It is probable that no modern manual of polite conversation has ventured to omit from its list of topics recommended to social beginners the question whether or not the Academy is better this year than last; and the subject is undoubtedly one of legitimate public interest. The Royal Academy is first and foremost a national institution, like the Poet Laureateship or the Derby. It is the means which our country has chosen to acknowledge the existence and the importance of the graphic arts; and the ordinary man of good will pays his annual visit to its exhibition in the spirit in which he goes to the Boat Race, or has a bet on the favourite at Epsom. Compared with the Academy, the minor societies and one-man shows are holes and corners – deep holes, perhaps, leading down into the heart of things, or sunny and sequestered corners where the fruits of art may ripen. They are the nurseries of experiment and transition; and in an ideal world the Academy would watch the growth of each new tendency and, if it made good, adopt it at the fitting moment into her family.
In an ideal world, moreover, the advancing artists would lend themselves to the process, and gracefully accept the judiciously belated overtures of the great mother when these came. Thus the enormous resources and prestige of the Academy would not be wasted on the extremes of either traditionalism or novelty-hunting; the ugly ducklings would in due season take their place as swans; and the general public taste would broaden slowly up from President to President. But the world is well known not to be ideal, and the benign process which I have tried to imagine is in practice patchy and jerky. One year the Academy will make a grab at eccentricity, and the next recoil into over-orthodoxy. On the other side those of the progressive artists who accept adoption seem to lose interest and cease to play up; while others, whose absence is deplorable and even comic, are still, whether by their own default or the Academy’s, outside the fold.
Surely it is more than time – to take a few names at random – that Mr Duncan Grant, Mr Matthew Smith, and Mr Arthur Nash should be among those exhibitors their country puts foremost year by year. But ‘these thoughts full counsel must mature.’ To go back to my initial question, how this exhibition compares with its predecessors, I think the answer must on the whole be favourable. The general level of competent workmanship is probably higher than ever. Secondly, there are very few of those elaborate and too meaningful allegorical or other contraptions by which a certain type of would-be artist demonstrates the fallacy about genius and taking pains. Coming to particulars, there is one case which must at once be squarely faced. I am told on all hands that Mr Stanley Spencer is an artist of the highest endowment and of the most indubitable sincerity, and that in portraiture, in landscape and in religious painting he has given proof of his quality. But I am not to be intimidated even by what Anatole France calls ‘the fear of offending against Beauty unknown’ into praising, or acquiescing in, the present representation of his talents. Milton’s Sin is at any rate provided with an explanation why ‘with fear and grief Distorted all my nether parts thus grew Transformed’; but these misshapen figures, ‘abortive, monstrous or unkindly mixed’, more fit for Limbo than for the English countryside, are given nothing to say for themselves. The predicaments in which they are exhibited are as unaccountable as their structure.
The work in which it is easiest to recognize Mr Spencer’s gift is the ‘Portrait’, which gives us a rugged and powerful design, and fine and searching draughtsmanship, though even here some parts of the face look as if they had been studied under a stronger magnifying glass than the rest. But if it be true, as a distinguished critic has hinted, that fifty years hence these paintings will be recognized as the heralds of a new dawn, we may surely congratulate ourselves on our present twilight. Just as we shall never know if the one improper joke in Liddell and Scott’s Greek Lexicon was intentional or inadvertent, we may continue to speculate whether or not the Hanging Committee saw the humour of two of their collocations. The visitor who learns from his catalogue that No. 75 is ‘Combing her Hair’ will be irresistibly tempted to rechristen its neighbour No. 73 ‘Combing her Hare’; and is it by accident that we find Mr Monnington’s ‘Lord Jellicoe’ averting a furtive gaze from the flashing and contumelious eye which Mr Cowan Dobson’s ‘Lord Beatty’ is directing upon him from the opposite wall?
