PAINTING AND SCULPTURE.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1321, 24 June 1897, Page 36

PAINTING AND SCULPTURE.

THE VARIOUS SCHOOLS OP APT. An important epoch in the history of art in England dates from the year of the Queen's accession, 1537, when the South Kensington School of Science and Art was established. Thus from the beginning of the reign till the present time there has been at work a most powerful influence in the art education of the country. The Edinburgh School of Art was affiliated with that of South Kensington in 1858, and in 1880 another important development, in art training in Scotland took place, when the Watson-Gordon chair of Pine Art was founded in the University of Edinburgh, in memory of Sir John Watson - Gordon. Meanwhile the various Continental schools have been continuing their good work steadily. Paris, a great centre of art instruction, has been for many years the Mecca of Scottish and American students anxious to perfect themselves in their beloved profession.

The painters of England have formed independently of Prance a distinct school of their own, founded upon the standard set by the great Spaniard Velasquez, whose influence has had tremendous effect upon the trend of latter day art. The Dutch School of Rembrandt has also had a share in the development of British art, through the work of such men as Herkomer and Alma Tadema. Of the English painters, the greatest man of the reign is probably Greorge Frederick TVatts, whose pictures of ideal subjects have justly given him a world-wide fame. Sir Frederick Leighton was the most academical painter of his time. There was always some of the coldness about his work which came from the training of his Teutonic master Steinle. As a scholar and man of the world, Leighton was admirably qualified for the position of president of the Royal Academy, an office in which these qualities rather than that of the mere artistic temperament find plenty of scope for exercise. It is not always the best painter who becomes president of the Academy; the power to make a speech, and to talk, and to entertain distinguished guestc are qualities which must command attention in the selection of a man for the position. | Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown and Holman Hutit comprised the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, claiming that it was their object to follow the masters who preceded Raphael, such as Giotto and Fra Angelico. In a large bare room which served Holman Hunt as an apartment and also as a studio, which he shared with Rossetti, the brotherhood was formed, Millais including himself amongst the members until some time afterwards he broke away from them, and in doing so incurred the displeasure of the famous art critic Ruskin, who was a strong supporter of Pre - Raphaelitism. Sir John Millais, who died not long after he was elected president of the Royal Academy, was for some time one of the leading figures in art circles, and as a painter of popular story pictures was unrivalled. Mystery was no part of his work. Simple and assiduous devotion to nature was his ruling principle. Ho was never happier than when sitting* on the bank of some Scotch mountain stream, studying nature, writing her down, and smoking fills of tobacco from the pocket of his shooting jacket. Corot and Jean Francois Millet have been the leaders of a French school influenced by Constable —a school which has done bplendid work. Millet is well known as the painter of " The Angelus." Meis-. sonnier and Munkaczy have also been notable men amoncst Continental painters, especially Meissonnier, with his striking characterisation and uncompromising attention to detail. In painting his " 1814," Meissonnier was found by a friend on the turret of his chalet at Poissy seated in the war costume of Napoleon I. on a stuffed grey horse, and painting the figure of the Emperor as it was rendered by a large mirror that stood some distance from him. It was a bitterly cold day, with heavy snow falling and a foot of snow on the ground; yet the painter had been there for three hours, and was in a state of high excitement because he had found the right tone and true effect of Napoleon's coat against the sombre greys of the sky and the snowy carpet of the ground. A month later he was in his studio scraping out the

figure of Napoleon, to paint which he had endured so many hours of a freezing- temperature. It then transpired that an old servant of the Emperor, who had been with him in Russia, had seen the picture, and when pressed to tell if there was anything inexact in it had told Meissonnier that during the Russian campaign Napoleon had worn the uniform of the Chasseurs, not that of the Grenadiers, and that, moreover, he had never consented to have his epaulettes unfastened from his tunic. Therefore the painter began studying anew the uniform of the Chasseurs, the effect produced by the epaulettes under the overcoat, and so on, until he obtained the same perfection he had reached in the first portrait. It is devotion of this kind which goes to make the great master. In sculpture, the greatest Englishmen of tbe century have been Alfred Stevens and Joseph Edgar Boehm, while France to-day is singularly rich in sculpture. .Art in these colonies is promising. There is a strong band of enthusiastic devotees who are wrapped up in their art, and already there are indications of a distinct colonial school of painting, which the opening years of the next century will probably see an accomplished fact.