THE ROYAL ACADEMY.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXII, Issue 147, 22 June 1901, Page 3 (Supplement)

THE ROYAL ACADEMY.

VALE VICTORIA! SAKGBKT SUPERBUS.

(From Our Special Correspondent.)

LONDON, May 10.

A few masterpieces in a mass of mediocrity of the twopence coloured style—that must be the verdict on tills year's Academy. Aa for the hanging, which neighbours just the pictures that kill each other, that seems to have been conducted on the "muddle through somehow principle.

Quoeu Victoria and her funeral punctuate the Academy, but Sargent dominates It. The place of honour in the central gallery is given to Benjamin Constant's full length vision of the late Queen, draped with tne Royal Standard, against a background of dark blue veiled with crape. Fan in hand and draped in black and white, the aged Queen, the blue ribbon of-the darter across her breast, sits In her coronation chair in a bay of the House of Lords. Her silver hair —on which is poised a small diamond crown — H veiled by rich creamy lace. From a side window a my of golden sunlight streams in, illuminating her face, and floodins the throne and ornate heraldic carvings <>f the walls with a,sunset glow, typical of the sunset of the Queen's long reign. Grand in conception but feeble in execution, it lacks the simple dignity and sincerity that characterised the Queen. There is no life and little likeness In the aged sovereign. It is as if some wan, pale, bloodless ghost !of the real Queen Victoria had usurped her I throne. In the central hall a massive memorial of Her Majesty, the work of Onslow Ford, which is to be erected in Manchester, is, or ought to be, a warning as to what to avoid In designing the National Monument In front of Buckingham Palace. The distinctly podgy figure of the Queen in bronze la enveloped in a monstrous mantle. The marble monument beliind her, crowned by a gilt St. George and the Dragon, is heavy and inept. Mr Thomas Brock is to be the sculptor of the National Memorial. His marble bust of the Queen justifies his selection. It represents her in her seventieth year, and Is full of • regal dignity and strength, and a thoroughly artistic work. Binll Fuehs's silver medallions accentuate Victoria's aquiline nose.

The "2nd February, 1901," Is commemo ratrd by John Charlton, who depicts the funeral procession making a double turn in front of St. James's Palace. By this means he Is enabled to include In his picture the Duke of Norfolk, the cream-coloured ponies, the coffin and insignia, and the King and Kaiser with their cortege in the background. The crimson and purple trappings do not lend themselves to artistic treat iiient, but Mr Charlton has made the most of his subject, and his portraits of the Duke of Norfolk and the King are excellent

Mr W. L. Wyllie records the "passing ot 11 great queen" by sea. The Royal yachl with Its precious burden, escorted by grim torpedo boat di>stroyers,steams towards the spectator between the long linos of battleships, from which rolls the smoke of their lust salutes. Mr Wyllie has confined hiinsclf to a straightforward pictorial narrative of the event. Mr Stanhope Forbes shows us "how the sad uews was received in a Cornish cottage; Mr J. Finneniore depicts the arrival of Queen Alexandra at Paddlngton on the occasion of the funeral; Mr W. natherell pourtrays York herald In brilliant tabard proclaiming Edward VII. at Chancery Lane.

; Though the war has been so long with us, happily few khaki pictures catch the eye, There is a banal "Iteturn" and a "Farewell, Sweetheart," of the "Kiss-me-quiek-on-the-Hps-and-parf type, but on the whole the artists hare been merciful. First-class hon otu-H go to Miss Lucy Kemp-Welch for her spirited "In Sight: Dundonald's Dash on Lndysinith." Galloping along la a rocky valley at the head of their irregulars, Lord Dundonald and his staff and their immediate escort, a group of nine, have just reached a stony knoll, from which they catch a glimpse of their goal. Mounted on a bigboned chestnut which swerves as it strides over the crest, Lord Dundonald points down to the beleaguered town. On his right nn oflicer with glasses glances eagerly forward, as his sturdy bay, cleverly foreshort* ened, bounds into the air. A tired black charger stumbles on the stones, just behind the leader. The Imperial Light Horsemen wave their rifles and shout for joy as they press eagerly forward. The cavalcade stretches In a long winding line back to the blue hills on the horizon. There is "go" and dash in the horsemen and chargers, and strong sunlight over the whole scene. The picture Is sure to be a favourite, and to be extensively reproduced. An extraordinary farrago of realism and allegory is Robert Hilllngford'a "Dawn of Peace." On a ridge in a dark kloof, overshadowed by frowning crags, "Bobs" and Bullep and Kitchener sit their steeds. Kitchener looks towards fire and sword in the valley below him; houses burst into flames, Briton bayonets Boer, tlie white flag is treacherously hoisted. "Bobs" waves aloft a proclamation which, unlike its predecessors, has apparently brought peace, for on Buller's side, under the Union Jack and in front of the mine machinery, are seen contented Boers laying down their arms. In the foreground an Indian gives drink to a sorely wounded soldier, while a nurse drives away two vultures. Caton Woodville's "Lindley: Whit Sunday, 1900"—the soldiers in square round a chaplain, who is administering the Sacrament to them, while shells are bursting over the kopjes—strikes one as a rather manufactured picture. The same may be said of Beadle's "Arrival of the G2nd Field Battery at the llodder River Battle."

