Summary
Wilde begins with a London May in which one could hear Rubenstein, see Wagner conduct and study art at the Grosvenor Gallery. Leaving music to others, he explains the gallery's origin: Sir Coutts Lindsay built it so that great living artists could be shown side by side, without 'Hanging Committees' or endless mediocre work, and so that the public could judge one great master whose pictures rival artists had kept from view. There are only three rooms, hung with scarlet damask over a green and gold dado, with velvet couches, flowers, Japanese china and globes of 'rainbow glass'.
He then sets out his three masters. Burne-Jones and Holman Hunt are the greatest colourists England has had except Turner: Hunt reproduces the colours of nature and paints real or historical scenes, mostly Eastern, while Burne-Jones is a dreamer of mythology and a symbolical painter, for whom colour is, in Pater's phrase, a spirit upon things. Watts has an originative genius that recalls Aeschylus and Michael Angelo. The first picture in the West Gallery is Watts's Love and Death: a veiled grey Death breaking through a jasmine-covered doorway while Love, a boy with rainbow wings, tries in vain to bar the way. Wilde ranks it with the Sistine ceiling.
Millais disappoints: three good likenesses of the Duke of Westminster's daughters, a seamstress from Hood's poem whose poverty jars against them, and a portrait of Lord Ronald Gower, none showing the genius of the Home at Bethlehem. Alma Tadema's eight pictures are accurate and subtly coloured, above all a tiny scene of Roman girls bathing, but his Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon paints the frieze in sombre un-Greek colours. Richmond's Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon lacks the passionate mourning of Aeschylus's Choëphori, though its Greek sky and flowers are true; Wilde has seen those flowers himself at Argos. Sir Coutts Lindsay's Daphne lacks the breathlessness of flight.
Holman Hunt is shown only in lesser work, chiefly the Afterglow in Egypt, superb in colour but without human interest. Albert Moore's women are fine studies in drapery. Spencer Stanhope's Eve Tempted, her gilded hair falling like the rain in which Zeus came to Danae, is one of the remarkable pictures of the gallery, and his Love and the Maiden leads Wilde into a passage on the adolescent beauty of the Greek islands, seen in Guido's St. Sebastian and in Correggio. Frederick Burton, of whom all Irishmen are proud, sends a water-colour portrait so rich it could be oils.
On the east wall hang Burne-Jones's three great pictures. Wilde quotes the Romance of Merlin as the source of the Beguiling of Merlin, then describes the pale, weary enchanter stretched on a hawthorn branch while Vivien, lithe as a snake in violet silk, reads the fatal spell. Were this his only work, it would make Burne-Jones a great painter. The Days of Creation shows angels holding crystal globes, their number and colour growing day by day, and the Mirror of Venus shows eight girls at a still pool, though it lacks the pathos of the Merlin.
Walter Crane's Renaissance of Venus is a vapid Venus after Swinburne, redeemed only by an apple tree in blossom. Legros's rapid heads for the Slade students are vigorous, but his colour is thin. Then come the 'most abused pictures' in the exhibition, Whistler's colour symphonies: a Nocturne in Black and Gold worth looking at as long as a real rocket, less than a quarter of a minute, and an Arrangement in Black No. 3 that is so like Henry Irving as Philip II that one almost laughs. Yet his portrait of Carlyle shows great power.
The East Gallery holds less. Leighton sends two small heads; Poynter paints Mrs. Burne-Jones drinking tea; Forbes-Robertson paints the Duchess of Westminster. Heilbuth sends charming Roman scenes of cardinals, and Tissot, over-dressed people and 'painfully accurate' soda-water bottles, though his Widower is full of depth. The sculpture is weaker than the Academy's, the water-colours mediocre.
Wilde concludes that this dull land of fogs, factories and 'vile deification of machinery' has still produced very great masters. Many great works, including Rossetti's, are missing, so he hopes for more exhibitions, which will aid the revival of culture that owes its birth to Ruskin and is kept alive by Swinburne, Pater, Symonds and Morris.