—instanbe Thos. Rowbotham, who has

thirteen, hires Fahey, who has fifteen, J. Chase,
who has sixteen, and D. H. 31Tewan, who has no
iess than seventeen. Not of course that mere num-

ber can be taken as the sole attestation of an

artisVo incluotry. Who absurdity of accepting which

evidence as a sufficient criterion in such matters
being intimated to us, if by nothing else, by
the mere recollection of Holman Hunt's marvellous
picture of the " Finding of our Saviour in the
Temple," a painting upon which it is well known
that that master of the school of the pre-Raphaelites
was engaged for fully six years—of course, inter-
mittently.
Here, again, upon crossing the threshold
of the New Society of Water Colourists, as
swiftly as we were borne away to the Chan-
nel upon passing the doorway of The Old,
our imagination is carried away captive almost in-
stantaneously. It is upon casting a casual glance at
(No. 15) by Carl Werner—" The Bridge of Sighs
over the Canal San Mario." The quotation upon
the catalogue is, of course—
" A Palace and a Prison on each hand."

Byron.
The luminous ripple upon the canal surface, the
glorious sunset halo, the shadowed buildings upon
either side—all are admirably delineated. It is an
exquisite picture. L. Haghe's (No. 63) " The
Artist's Studio"—with its orderly confusion of artis-
tic litter, its costumes, its antique furniture, its
busts, its paintings, its books, its living model " in
gorgeous array," its gleaming armour, and above
all its self-limning of the artist at work at his easle
in the distance, at the other extremity of the ateliers,
will be examined with peculiar interest by those
who have long learnt to admire L. Haghe, and to
appreciate his rare abilities as an artist winning
fame and fortune under extraordinary physical
difficulties. It will startle some, for the first time,
doubtless, to see how the painter has depicted him-
self at his easle—at once left handed and single
handed. What is this, actually in (No. 88)--
"Elaine ?" Yes, really and truly another Elaine.
We have already had Messrs. Charles Goldie and
Brewer's ingenious representation of the incident
described in glowing verse by the Laureate. This,
it will be remembered, was in the Suffolk-street
Gallery. We have since then had Mr. Wallis's
clever picture upon the same theme, now on view at
the Royal Academy. And now in the New Society
of Water Colourists—it is Edward H. Corbould
who depicts, in radiant colours, " The Lily Maid
of Astolat," as sung in melodious verse by Alfred
Tennyson. It is a vigorous and beautiful delinea-
tion—but we are beginning to tire of the scene :
and so pass on. We pause before (No. 98), by John
Absolon—pause, more with a sense of disgust than
of horror. Mdlle. de Sombreuil is about to
save her father's life in the Reign of Ter-
ror, by drinking a glass of warm human
blood—an incident described (and for the sake
of humanity, we console ourselves by believing
also simply imagined) by M. de Lamartine. The
representation of this apocryphal horror is here—.
as visibly revealed to us by Mr. Absolon's brush—
merely loathsome. It has not anywhere discern-
able about it one touch of tragic passion or one soli-
tary line of beauty. We turn away, sickening,
from a painting that art and nature would alike
seem to protest ought never to have been produced.
Sketchy though the picture is in itself (No:109),
" Genevieve," by Henry Tidey, is especially welcome
to us, for inasmuch as it realises with a grace and
tenderness not unworthy of the scene depicted—the
innermost core, the very heart of hearts of one of the
most exquisitely beautiful minor poems in the whole
range of English Literature ! That culminating
stanza of " Love," sung in delicious accents by the
poet of Christabel :
"She half embraced me with her arms,
She pressed me with a meek embrace,
And bending back her head, looked up
And gazed upon my face." Coleridge.
An incident from Sir Walter Scott's Talisman is
celebrated by G. H. Laporte in (No. 116), the en-
counter between " Sir Kenneth and Saladin." Aft,
later on in the catalogue, it will be perceived that
J. M. Topling (observe, not Frank Vance, R. A. !)
portrays the features of Sophy Waife, the child-
heroine of Sir Edward Lytton's What will he Do
with it? we question very much whether anything
in the way of a delineation from rustic life could
well be more ridiculous, or, for that matter, could well
be more unlikely, we had almost said impossible and
utterly preposterous, than G.B.Campion'slarge sized
and elaborated picture of an " English Harvest
Home—' The Last Load " (No. 118)—with these
extremely absurd reapers dancing a deliberate
pas de deux right in front of the loaded wain!
The wheels of which, by the way, are throwing
up such clouds of dust that the team of cart herself
must certainly be carrying it onward at the ratio
of ten miles an hour—a pace that must involve by
inevitable necessity the certain destruction of those,
slowly twirling votaries of Terpsichore ! About this
most charming contribution in the whole collection
this season of the New Society of Water Colourists
is, to our thinking, Augustus Bouvier's (No. 14a)
" The Princess Elizabeth Prisoner in the Tower♦
lss4"—the prettiest little incident imaginable, sug-
gested to the artist, so says the catalogue, by sa
passage in Miss Strickland's noble biography of
Queen Elizabeth. A little girl having found BOW,
keys—a diminutive bunch of keys more suitable
for jewel-boxes than for prison doors—runs aft'!"
the fair-haired young Princess while she is walking
in the gardens of the grim old Tower of London,
and plucking her by the skirt, and standing
eagerly on tiptoe while she (the child) is
holding up her glittering prize prattles inno-
cently to Elizabeth—"she had brought her the
keys now, so she needs not always stay there, butt
might unlock the gates and go abroad !" The con-
ception of the scene is not more graceful or more
bewitching in its pathetic naturalness, howeven,
than the artistic reali3ation of it as a work of arit,
is, both in colour and drawing, entitled to our
highest admiration. There are other works fror
the same fruitful easle, noticeable elsewhere upo
the walls of the gallery, but this is by far the most
ambitious, and for that matter also, the most
indubitably successful. A minor work of Augustus
Bouvier's, a little cabinet picture hanging upon
one of the screens, we should be ungrateful if we
passed by without one casual word of commendation
—so sweet a glimpse is it of rustic beauty peeping•
coyly from her lattice. The picture (numbered
299) appearing in the Catalogue as "The Nut
Browne Mayde"—

