The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎592v] (75/239)

44
A MORNING IN THE GALLERIES.
imaginative. As Tennyson said, you might write a very correct
Wordsworthian line—A Mister Wilkinson, a clergyman—but this
is not poetry. An old man with sticks, a sailor boy in a boat, a
girl feeding a bird, are honest facts, which yon may honestly
paint but they don’t make a picture. Millet’s Angelus has gone
round the world, because it is more than an old peasant and his
wife. It is a solemn and pathetic poem. To make a work of art
something more than ‘values’ is wanted.”
It seems to me that the essential point to insist upon nowa
days is the subject of a work of art,” said I. “ Many of these
subjects that one can see on a road or a farm any day may be
worth painting in small, on a canvas 16 x 10 inches. When it
comes to life-size, on a canvas 60 x 48 inches, as a great gallery
work, it is taking it all too seriously. Everything you see, painted
as you see it, true to nature in lights, values, and surfaces, may
be an honest piece of handiwork, but it is not art. Your ‘ Mister
W ilkinsons, in or out of the pulpit, bore us. Your beggar-boys,
and sheep-cots, and sandhills may be perfectly true, but utterly
tedious. I nless you can show us some memorable thing, some
impressive trait in your beggar, your sheep, or your sand, we do
not want you to labour the matter further. And then, how sadly
the habit of exhibitions reacts upon the painter. He thinks what
will amuse the summer visitor, not what will rejoice the heart
to be upon our walls. One of the cleverest pictures of the year,
which attracts a crowd all day by its admirable life, its ingenious
telling of a complex story, by its intense ‘ modernity,’ as the slang
goes, would hardly be a pleasant work to hang over one’s dinner-
table, on so large a scale, to be looked at day after day, day and
night. One s guests would ask, as they sat down to dinner—
' Well! who is she? ’ And there would be whispers all round.
he curse of exhibitions is that they encourage painters to labour
out silly japes of their own, incidents picked out of Tit-bits, to
attract mammas by some baby nonsense, and to attract girls by
mawkish sentiment. There will always be a lot of poor stuff
whiW ^ inters f t ^ nk ou 'y of their palettes, and not of their minds ;
whilst they get their ideas out of trashy novels, comic plays, and
eiy poems. Painters want cultivated brains as well as nimble
goto'luncheon.’ ^ Wa ' k r ° Und the National before we
Frederic Harrison.