There is life—and death—ln W. B. Wollen's "Imperial Light Horse at Waggon Hill." In the sunlight before daybreak the plucky Irregulars on the crest of a rounded hill are holding at bay the crescent of Boers just below the summit, whose presence is displayed by a line of fire. Some of the British creep forward,others are firing from behind the boulders with which the hill is strewn, many nave bitten the dust.

Byam Shaw's "Boer War, 1900," Is a particularly peaceful and harmonious composition. A lady who has lost her lover in the war stands in a gTeen meadow gazing sadly across a reedy stream. Her black and white blouse and black skirt, against which she holds a skein of purple wool, make tne only sombre note in the verdant scene. Leaning her face on her hand, she recalls Christina Rossetti's lines: "Last summer green things were greener, brambles fewer, the blue sky bluer." Mr Byam Shaw has imitated MII--lais in his pre-ltaphaelite days very closely, and both in colour and composition the picture is strongly reminiscent of the tatter's "Ophelia."

Mr A. C. Gow deserts "his sleek, wellgroomed horses for once and devotes himself to dervishes. In the starlight the little band of whlte-jibba'd. dervishes is rapidly being annihilated by the concentrated BrJ-

tish fire, and behind a line of prostrate braves who have died in his defence the grey Khalifa, on his knees, raises his hands and sinks back, shot through the heart.

A gallant figure, badly skied, is C. W. Furse's equestrian portrait of General Sir Charles Nairne, a group of blue-turbaned Indian lancers behind him, a bint of artillery below him.

Of the statuary inspired by the war, Onslow Whiting's relief, "Field Guns Coming into Action at Colenso," is full of vigour; and Cecil Brown's "Red Badge of Courage" represents one trooper helping another on to a very comical horse. Onslow Ford has a graceful bronze statuette, "Glory to the Dead," a slight female figure with bowed head holding a wreath of bays in one hand and a torch in the other.

"The Victory of Peace," by Andrea C. Lucchesi, is to be erected in marble In Albert Park, Auckland, N.Z, A toll, shapely figure- with bared bosom presses a dove to her left breast, and trampling on the sword iti her right hand breaks the blade. Her 'hair, which is drooped over her ears, is encircled by a wreath of laurels, and her stubborn, determined face suggests that the peace is not that of pro-Boer conciliation and Majuba magnanimity, but that resultIng from a fight to a finish. Lady Butler (Elizabeth Thomson), our battle painter par excellence, sends no picture this year.

Sargent shows the eight pictures to which he is entitled. All are portraits of astounding cleverness. The most brilliant tour de force is his "Daughters of A. Wertheimer, Esq." They stand side by side In evening dress, the elder and taller In luminous white satin, the younger in a low-toned crimson gown with crimson flowers and blue-black hair. The elder's right arm encircles her sister's waist, her left rests on a large blue and white Chinese jar. The background 1b a wall with dully gleaming pictures marvellously painted. The younger sister holds a wonderfully foreshortened fan. Both smile with an air of mocking diablerie.

In his "Mrs Cazalet and Children" Sargent shows a happy mother in a black evening dress standing against a heavy red curtain, balancing a child in white on the arm of an old carved chair, while her little son in red clasps her hand.

Red Is also the keynote in his "Sir Charlea Sitwell and Family." The family is grouped in a high spacious room. Sir Charles, In grey with brown leggings, stands with his arm ou the shoulder of his fair-haired daughter In red. Lady Sltwell in a white gown with spangles, a touch of red la her picture hat, arranges red flowers In a bowl on a polished table. On the floor a small boy and girl play with a.black dog and red tin soldiers. A grey tapestry covers the high wall behind the family, and on a satin wood cabinet stand porcelain figures and ornaments, indicated by just a touch which, however, gives them the genuine glaze. The difliculty is to see the Bargents at a private view. People poke their noses into the canvas to scan the details, and observe uothing but smears and smudges, at the same time obscuring the view of those who stand well back in the room, where the picture becomes a coherent harmony.

