Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/161

 Hall. Then there are people who hold that it corresponds to an essential yearning of the public heart; that it will become a permanent institution, pursue a glorious career, and reimburse the owner for the £100,000 it has cost him. I am unable to hold the scales on so momentous a question, and can only say that for the present the place is very pretty and elegant, and the pictures, in general, are very clever. A good many of them are from foreign hands, and it is interesting to see the work of continental artists in juxtaposition to that of Englishmen. A whole long wall in the first room is covered with the contributions of MM. Heilbuth and James Tissot, who are probably (with a single exception) the most brilliant members of the large colony of foreign painters established in London, and basking in the golden light, not of the metropolitan sky, but of British patronage. Tissot is a Belgian and Heilbuth is a sort of Gallicized German, whose specialty is Graeco-Roman "restorations." Both are extremely clever, but M. Tissot is perhaps more brilliantly so. He is a painter of modern manners, and he generally chooses a subject which it takes a kind of tour de force to render. One of his pictures represents a corner of the deck of one of the Queen's ships at Portsmouth, with two ladies and a young officer leaning over the side and looking down at a boat containing a party of their friends, which is putting off. They are women of high fashion, and dressed in garments which have come straight from Brussels; the one in front, in particular, who twists her perfect figure with the most charming gracefulness as she rests her elbows on the bulwark, and, with her head a little thrown back, smiles down lazily and luxuriously at her friends. She wears a dress of frilled and fluted white muslin, set off with a great number of lemon-colored bows, and its air of fitting her well, and, as the ladies say, "hanging" well, is on the painter's part a triumph of perception and taste. M. Tissot's taste is highly remarkable; what I care less for is his sentiment, which seems sterile and disagreeable. Like so many other pictures representing the manners of the day, his productions suggest a curious and, I confess it seems to me, an insoluble problem. What is it that makes such realism as M. Tissot's appear vulgar and banal when an equal degree of realism, practised three hundred years ago, has an inexhaustible charm and entertainment? M. Tissot's pretty woman, with her stylish back and yellow ribbons, will, I am convinced, become less and less charming and interesting as the years, or even the months, go on. Certain I am, at any rate, that I should not be able to live in the same room with her for a week without finding her intolerably wearisome and unrefreshing. This is not of necessity because she is dressed in the costume of a particular moment; the delicious Dutch painters, Terburg and Metsu, Mieris and Gerard Dow, dressed their ladies in the current fashions of their time, and we find their satin and silver, their velvet and swansdown, their quilted hoods, and their square-toed shoes, delightful still. The only thing I can say about it is that the realism of the Dutch painters seems soft, and that of such men as M. Tissot seems hard. His humor is trivial, his sentiment stale. Is there then to be no more delightful realism? I sometimes fear it.

M. Heilbuth is very real, and he is a good deal softer than his companion, but his Roman skies are strangely gray and cold, and his pictures have to an inordinate degree that deplorable look of being based upon photographs, which is the bane of so much of the clever painting of our day. The painters have used photographs so much in their work that the result is tainted by that hideous inexpressiveness of the mechanical document. You see that the picture has been painted by a short cut. But I have not the heart to bear too hardly on M.