garding nature and art, and more especially the circumstances which led him to treat any particular subject, and his own feeling with regard to it. It is true that the pursuit of this investigation may lead to a painful amount of what is called disillusion; to know too much of what is behind a picture does not always tend to raise one's intellectual estimate of painting and painters. It is curious to find sometimes (in the case of landscape especially), in reference perhaps to a picture which seems to have a good deal of poetic feeling in it, how very matter-of-fact a business it has been to the painter of it, and that what has been to the outsider an appeal to his sentiment has been to the artist an experiment in the use of pigments to produce a certain effect; curious to think that a work, into the making of which no sentiment has gone, can evoke sentiment; but it certainly is so in many cases. It is strange, again, to find how very poor an order of intellectual perception in other respects may co-exist with the power to produce pictures which have high intellectual interest, as if the painter's intellect went all into the picture and found expression in no other way.' In short, there is a great deal of hollowness in the pretensions often set up as to the high claims of the artist on society, and his position as a kind of superior being. A great deal of the painting of the day is really only a kind of business, requiring more adroitness, painstaking, and application (let that always be admitted) than most other businesses. There are painters no doubt, some living and some whose biographies are before us, to whom painting was an art to be gone into in a serious spirit and with high aims. There are some, on the other hand, to whom it seems to be a kind of joke, wherewith they amuse themselves and mystify or befool the public.

We are not going at this date, of course, to review, in the ordinary

1 This, as every one knows, may be said with equal or even greater truth about musicians. Some of the greatest composers have been men of very little intellectual culture.

His

sense, the autobiography of Mr. Frith, which some ten years ago became, not undeservedly, in a sense, the book of the season; not undeservedly, for it is well written and contains ૧ great deal that is really amusing and interesting; a great many much finer artists could not have produced half so readable a book. But we refer to it here as a salient example or confession of that mere superficial and business view of painting to which we have referred. Mr. Frith's frankness is amusing, almost cynical. He laughs at the whole thing, and at himself into the bargain. He seems to have been perfectly conscious that he had no serious aim in painting, and content that every one should know it; he almost writes himself down a humbug. election as associate of the Academy seems to have been a kind of "fluke," and surprised no one more than himself-or so he gives us to understand. Even the curiously scrambling course of instruction at the atelier of the eccentric Mr. Sass bored him; "perspective bewildered me, and to this day I "know little or nothing about that dreadful science, and anatomy and I parted after a very short and early acquaintance;" and he goes on to say that in the kind of art he has practised very little anatomy is required, a dictum which can only be accepted in a sense which the author of the observation would probably find rather objectionable. A few pages further on, indeed, in the course of some sensible remarks in regard to the "well-meaning objectors" to female models, observing that many artists draw every figure

2 He is perhaps in better company than he is aware of here. We have heard the confession from much more distinguished artists that they could not tell how to put a building in perspective; one very eminent artist admitted that he had to get a model made of the interior of a columned temple before he could tell how to get the columns in their right place; yet it is a very simple matter, much easier than foreshortening an arm. Perspective, in fact, is a science; foreshortening is an art. If painters do not understand perspective, it is only because they have not taken the trouble, as any one can learn it even without being an artist.

naked before they clothe it, he adds, "I did so for years, and ought "to do so now;" the meaning of which frank admission is, we presume, that the painter had at last got the length of his public's foot, and discovered that the qualities they looked for in his pictures might be provided without any such thorough figure-designing. On the other hand, he worked very hard and conscientiously at providing the public with the kind of art they wanted. The autobiography shows, indeed, a continual history of painting pursued with no higher aim than to find and work out subjects which would be popular with the masses; but no trouble was spared in such preliminary study as was necessary to turn the thing out well, and a great deal of hard work lay behind the "Derby Day" and "Ramsgate Sands." The former is a picture which, however vulgar in the artistic existence. sense, justifies its The "Derby," as a national function, merited being put on record in painting. Mr. Frith was just the painter cut out for the subject, and he unquestionably spared no pains to do his best with it. But in mentioning, with a satisfaction which may be either real or cynical, the repeated occasions on which a rail had to be put in front of his picture at the Academy to protect it from the crowd (an honor which befell him three or four times), he does not seem to be quite alive to the fact that these railings testified not so much to the greatness of his works as to the littleness (artistically) of the average Academy sightseers. He had supplied the crowd with the kind of picture they most de lighted in, and been at some trouble to gratify their taste; and he had his reward. Sometimes, however, the national taste was too much even for Mr. Frith. He writhed under the terrible title, "Sherry, Sir?" appended by some dealer to the engraving of what is really a pretty enough little work of its kind, and once petitioned for it to be re moved, but was met by the reply, "Why, sir, it is just the title that sells