Mr Monnington’s other portrait, ‘Mr Baldwin’, has great dignity, and is an excellent likeness, except that the head seems a little too small. The gold embroideries on the gown are painted with mediaeval precision. Mr James Gunn has not yet eclipsed the masterly presentment of three writers which made a sensation two years ago. His ‘Lord Lee of Fareham’ is overwhelmed in the eye-piercing splendour of his lordship’s robes, but his ‘James Pryde Esq.’ is an imposing work with a nearer approach to pleasing colour than he usually compasses. The veteran Sir John Lavery is to be warmly congratulated on the inexhaustible vigour of his contributions. His ‘Prime Minister at Lossiemouth’ is a charming conversation piece, and ‘Miss Diana Dickinson’ is full of grace and life.
Mr Sickert’s ‘Sir James Dunn’ could only be the work of a master. Miss Cathleen Mann’s ‘Prince George’ is distinguished among royal portraits by its combination of character with sensitive handling. Mr Gerald Kelly is developing a delightfully intimate style of portraiture in which the sitter is shown among the properties of his business; his ‘Sir Almroth Wright’, in particular, looks as happy among his rows of test-tubes and bottles as Pip thought Mr Pumblechook must be from having so many little drawers in his shop. Mr Meredith Frampton’s wise and stately ‘Bishop of Exeter’ is a true pillar of the Church, and Mr Victor Hammer’s tempera self-portrait is a notable design carried out in an original and consistent colour-scheme. There is a pleasant touch of humour in Mr Neville Lewis’s masterly ‘Henry Rushbury’, and a pallid grace in Mr Neville Lytton’s ‘Les Toits de Paris’.
I am sorry not to be able to congratulate Dame Laura Knight on the account to which she has turned her opportunity of painting the Duchess of Rutland; but Mr Henry Lamb has filled his picture of his wife with palpitating colour and life. Miss Ethel Walker’s ‘Melody’ and ‘Spanish Gesture’ are fine examples of an artist whose reputation is rapidly overtaking her merits. Sir William Rotherstein’s ‘Two Students’ beautifully combines the suave and the austere, and Mr A. K. Lawrence’s series of men is crowned by an attractive and well-ordered family group. Mr Rex Whistler’s skied portrait of the Misses Dudley Ward has a charm and solidity of its own, apart from its merits as a revival of a bygone mode.
I have only skimmed the portraits, but now I must turn to the landscapes. I cannot understand why no greater fuss is made about the noble scenes that Mr Oliver Hall tinges with a consistency of tenderness and melancholy which yet never degenerate into monotony. In each of his pictures, as the eye reaches them, it finds a point of rest and satisfaction. Mr Terrick Williams is another artist who paints from one palette, of greys and blues and greens, but every time with a new delicacy and delight. His loveliest piece here is ‘Sun and Mist, Mousehole’, which gives the essence of all fair-weather dawns on boat-ridden harbours. Mr Arnesby Brown is, as always, a standby and a mainstay of the show. There is a questionable passage in his ‘Round Tower’ – a cloud with which Hamlet might have puzzled Polonius; it is ‘very like a field’. Mr Munnings pleases me most with his delicate white-and-brown snow piece, ‘Winter at Flatford’. His two ‘Troopers, Scots Greys, 1807’, adapted from contemporary painted statuettes, are an amusing but, I think, not quite successful experiment: the vivid setting of actual warfare in which he has placed them conflicts too violently with the spick-and-span uniforms, fresh from the tailors, which were appropriate to his models. There are some admirable townscapes. Mr Charles Cundall’s ‘Piccadilly Circus’ shows the same skill in the marshalling of detail as his ‘Derby Day’. Mr Henry Bishop charmed me with the simplicity and clarity of his ‘Sky and Roofs, Durham’; and Mr Algernon Newton, in his ‘Townscape’, suffuses a dreary scene with the consecration of serene light which is his secret magic.
I cannot end these brief and partial notes without paying tribute to two lamented artists whose works are among the illustrations of the exhibition: Robert Bevan, whose ‘Horse Sale at the Barbican’ is a feather in the cap of the Chantrey Trustees, and Annie Swynnerton, whose genius, displayed in four examples, shines forth most brightly in the enchanting ‘Gipsy Girl’. But the general impression of the exhibition is exhilarating. No one who visits this year’s Academy will spend his time there without pleasure and instruction.