PART II. BY

ALGERNON C. SWINBURNE.

“Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope.”--SHAKSPEARE.

LONDON:

JOHN CAMDEN HOTTEN, PICCADILLY.

(ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

The reader of this pamphlet will be apt to understand, from its very

arrangement, the fact that each of the writers speaks solely for

himself. Each chooses his own point of view, and expresses his own

opinion, and in his own way. If the opinions happen to diverge, it will

be for the reader to select, as he pleases, either or neither.

A. C. S.

W. M. R.

A person who undertakes to express to the public his opinion of any

such Exhibition as that of the Royal Academy is not unreasonably liable

to the imputation of presumption. For that imputation I am prepared; I

admit it to be, within certain limits, just; and must bear it as I may.

But there are two forms of possible and probable censure which I should

respectfully decline to accept as well bestowed.

The first is censure of a signed critical pamphlet, _rather than_

an unsigned newspaper or review article. The pamphlet expresses the

opinion of an individual: the article does or ought to do the same. So

far they stand on the same ground; anything which may be presumption

in the first is presumption in the second also. The difference is that

the first does, while the second does not, lay bare the writer to the

retorts of any person who may hold himself aggrieved: that may be more

open, more equitable, and more bold, but it is not more presumptuous.

The second form of misleading censure is that which makes a point of

reprobating omissions. The limits of this pamphlet, as to dimensions

and as to the time and facilities available for its preparation and

composition, are manifestly narrow. All that the writer professes is to

say straightforwardly whatever he does say: he by no means implies that

nothing else remains to be noted concerning the works of art commented

upon, nor that the works wholly omitted are undeserving of mention.

If anybody, therefore, tells me that the picture of A, of which

this pamphlet says nothing, merits criticism, or that the picture of

B, praised for colour, claims praise on the score of drawing also,

I shall have no difficulty in admitting the probable correctness of

these remarks; but, if he adds that I am blameable for the omissions, I

shall feel entitled to reply that A’s picture and B’s draughtsmanship

were not in the bond. What _is_ in the bond is liberty of selection

and candour of statement on my part: if my selection is stupid, or my

statement unfair or erroneous, be that the charge. Let the censure

concern itself with something wrong that _is_ done; not with something

right that might have been done.

W. M. R.

ROYAL ACADEMY EXHIBITION, 1868.

_PART I._

Some twenty years and more ago, the ingrained fault of the British

School of Painting was that it painted flimsy pictures. They were not

exactly sketchy, having little of either the merits or defects proper

to the phase of art termed sketching: pictures they were, but flimsy

pictures. Then came the thick-and-thin revolution of Præraphaelitism;

which aimed at treating substantial subjects, thinking them out deeply,

and painting them with abnormal thoroughness. That revolution scarcely

exists now otherwise than in its results: certain works executed

according to the principle in question, and representing it; many

others parodying or maiming the principle, and traducing it; a vast

number of works, still in course of active production, which owe their

genesis to the principle, but have metamorphosed it beyond recognition.

So that now we have come round to a condition of the school more

analogous to that of twenty years ago: only that the present staple

product is, instead of flimsy pictures, works executed with a valuable

reserve-fund of knowledge, efficiency, and material, but in the feeling

and with the aim proper to sketches. Critics have long been beseeching

for “breadth.” That is now supplied to them in handsome measure; but

it is found that breadth, like frittering, may overlie a considerable

surface of commonplace and inanity. The very skill of our current

generation of painters is one of their chief perils; for it enables

them to indicate with ease, and often indeed with mastery, what less

dexterity could only strive for with labour. Rapid gains and the tumult

of competition conduce towards the same result. The upshot, to some

critics, is, in the present Academy exhibition, a sense of no little

dissatisfaction, mingled with unstinted recognition of telling and

well-diffused ability. One perceives that many artists can now do a

good deal, if they choose; but the more sound one sees the attainments

of the painter himself to be, the less one is disposed to accept with

implicit faith the rather cheap outcome of those attainments. Sketches

may be excellent things, and they testify to the ready availability of

the artist’s gifts: but sketches magnified into pictures cloy upon one.

They betray in especial a self-complacent unconcern for higher efforts.

In general character the present Academy exhibition, the hundredth of

the series, is very like that of 1867: that was a particularly clever

display, according to its own standard, and this perhaps is nearly on a

par with it.[A]

[A] To estimate the comparative merits of successive Exhibitions

is always to me a difficult matter. The sentence in the text

expresses what I felt about the present Academy show while I

was in the rooms and as I began writing; but, on treating of

the pictures individually, I so often have to say that some

painter is this year quite at his best that I infer the

display of 1868 may probably be fully as good as that of

1867. I leave the text, however, unaltered, as faithful to a

general impression.

With these few remarks, I turn at once to the walls, and begin with--

6. MILLAIS--_Sisters._--It is a great satisfaction to find Mr. Millais

in force this year--in very superior force, for instance, to what

he displayed last year. This group of three girlish sisters--the

painter’s daughters--shows him in pure, unforced, untrammelled

possession of his mastery throughout. The arrangement of the group is

so far artificial that one clearly perceives the sisters are posing

for their portraits: no effort is made to disguise this fact, and it

cannot, I think, be counted as a blemish--rather as one legitimate

method of portrait-painting, though not so popular now as the contrary

scheme. All the three girls are dressed in white muslin, with azure

ribbons, and hair combed out. The background is composed of azaleas,

which, in the left-hand[B] corner of the picture, seem to change from

crimson-pink to vermilion-pink; but the latter colour is scrubbed about

with no appreciable traces of form.