it." There is a Nemesis in wait for artists who cultivate the mob.

Mr. Marks is a painter of a different calibre from Mr. Frith. Within his own lines he is a perfect executant, never careless or superficial, and in his art at all events he has evinced a keen sense of humor, a quality which Mr. Frith has never been within measurable distance of. Under what ill-advised misapprehension did he undertake to dip his reputation in the inkbottle? He exonerates his friends: "Whatever else may be said of this work, I can confidently declare that it was neither written with the remotest idea of supplying a want long felt, nor undertaken at the solicitation of enthusiastic friends." Was the ignis fatuus the vision of a publisher's cheque? Or was it merely the motive which Burns ingenuously confesses

Some rhyme a neebor's name to lash, Some rhyme (vain thought!) for needfu' cash,

Some rhyme to court the kintra clash,
An' raise a din;

For me, an aim I never fash

I rhyme for fun.

This last seems the most probable explanation; the book is a joke, but the result goes to prove that an artist may be really humorous on canvas and yet degenerate into a very commonplace joker in print. Worse than that, he has sacrificed along with himself a greater painter, Frederick Walker, who, with no sense of humor at all in his paintings, which are almost uniformly grave and even melancholy in sentiment ("The Bathers" is an exception certainly), seems to have leaned in private life towards a kind of larking in which the reader finds very little wit. One page in Mr. Marks's book is headed "Walker's Sense of Humor." What Walker's and Mr. Marks's sense of humor amounted to may be gathered from the following account of their amusement on the occasion of a hollday up the river:

proceeded to get ourselves up as if we Once fairly out of Waterloo Station, we had been severely injured in some football or cricket match, or other athletic sport. When we alighted at Walton, one had a

patch over his eye, one walked lamely with two sticks, another with one; there were some arms in slings. I bought a quartern loaf and Crowe a plum-cake. Leslie and Walker, playing on tin whistles, headed the procession of cripples, which walked, limped, and hobbled into Shepperton. Though amused and puzzled, the people we met or passed refrained from chaff or jeers.

It does not seem to have occurred to

Mr. Marks that the population of Shepperton in this respect contrasted rather favorably, in the matter of good taste, with himself and his comrades.

One old lady, however, who saw through our shamming, reproved us by saying, "Ye ought to be ashamed of yourselves-you might be struck so!" When we got to a convenient place the whistles ceased playing, and I addressed the natives, assuring

them that I was to be member for the borough at the next election, and when that happy day arrived the quartern loaf, such as I showed them, would be greatly reduced in price-in fact, all but given away. Crowe then cut up the plum-cake, and distributed the slices among the assembled children. . . . On the return journey, at each station we stopped (sic) I harangued the people, asking, among other questions, if there were "any lady or gentleman for

the diving-bell." The guard came up to our carriage, and, addressing me, said, "Well, sir, you are a cure."

After this example of artistic "humor," which a Royal Academician in his mature years thinks it worth while to put on record in print for the edification of the world at large, is it not time that we revised the fashion of regarding to reartists, and encouraging them gard themselves, as constituting a kind of intellectual aristocracy?