Shannon's refined portraits, among which is one of Lady White, look tame beside the strongest work he faas yet given us. "The Flower Girl" Is a little picture but full of vitality and light. A woman In a white muslin dress spotted with black stands with a basket of roses on her arm in front, of some dark green bushes in the shade: the yellow sunlight falling through the boughs touches her cheek and ear and her dress. A blue-eyed baby lies sucking at her breast, the frills of its dress drawn up so as to disclose a chubby leg. The child is handled with a delicacy and a tenderness and yet with a strength that is altogether charming.

It is noticeable tnat each year the proportion of portraits to landscapes and subject pictures in the Academy becomes larger. There is a profusion of portraits this year. Even Mr H. S. Tnke, who gives us delightful boys in boats In*bays, tries his hand at lady sitters, and with some success. But blue-eyed girls in white dresses are apt to pall, and I prefer the strength of his "Summer Evening" with two virile boys fishing from a boat. A welcome relief to so much of the sickly society pentimentalism that ogles the spectator in every room is the manly work of W. L. Wyllie, who is at his best in two adjoining pictures. "The City of London" was apparently painted from high on the Tower Bridge, and shows the busiest stretch of the Thames —a tangle of steamers and barges. On the south bank is seen a jumble of warehouses, on the right the dome of St. Paul's, the Monument, and numberless slender spires; smoke rises to the sky on all sides. The tones of this picture are yellow and brown. In his other picture Mr Wyllie gets back to blue water again. Two dark blue heaving biliows of the Bay of Biscay and the trough between, crested and lashed into spray and foam, and the masts and funnel of a tramp jnst rising over one roller, tell their own breezy story without the help of the catalogue quotation— "Just a funnel and a mast lurching through the spraySo we threshed the Bolivar ont across the Bay." Edwin Abbey's one picture is of a warlike subject, "Crusaders Sighting Jerusalem." The glare of the eastern sun falls full in the faces of three mail-clad Crusaders, who from the summit of a stony hill look towards the sacred city. One lusting for battle shouts with exultation as standing erect he unfurls his banner. The middle figure who kneels bareheaded, his sword clasped to his breast, his auburn locks lit up by the sun, looks forward in rapt ecstasy, as If he beheld his Saviour. The third Crusader also kneels and holds his hilt before him as a cross, but in his grim face there is written "destruction to the infidels." Up the steep hill painfully toils from the misty blue plain below a host of mail-clad warriors, the red cross of St. George on their breasts.

Sir E. J. Poynter is responsible for a tame and trivial "Helena and Hermione," two Greek maidens Inspecting a piece of tapestry that they have woven together, far inferior to his "Visit to Aesculapius." Alma Tadema revels in a chaste marble amphitheatre and blue sky, with a few classic figures of obviously secondary importance. The Hon. John Collier has a full-dress portrait, of the Duke of Cornwall and York standing in an admiral's uniform against a crimson chair. The Duke is almost as wooden as the chair. The same artist shows us Tannhauser in armour at the Yennsberg kneeling before a female figure partly clad in royal red robes, with the vine in her hair, who, standing In a marble niche over wWch. hover doves, holds out to him a chaplet of roses. Another vine-leaved crowned lady looks on with calm indifference. There isn't as much fascination, in the whole anatomy of Venus and her companion put together as in the little finger of one of Sargent's Wertheimers.

A couple of years ago. the Chantry Bequesi boug-ht f- n Mr J. Xon«^ hunter a

picture of proud peacocks sunning themselves in a formal garden. This year he livens up one of the dnllest of the galleries with his fresh and humorous "Come, Lasses and Lads." In a rudely-cobbled street before a vegetable stall, lads and lasses in quaint mediaeval costume are going merrymaking on May Day. An apprentice, holding a spray of May blossom adorned with bright ribbons, at which a dog is snapping, beckons to a girl to come and dance with him. Two boys have fallen over one another, doves fly up, pigs look on puzzled, a youth and two girls hand in hand flingthemselves forward, a woman in a pink dress trips out of a doorway, an old beggar hobbles off at one side, and two comical geese lift their necks in the air to add their gabble to the gaiety. All is animation.

This is lacking In Chevallier Tayler's "Honi Soit Qui Mai y Pense"—Edward 111. holding up a blue garter before a lady who strikes a supplicatory attitude, while the courtiers look on rather with the unconcern of an opera chorus than with those cynical sneers and ill-concealed laughter which tradition ascribes to them.

