June 9, 1882. 



♦ KNOV/LEDGE 



p^ MAG^^INE OF SqENCE ^ 



^PlAINIlifORJED -EXACTL^DESCRIBED, 



LONDON: FRIDAY, JUNE 9, 1882. 



Contents of No. 32. 



The Grosrenor Gallery _ 



EDglish Seaside Heallh Besorts. 

 Bj- Alfred Uariland. Classifica- 



Antiqnitj of Man in Western 

 Europe. BvE.Clodd. Part III. 



Crrstals. Br'AVilliam Jago.F.C.S., 

 A«30C. Inst. Chem. Xo. HI. 

 (JlltutraUJ) 



Nighta with a Three-Inch Telescope. 

 Br •■ A FfUow of the Roval Astro- 

 nomical Society" {IHus'trateJ) ... 



Photographv for" Amateurs. Bt A. 

 Brothers, "F.R.A.S. Part IX. ... 



Weather Charts 



Butterflies and Moths. By W. J. 



H.Clark 24 



EasT Lessons in Blowpipe Chemistry. 

 Bt Licut.-Colonel W. A. Ross, 



UteR.A. Lesson VI 23 



The Babylonian Calendar 26 



Siemens on Solar Energy 27 



Correspondence '- 2S 



Answers to Correspondents 29 



Our Mathematical Column 3''> 



Out Whist Column 31 



Our Chess Column 31 



THE GROSVENOR GALLERY. 



A FOREIGNER who should take a hasty glance through 

 the Grosveuor Gallery might at first suppose it was 

 intended as a place of refuge for works of art (Heaven save 

 the mark !) which elsewhere would be regarded as insults 

 to the public. Looking more carefully through the collec- 

 tion, he would find many charming works manifestly placed 

 here for their excellence, not for the grossness of their 

 defects. It would probaVily remain a mystery to him how 

 works so unlike in character came to be side by side in 

 the same collection, did not some English friend tell him of 

 the idiocies of the lesthetic school of art, and of the insolt^nt 

 madness of that school of which Mr. Whistler is the most 

 peccant — we wish we could say, the only— representative. 



In the early youth of painting (passing over the Egyptian, 

 Greek, and ancient Roman schools, of whose works we know 

 very little), artists had crude ideas of drawing and colour- 

 ing, they knew very little of perspective and anatomy, 

 and they had scarce any models worth copying. They had, 

 as children have, a taste for bright colours ; and they pos- 

 sessed what children, as a rule, do not possess, the power 

 of depicting beautiful colours, though in inharmonious 

 combinations. Thus we find in their paintings imperfect 

 perspective, angular figures, impossible bones and muscles, 

 unwholesome complexions, and gaudy ornamentation — but, 

 occasionally, very beautiful tints. Of aercal perspective 

 the early painters knew simply nothing — or, if they knew 

 anything, they made not the slightest attempt to apply 

 their knowledge. 



The paintings of the early schools are therefore neces- 

 sarily defective, and so far as general effect is concerned, 

 they are, for the most part, in the artistic as well as ordinary 

 sense, simply hideous. But they are full of interest 

 Moreover, scarcely one of the paintings by the ablest of 

 the early painters fails to show here and there features 

 which, considered iiioni', are of exquisite beauty. The 

 charm of antiquity appeals to us as we study tliese ancient 

 paintings. The practised eye can see in them also the 

 germs of the noble works of the great painters who came 

 afterwards. In every national collection these old paint- 

 ings have a place of honour ; every student of art ex- 

 amines them with loving care ; and if occasionally there 



is something of the feeling with which we look over a 

 portfolio of pictures by a child, if there is sometimes a 

 sense of amused wonder at the quaintness of the concep- 

 tions and the inadequacy of their rendering, the feeling is 

 softened, much as when, looking at pictures by a child 

 who is dead, the thoucjht comes to us that his tiny fingers 

 never learned to hold pencil or brush with firmness and 

 vigour, that he was never more than the child-artist. 



And because men of sense and of artistic skill study 

 with love and tenderness these quaint old beginnings of 

 modern art, there " come you in " certain idiots, hoping to 

 beguile us of our esteem by copying the defects of those 

 beloved old masters who tlourished during the childhood of 

 painting. As if some inane noodle of middle age should take 

 the grotesque drawings of a child, and copy all their absur- 

 dities, these imbeciles of the present day (when art, though 

 it should at least have reached its full manhood, ought not 

 to be in second childhood) carefully picture sickly, ill-shaped 

 beings, in impossible attitudes (they call them mediwval, 

 but people in the middle ages were not all crippled and de- 

 formed), adorned with tawdry, ill-arranged frippery, and 

 wanting even what the quaint old pictures possessed, occa- 

 sional touches of beautiful colouring, and occasional bits of 

 effective drawing. 



Take, for instance, " The Feast of Peleus," by E. Bume 

 Jones, Xo. 1.^7 (East Gallery). For what earthly reason 

 is a long-su tiering public to be insulted by a picture in 

 which the Laughter-Loving Goddess of Beauty is represented 

 as a high-shouldered, hideous sksieton 1 and in which tho 

 two rival goddesses who claim the apple (marked by Discord 

 " for the fairest !") are as ugly and dyspeptic as their dreary 

 rivaU — uglier they could hardly be. There was some 

 excuse for a Ghirlandajo or a Botticelli who represented a 

 saint as one who had lived an ascetic life — in other 

 words, as a pale, half-starved weakling. But there is not 

 common sense or even decency in picturing these wan 

 and wasted wretches as " the three great goddesses who 

 claimed the golden apple as the prize of beauty." In the 

 "Tree of Forgiveness,"' by the same (No. 144) we are 

 pained perhaps more by the oftensiveness of the sub- 

 ject (in an artistic sense) than by the hideous com- 

 plexions and expressions (we say nothing about the utterly 

 incorrect proportions of Demophoon's chest, belly, and 

 limbs, seeing that the painters of this school must be all 

 wrong anatomically, or they would not be media>val). A 

 lady who had been an almond tree for a while might have 

 such a colour (for aught we know), and a man upon whom 

 such a creature suddenly sprang out might be excused for 

 wearing a very uncomfortable expression. But Venus 

 Aphrodite sick and sorry, worn, wan, and wasted, we 

 really " cannot away with.' Of the three ladies in "The 

 Mill" (No. 175), by the same painter, we can only say 

 that they are suggestive rather of stale rhubarb than of 

 faint lilies; and a similar remark applies to the Angel with 

 complicated wings in No. 292, whose melancholy expres- 

 sion by no means accords with the usual ideas respecting 

 angelic happiness. 



It is, indeed, easy to fall into a way of lightly ridiculing 

 this absurd school. But their offences merit more serious 

 chastisement than mere ridicule. The mischief such paint- 

 ings do is very serious. Among the inexperienceil they 

 create utterly false tastes. They are not only bad in them- 

 selves: they are bad in their indirect influence. They 

 kill men's love for tho works of the old paintert. If there 

 are any who have done more than otliers to dt^stroy our 

 appreciation of those works, to make tiiem positively hate- 

 ful and disgusting to us, instead of intei-esting and delight- 

 ful (as rightly viewed they should be), it is their so called 

 followers, who admire them for their defects, carefully 



