ART REVIEW : SOME PAINTINGS WORTH THOUSANDS OF WORDS

When Sir Joshua Reynolds’ “Portrait of Mrs. Edwin Lascelles” went up in smoke in the October fire at the Huntington Art Gallery, a wonderful little exhibition of “British Narrative Drawings and Watercolors, 1660-1880” very nearly perished too. The show was scheduled to open in the changing exhibitions gallery of Henry E. Huntington’s stately old home but, with the building closed for extensive cleanup and renovation, there was suddenly nowhere to put it.

Until Susan Walther, assistant curator of American art, stepped in. She pushed back her exhibition schedule at the Huntington’s Virginia Steele Scott Gallery and inserted the British presentation, organized by Associate Curator Shelley M. Bennett. Twenty-two examples from the Huntington’s collection of about 13,000 British drawings are installed there through March 30.

Twenty-two of 13,000? Now there’s a boggling reduction of volume. Bennett accomplished it by concentrating on storytelling works and by choosing a representative cross section.

Narrative art--long out of favor but now enjoying a Post-Modern revival--has a special problem: It attempts to represent a time span in a form that is static. Its audience doesn’t sit down in a movie house or curl up with a book, intending to spend the necessary amount of time with it. Instead, the pictures must deliver their story almost instantly, in visual portrayals of action. This can be done with serial images or in sequential book illustrations, but each frame still attempts to cover more time than is customary in one picture.

In the Huntington show, each work stands alone--and for larger historical event, anecdote, fantasy, legend or fable. As Bennett explains in the catalogue, “The choice of moment portrayed visually is critical. It must be a pregnant, meaningful moment which is suggestive of past and future actions.”

In a bizarre watercolor called “Dymphna Martyr,” Richard Dadd accomplishes that feat by portraying Dymphna (the patron saint of the insane) about to have her head cut off by her father (an Irish pagan king who wanted to marry her) while an angel flies above her. The artist thus merges the saint’s life before and after death in a work executed while he himself was incarcerated in a mental institution.

The artists didn’t have to be crazy to create these conceptually complicated drawings, but they did have to muster an unusual variety of forces in their efforts. Walter Crane, for example, offers a literal clue to his illustration of “The Goose Girl” by incorporating a verse in the elaborately drawn frame around his ink drawing of the fairy tale.

Thomas Stothard tells the story of “Lovelace’s Dream” by matching a concrete dreamer with ethereal dreamees--a childlike woman and her angelic aides who hover above the mere mortal. Thomas Rowlandson calls on our knowledge of lechery and bawdy wit to fill in the details of a peg-legged English sailor romancing an enticing French prostitute.

For some artists, it was enough to conjure up a mood compelling enough to cause viewers to linger and infuse their own time into the artwork. Take Richard Doyle, who gives us an enchanting pen-and-watercolor interpretation of the Danish legend “The Altar Cup of Aagerup.” The hero on horseback charges through a forest crawling with trolls as he makes his getaway from the nasty little creatures who attempted to poison him with a New Year’s potion.

Henry Fuseli’s ink drawing of “Death of Cardinal Beaufort” recounts a scene from Shakespeare’s “Henry VI” with such high-contrast drama that you need not know the plot to sense the emotion. A shaft of light slices diagonally through the picture, as if to expose the guilty cardinal and the horror of those around him.

The most captivating works narrate improbable stories, but there are impressive sheets recalling sober historical events and often serving as studies for works in other media.

Benjamin West’s sketch for his “The Death of the Earl of Chatham” painting records a 1778 session in the House of Lords, when Chatham collapsed as he rose to argue for retaining British troops in Colonial America. John Flaxman’s astonishingly intricate pen drawing of a battle scene from the “Iliad” is a design commissioned by a silversmith firm for a silver “Shield of Achilles.”

As the stories unfold and the works range from spare sketches to effusively developed expressions, this small exhibition seems to grow larger. Bennett has hit upon such an intriguingly complex theme that this one exhibition suggests dozens of more narrowly focused sequels. Maybe when the Huntington Art Gallery reopens?

In the meantime, you can read about the works at hand in an attractive and illuminating catalogue.