Very different from Ms sympathetic portrait of Sir George Grey is Herkomer's "Zither Evening with my Students in my Studio." In one corner of the picture the Professor's back is seen as he bends aver his zither. Grouped round the studio in a semi-circle a score or more of his students look on and listen in different and characteristic attitudes. The grouping is easy ana natural, each student has his own individuality, and the effect is vigorous and spontaneous. The tones are somewhat black and dirty, but the picture must rank as one of the best in the Academy.

A fantasy in clouds is Arthur Hacker's contribution. The quotation,

"And I all the while bask In heaven's blue

smile, While he is dissolving in rains,"

explains the meaning of the picture. On a white cloud rests a remarkably robust recumbent female, stretching herself out in the yellow ray of a rainbow, her companions somewhat vaguer than herself recline on the cloud in the background. Earthwards the cloud is dissolving into dark rain and mist, In which Is seen a stern, sorrowful male face. A more diaphonous lady would seem to be called for by the quotation.

Full of luminous atmosphere is Clausen's "Golden Barn," a spacious room fnll of flour dust and soft white sacks, all in a golden haze of subdued sunlight. La Thangue'a "Gathering Plums," a girl in a white dress and a boy stooping to pick plums from the ground in an orchard and to place them in baskets, several of which are already filled with the purple fruit, deserves special mention for the richness of its colour and the grace of the curving figures. Even finer is the colouring in his "December in Provence," a girl watering from a green Jar creamy roses under dark orange trees full of golden fruit. Above there is a long line of creamy, shining houses.

J. W. Water house's Diploma work Is "A Mermaid," seated among the rocks in shady sea eaves, with pearls in a shining shell bj her side. The inevitable blues and green appear as usuaL "Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus" is a colour scheme in blues, mauves, and greens, but the two nymphs stooping over a deep pool in a dark wood do not seem at all disturbed by the apparition of the poet's head in the water, with his auburn locks entangled in his lyre.

i Au exquisite piece of painting is Mr Stott's "The River Bank," nude boys watering horses as they bathe in a moonlit streani Mr Adrian Stokes has given delicacy and brightness to sombre "Trafalgar Square." Alfred Parsons has a delightful picture of the junction of the Lees and Greta, salmon streams lined with golden and russet trees; and Percy E. Croft shows himself a Master of Craft in a green lawn on which stands an "old sumach" laden with pink blossoms. Some exquisites in empire costumes are playing at bowls under the sliade of the trees.

. As usual, it ia In the sculpture that the visitor finds Imagination and originality, and an artist's sense of grace and- symmetry. Quite the most dainty and charming conception is a bronze statuette, "Castles in the Air," by W. Reynolds Stephens—a girl seated with an open book on her knee, gazing open-eyed before her as she builds her castles in the air. On the canopy above her there is a suggestion of turrets la mother-of-pearl and bronze. The statuette stands on an ivory pedestal, and all the elaborate decoration is symbolical of the title, Quito the "live-est" bust in the whole show is that of Sir John Cockburn, by Mr Alfred Drury, in green bronze on an Irish green marble pedestal. This is nothing less than an inspiration. There is a breezy bluffness about it, in the flowing hair, the coat thrown back, the keen and kindly expression of the eyes. In a word, Mr Dmry. has pourtrayed Sir John In his happiest mood. The face lives; it does everything but speak. I don't know what the ult&nate destination of the bust is to be, but if the genial Agent-GenerS.l Is to be commemorated in an Adelaide Art Gallery no better memorial of him than this bust could possibly be found.

Mr Onslow Ford's marble bust of Sir Geo. Grey for the crypt of St. Paul's has dignity and an air of that mystery that always lurked under the pro-Consul's shaggy eyebrows, but there is just something lacking in the likeness.

Of Anglo-Colonial Interest rather from its subject than from its technique is a fulllength portrait of Mr Borchgrevink, amidst the snow and ice surrounded by his dogs,, of whom Zembla looks up to him with wistful eyes, while the explorer looks ahead to see if he cannot yet get "further south." The painter is Mr G. Hiilyard Swinstead.

There Is strength in Mr Tennyson Cole's portrait of the Duke of Norfolk, and feeling in Mr Percy P. Spence's three horses.standing on a tussocky wind-swept hillside with their backs to the "cold blast."

Mr Tudor St. G. Tucker is represented by "Day Dreams" and a portrait of Miss L.

Eeidy.