Aprit 26, 1872.
THE BUILDING NEWS. 329
THE BUILDING NEWS.
eet
LONDON, FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 1872.
FINE ART AT THE INTERNATIONAL
EXHIBITION OF 1872.
[pee present century is distinguished from
all past time by the multiplication to
an unprecedented extent of channels of infor-
mation. Learning has been more profound
and scholarship has been more polished ; elo-
quence and poetry have been more fervid in
other ages, and under other conditions than
those of the present day ; but the railway, the
‘telegraph, the printing-press, and the photo-
graphic camera have brought knowledge
within the reach of the million, and are fast
obliterating many of the apparently insur-
mountable barriers which distance, language,
and race oppose to universal intercourse.
Before the year 1851 it was essential, in
order to know what were the products of a
foreign country, to visit that country, travelits
length and breadth, learn its language, and
slowly master the nature of its soil, manu-
factures, arts, and industries. In that year,
for the first time, was seen the spectacle, so
many times intimated since, but with less bril-
liant success, of the products of all nations col-
lected side by side under one roof in friendly
rivalry. It was very possible to go often to
that display and learn little; but it was also
possible to gain information there in a few
days or even hours, which it would have cost
the painful and tedious labour of months to
acquire in the country itself.
In that Exhibition however, industry,
almost to the exclusion of fine art, was to
be studied. Subsequent gatherings of this
sort have happily embraced the arts in their
scope, and in the London Exhibition of ten
years ago, and in the two which have taken
place in Paris, it was quite possible to review
almost all the European schools of painting are
represented by a very complete collection of
choice examples.
We have now aseries of International Ex-
hibitions on foot at South Kensington, de-
signed to exhibit each year the products of a
few industries, as carried on throughout the
world; but also embracing an annual exhi-
bition of works of art. Jewellery and instru-
ments of music will this year take the place
which was a year ago occupied by earthen-
ware and porcelain. All the endless vavieties
of paper manufacture, and the wonderfully
varied applications of that material, will also
be displayed. Printing and paper-making
will oceupy the machinery department where
last year woollen fabrics were shown, and
we are to see cotton fabrics in place of educa-
tional appliances. In this way it is hoped, in
the course of ten years, to go through the
circle of the industrial arts and bring them
one after another before the public.
With this part of the scheme we have, how-
ever, but little concern at the present
moment, the fine art division being what
claims our immediate notice. It is, of course,
well that the scope and intention of the
industrial part of the Exhibition should be
understood, and as often as it includes manu-
factures or inventions which come within the
legitimate scope of the Buitpinc News, our
readers may rest assured that their attention
shall be directed to it, and that the objects
which they may find it profitable or pleasant to
examine shall be pointed out. Fine arts,
however, are to be exhibited annually, and
though by fine arts are meant not only paint-
ing, sculpture, and architecture, but all sorts
of applications of art to industry, the back
bone of the art exhibition is necessarily its
oil paintings. Tt is easy for us to see a great
deal of artistic work from foreign sources in
London show rooms; but, although a con-
siderable number of French and Flemish
pictures are now annually exhibited, nothing
like a good international display of the schools
of modern painting had ever been possible in
this country till the Exhibition of 1862. The
repetition of such a display has heen barely
possible in England until this year, and
we look forward with great interest to
the development of this portion of the
Exhibition scheme, which was in 1871 much
interfered with by the consequences of the
war. In many respects oil painting is, and
long has been, the most important of the
fine arts of Europe. It holds the place now
which fresco once held, and which earlier was
occupied by mosaic. ‘To have good speci-
mens of the principal schools of Europe
accessible through a summer, and to be able
to study them, ig to have a means of gaining
such information brought to our very dcors
as formerly it would have needed long and
painful journeys and much time and expense
to gain. If the arts are worth any study at
all this chance of studying the most popular
and important of them, as practised through
Kurope, is not to be neglected.
Tt is not, however, quite certain that even
a painstaking and careful visitor will take in
the whole import and meaning of the display
if he goes there without some special know-
ledge to supplement his general information
as to art and pictures. ‘There are many
reasons why the collection sent from any one
country may fail to represent the art of that
country with exactness. It may he excep-
tionally good or unusually defective, or it
may be tinged by the undue prominence of
one exhibitor. Even if it be a thoroughly
representative exhibition it is worth while
to inquire how the school or country in
question has arrived at the position of which
the collection exhibited seems to give token,
and if its fine arts are rising or on the decline,
stationary or rapidly changing. Has it,
we may ask, old traditions to go upon;
or is its work the result of new growth ?