The beautifully got up volume of the "Life and Letters of Frederick Walker" contains nothing, we are glad to say, of that sort; the letters in fact are entirely unobjectionable in tone, but un、 fortunately that is all there is to say about them, and the book forms a notable example of the curious disfound between the crepancy to be painter as we know him on canvas and the painter behind the scenes. Frederick Walker's genius as a painter,

Of

1

ex

one

especially when we compare the tent and quality of his achievements with the brief limit of his life, it is perhaps hardly possible to think too highly. It may be said that every picture he painted made its mark; he could not do anything commonplace, whatever subject he treated was invested with a poetic suggestiveness peculiar to himself. Among his smaller works there is no better example of this than a little water-color, not as well known as many of his works, entitled "The Thunderstorm." What was it which answered to that title? Not a landscape with a black cloud and the regulation flash of lightning, might be sure. It was the interior of a small drawing-room in a country house, with a young girl and a child, with their backs to the spectator, planted at the window and evidently gazing fixedly out of it. It was strangely effective; one felt as if one were looking out at the thunderstorm along with the children. That was a typical example of Walker's way of mingling human interest with nature; it was not the thunderstorm per se, but the thunderstorm as an awe-inspiring spectacle for the child, that took the painter's fancy; it may be said that half the poetry of the work lay in the title. It is mentioned in the "Life" that he was very particular and hard to satisfy as to the titles of his pictures. The admirable and suggestive title of "The Harbor of Refuge" he owed to a friend, and signalized his satisfaction with it by dancing round the studio. This feeling as to the importance of the title showed a true poetic instinct. A well-chosen and significant title is a key to the artist's mental attitude in regard to the work, and may make all the difference in the mental attitude of the spectator in examining it.

Walker's power of combining the sentiment of the figures with the sentiment of the scene, so as to make them

1 We do not know where this picture is. We saw it once only, many years ago, in one of the minor exhibitions-very likely it was the exhibition of Walker's collected works in Deschamps' gallery in 1876-but it left an ineffaceable impression.

both go home to the heart as with one impression, was one of the most remarkable characteristics of his art. The peculiar feeling which he imparted to his combinations of landscape and figures may be said to have been a new word in art. Of idyllic paintings we had had many; landscapes with two lovers, landscapes with a pretty girl at a stile, landscapes with cattle, and so on. But with Walker the idyll assumed a pathetic, even a tragic, meaning. "The Plough" was perhaps his masterpiece in this class of work. The melancholy landscape with its waning light is only the duplicated expression of the pathos expressed in the weary figure of the ploughman, almost leaning for support on the handles of the plough at the close of an exhausting day's labor. The figures and the landscape are one poem; each element would lose nearly all of its effect apart from the other; and the title, simple as it is, is full of significance in its form. If the picture had been called "Ploughing," a title often used for landscapes which afford no other suggestion for a specific classification, the point would have been much weakened. "The Plough" puts the abstract for the concrete; it is the symbolic instrument of human toil-"In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread." Walker would perhaps not have expressed this in so many words, either to himself or to any other person, but his poetic instinct was in it. The same indefinable affinity between the landscape and the fig ures, the same suggestive generality in the title, is seen in such pictures as "The Vagrants," and "Wayfarers," and "Mushroom Gatherers." Each is an aspect of the pathos or tragedy of life defined in subject by the figures, and heightened in expression by the landscape. We have had nothing in art quite like this before. The nearest to it, before Walker, was to be found in some of the landscape conceptions, either with or without figures, by that fine and much neglected and underrated artist, Poole. In his landscape entitled "The Dragon's Cave," without any figure either human or draconian,

there was a menace of terror; in "The Lion in the Path," where a man in the foreground sees a lion in the distance, the whole landscape and sky seem to be associated with the threatening danger. But Poole's figures were bad; they were symbols of what was intended rather than studies of types of humanity, and we are not suggesting that he was a painter to be compared with Walker; he was moreover very unequal; but his finest works show a power of suggesting human sentiment by means of landscape which never received the recognition it merited.