Fair maid with lawn kerchief and bright cherry bows,
With lips red as sorrel and eyes black as sloes."
—W.. Charles Kent.

It has been remarked that among all the numerous
paintings now on view at the Royal Academy Ex-
hibition the only nude subjects are those contri,

equal truth, we believe, that the
only
buted by W. E. Frost the Associate. It may be
m
season after season
upon a rke
walls
semi-nude
of the Water Colour Gallery, are those
subjects visible
ur
theremarked with
visible in the classic themes selected by Augustus
Bouvier. Instance this year (No. 176) " Lesbia"—
not the "Lesbia hath a beaming eye" of Tom
Moore, but the sparrow-loving Lesbia of Catullus.
Instance, also, from the same hand (No. 6), the
voluptuous form of " Olympia." We must hasten

onwards, however—if only to note in passing Carl
%Verner's (No. 189) powerful symbolism of," Venice

in her Pride," that awful revelation of the Secret

Tribunal of The Three sitting in Judgment.
Edmund Warren has in (No. 212) " Rest in the

Cool and Shady Wood" a marvellous vista, in truth,
of sylvan shadows and sylvan coolness. It is a work
of such singular merit and careful elaboration, that
wo arc hardly surprised to find it marked at £4OO.
Looking at it, we cannot but marvel why the artist
did not obliterate that long line of the sweep-
ing branch rendering almost odious the
upper part of this otherwise delicious shadow-
ing forth of the English Greenwoods ! Upon
either side of Mr. Warren's woodland scene there
is a picture painted by command of her most gra-
cious Majesty. These are companion illustrations
(by Edward H. Corbould) to Adam Bede, George
Elict's masterpiece. One (No. 218) is a bewitch-
Dinah" as she appeared when
ing delineation of

preaching from the cart to the villagers. The
other
(No. 206) is a delineation (intended, doubt-
less, to be yet more bewitching, though, to our
mind, it is not nearly as bewitching) of Hetty as she
appeared in Mrs. Poyser's Dairy when making
butter to the great admiration of Captain Donni-
thorne. They are two really charming pro.

ductions, and are tolerably Certain, we may
presume, to be sooner or later engraved.
Porthole (No, 238) is another lovely