These and many other questions require ;
some reply; and we propose, in direct-
ing attention to the fine art portions
of the International Exhibition of 1872
(painting, sculpture, and architecture), to
attempt to supply the answers to at least
some of them.
In any review of the fine arts, as practised
at the present day in Europe, the French
school must take a prominent place. France
has exerted a very striking influence over
the arts of the majority of the countries of
Europe. French painters have, by their
good technical training, their genius, and
their power, placed their school in the front
rank of modern art, and, notwithstanding
some serious defects to which their artists
are liable, they probably aim higher, and
succeed oftener than those of any other
country. A French painter has always had
an excellent training in the use of the palette
and the brush ; almost always he has the ad-
vantage of forming one of a host of students
who frequent the atélier of some prominent
master, and in many cases he enjoys a certain
amount of State patronage. The greatest
defect in his view of his subjects is that he
is ‘‘stagey.” The theatre and the opera are
too often the sources of his inspiration when
painting ideal or even historical subjects, and
even his landscape is very apt to resemble
scenery rather than areal scene. But when
a French painter rises above this, the beset-
ting weakness of his countrymen, his power,
whether he aims at fire and action, like
Vernet, at force and finish, like Geréme or
Meissonnier, or at simple pathos, like Frére,
is of the highest order. ‘The French school
has, perhaps, had greater painters than it at
present possesses, and now encourages, or at
least, tolerates extravagances which seem to
threaten its stability. An audacious treat-
ment of the nude, often verging on the
indecorous, and an equally audacious manage-
ment of colour and grouping, may be men-
tioned as among the defects which have been
the less to be regretted because of the many
high qualities which the school possesses.
In all probability the second place, if not
an equal rank—for on this opinions are
divided and will, perhaps, always remain so—
ought to be given to the painters of this
country, the rival of France in so many
lines of thought and action. Nothing can
better illustrate the contrast of the
national characcers than the contrast of
the two schools of painting. In train-
ing, by which we mean the academic
technical instruction and drilling, and the
atélier work, in which hardly any French
painter is deficient, the Englishman fails aj-
most invariably, and though there appears
from time to time something like a school,
in the restricted sense of the word, such as
that of the pre-Raphaelites, or that of the
Scotch landscape painters, there is little
continuance in it, and an intensely strong
independence marks the works of English
artists. A true eye for nature and a strong
love of her, a colouring often happy and
rarely forced or unnatural, and a keen relish
for national life, are leading characteristics of
the English school. History we rarely
attempt, and when we try it the works are
usually not much raised above the level ef
those pictures of incident and character
which from Hogarth downward have been
the happiest productions of English art.
Heroic size is rarely attempted, compared
with the large number of life-size composi-
tions which a French gallery will display;
and no wonder, considering that all the patrons
of art in this country are private individuals.
In landscape, though Turner and David Cax
have left no equals, they have left the tradi-
tions of a high reputation ; and the foremost
rank in this art would be ungrudgingly ae-
corded to our countrymen by most judges.
We have not space here to go through the
other schools of modern art except in the
most cursory manner. Belgium is rich in
painters who have obtained for her a high
reputation in historical art, and in afar lower
walk is equally pre-eminent—for repre-
sentations of modern life and manners, flimsy
in subject, but treated with extraordinary
skill in all technical points. Holland, in
many respects closely allied to Belgium, is
distinguished by the adherence of many of
her painters to the precedents of the old
Dutch school; highly finished pictures ef
homely scenes, landscapes, and cattle pieces
being their chief aim.
The countries where the fame of bygone
greatness has almost oppressed the painter
are Italy and Spain, and it has been cus-
tomary to expect little beyond the work of
the copyist from the artists of these
lands. But in both schools activity is pre-
vailing ; new influences are at work, and we
shall, in all probability, see that, while the
initiative of the French school can be very
largely traced, a decided and very promising
spirit of progress is manifest in both
countries.
German (including Austrian and Bavarian)
artists, are largely imbued with the spirit of a
school of artistic reformers among whom Over-
beck and Kaulbach are the most prominent
names, and who set themselves to restore the
practice of high art in their country. Perhaps
the traditions of the eclectic Italian historical
painters have been those chiefly preserved in
the German school; at any rate, the majority
of their historical and sacred subjects are
pedantic and academic rather than forcible,
aud even the leaders of the school cannot
altogether shake off the fetters of this kind
of formality, though they are capable of great
and masterly compositions. Switzerland,
chiefly remarkable for a few powerful and
highly finished landscape painters, and the
northern schcols of Scandinavia and Russia,
close the series. Atmong Scandinavian
pictures may be traced a strong affinity to
prominent of late years, and they are not| some portions of the work of the English