In "The Harbor of Refuge," the combination is formed of ancient buildings and figures, and the main point is the contrast between the vigor of youth and strength and the decrepitude and pathos of old age. The extraordinary and dramatic power with which the contrast is illustrated produced an immense effect the year the work appeared at the Academy, and we believe many persons regard it as Walker's finest production-it is certainly his most popular one; but in our opinion it is just open to the charge of being a little overdone and too dramatic; the attitude of the mower also is certainly somewhat open to criticism, and the prominence of the figure makes this defect of importance; and on the whole we do not consider it as fine, as complete a work, as "The Plough," or one likely to retain its hold so long. some respects we are inclined to regard "The Bathers" as Walker's central production, and we have always regretted on this account that it was not the one selected for purchase for the National Gallery. The translation of an incldent from the common life of his day into a picture of almost Greek beauty and elevation of style is a feat as rare as it is remarkable, and such a picture from the life of his own day would have been a very fitting work by which to represent the painter in the national collection. How instructive, too, if it could have been hung next to the "Derby Day," as an artistic and social contrast!

In

The unfortunate painting, as Walker

Bar," the only life-size figure subject, as far as we remember, that he exhibited, though perhaps hardly an attractive work, had a considerable importance, for it served as an indication, at all events, of what the artist might have achieved in figure subjects on a large scale. Had his life been spared to the orthodox threescore and ten, there is no imagining what Walker might not have accomplished in painting; great as his executed works are, he was really only just beginning a career at the time of his death. And yet of all this intellectual power and poetry which comes out in his pictures, there is not a trace in the letters or in any anecdotes (of which there are in fact very few) that are related of him. The author has mainly allowed Walker to tell his own story, for the bulky volume consists almost entirely of the painter's own letters, linked together by a few connecting words; but the fact is there is no story to tell. The letters are for the most part What absolutely uninteresting. we wanted was a small biography just to give us the main facts as to Walker's life and character; for the rest let his pictures speak. In a note quoted in the book Mr. Calderon says of him, "Walker never expressed an opinion about anything, or joined in any discussion whatever;" and that is just what one would gather from his letters; they express nothing characteristic whatever, except an occasional From peevishness and irritability.

hints here and there we are able to put together the idea of a personality not without interest; a small but very wellformed figure, a melancholy and abstracted countenance, a character marked by acute shyness and sensitiveness and a passionate rebellion against anything mean or petty. For the rest one must go to his pictures; except that the vein of "humor" which Mr. H. S. Marks, as observed, claims for him, does come out in some of the pen sketches reproduced in the volume. His sketch of Thackeray with his back to you, an early effort made in answer

he could draw," is wonderfully good and quite recognizable as Thackeray; the sketch (page 111) in his own studio, with the dealer, with his cheque-book sticking out of his pocket, contemplating the picture, and the artist standing by in an embarrassed attitude, is humorous and pathetic at the same time; and the celebrated drawing of "Captain Jinks in his steam launch the Selfish, enjoying himself with his friends," and upsetting every one else on the river, which was contributed to Punch is a capital bit of satire.1

It is perhaps a question whether Walker's rustic figures were not too much idealized. One of the few interesting points in Mr. H. S. Marks's book is a letter from Ruskin in reply to a request that he would put on paper some record of his impressions of Walker's art in connection with the posthumous exhibition of the artist's works. The letter seems to have been written rather in a temper (no unusual occurrence, certainly, in Mr. Ruskin's correspondence), but, while showing a great deal of sympathy with and reverence for Walker's genius, it suggests criticisms which are worth consideration, though at too much length to quote. Some remonstrances as to his attitude drew from him, however, second letter in which he puts one point succinctly in regard to a suggested comparison between Walker:

a

Frère and

I wrote of Frère, first, "he had the simplicity of Wordsworth." Well, he lived in a village, loved it, and painted what he saw there. (Hook has done something of the kind, though not so faithfully, for Clovelly.) But you do not suppose there is any simplicity in Walker! All those peasants of his are got up for the stage. Look at the flutter of that girl's apron under the apple-tree. Look at the ridiculous mower, galvanized-Elgin in his attitude (and the sweep of the scythe utterly out of drawing). You do not suppose that flock of geese is done simply? It is

1 It is said that the person aimed at in this drawing received three copies of Punch' by post the day after it appeared.