[B] “Left-hand” and “right-hand,” in this pamphlet, will always be

used to designate the portions of the pictures opposite to the

_spectator’s_ left and right respectively.

10. LEYS--_La Famille Pallavicini de Gênes réclamant le droit de

Bourgeoisie des Bourgmestres et Echevins de la Ville d’Anvers,

1542._--When our Royal Academy is honoured by a contribution from one

of the first magnates of European art, it becomes us to accept his

work in a spirit of gratitude, with much desire to study, and very

little to cavil. It is by way of study that I venture to note some

of the leading characteristics of that mediæval style which has made

Baron Leys famous throughout the civilized world. 1st. He identifies

himself with the period he paints--not only in a general way, as a

good scholar might do, but especially in respect of its concerted

outer demonstrations, and its social aspects, and this with all the

more zest when a spice of patriotism is involved. 2nd. Working from

this solid basis of mediævalism, he is never afraid of individualizing

his personages to the very uttermost: they are actual men and women

whom he might--and for anything I know does--pick up in the streets of

modern Belgium. An extreme instance appears in the present picture,

in the furthest right-hand figure, whose portrait-like aspect is

unmistakeable. This, however, being an obviously modern head, differs

from the generality--which, with their personal actuality, are somehow

_projected back_, by the imagination and skill of the painter, into

the mediæval period, and thus come to be even more like what one

conceives of the sixteenth than what one knows of the nineteenth

century. Hence an air of startling realism: the personages are as real

as if they were painted in coats and trowsers; and the mediævalism

is as real as any modern man can make it. The very uncouthness and

hard-featuredness of the figures is a powerful element in this realism:

it looks as if the painter had seen them actually there, and depicted

them as in duty bound--had he been selecting, one would expect more

of positive beauty or semi-idealism. 3rd. Baron Leys paints with a

remarkable mixture of force and slightness, detail and unfinish. He

gives an extraordinary number of items, and with singular strength of

definition, yet with little that can, on close inspection, be called

elaboration. Everything is done so as to solicit the eye at a little

distance, and up to a certain point to satisfy, never to satiate it.

The style of execution has even a good deal that might be termed rough

and ready; and (what is of great importance) it is quite unlike any

handiwork of the Middle Ages themselves. Moreover, the painter (in the

present phase of his style) very seldom gives any mere _accidents_ of

light and shade--direct or flickering sunshine, contrasts of natural

and artificial light, or the like. It may seem fanciful to say that

this also subserves the historical impression; and yet I think it

does so powerfully--the scenes and the actors in them tell upon the

mind, through the eye, as having passed out of the momentary into the

permanent--out of the region of chance and change into that dim lumour

and remote subsistency of the past. Having said thus much, by way of

study, of Baron Leys’s pictures in general, I shall not endeavour to

analyse the particular work before us. It is a _replica_ of one of his

frescoes in the Townhall of Antwerp, and illustrates the value which

distinguished foreigners were wont to set upon the right of citizenship

in that great commercial and privileged city. It is to be regarded as

an important and excellent specimen of the master, though some others

might deserve the preference in point of executive completeness.

17. LINNELL, SEN.--_English Woodlands._--A very characteristic and

fine example of the painter’s style: one might use it as a text-book

wherefrom to develope his specialties in the English school of

landscape.

30. WATTS--_Landscape, Evening._--A small work, but conspicuous by its

broad, strong colour, very warm and mellow: it has power both of hand

and of sentiment. The sky is especially luminous.

44. HEMY--_Tête de Flandre, near Antwerp._--There is a great deal of

space in this picture: and the tone of green-grey colour is finely felt

and solidly sustained. A sense of the ripple in the estuary is given

by a curious sort of sleight of hand--an actual ridging or rucking in

the surface of the paint.

52. COPE--_The Life’s Story._--This is the subject of Othello relating

his adventures to Brabantio and Desdemona. The lady hangs upon the

words of the Moor with a demonstrative interest that fully justified

his inference that she must be in love with him. The picture cannot, I

think, be counted among Mr. Cope’s successes.

64. GRANT--_The Duke of Cambridge at the Battle of the Alma, leading

the Guards up the Hill in support of the Light Division._--The weak

point of this picture is the isolated figure of the Duke himself, which

has more the character of a likeness by a portrait-painter than of a

leading agent in the event. The Guards in the foreground are happily

treated; with sufficient individuality in the several figures, not made

singly over-prominent. The general execution is not unlike that of Sir

Edwin Landseer; which is as much as to say that it has uncommon ability.

70. MILLAIS--_Rosalind and Celia._--A picture full of sunny light and

masterly celerity of execution. The faces have great sentiment, and

ample charm of beauty: the confiding self-subordinating character of

Celia speaks in the lines of her mouth. Touchstone is older than one

would infer from the drama. It is a pity that Mr. Millais did not set

himself to reflect what Rosalind would probably have done with her hair

and costume in order to sustain the disguise of a young man. The upper

portion of the dress is absurdly feminine, and hardly recedes even

from the nineteenth century. On the stage one pardons the paraded sex

of the actress--it is partly unavoidable, and partly a device of her

profession: but in a picture one fairly expects a greater conformity to

the common sense of the situation. Mr. Millais, however, never _will_

pay any attention to his costume. With all the signal merits of the

execution, the texture is not free from woolliness.

87. FRITH--_Before dinner at Boswell’s Lodgings in Bond Street, 1769:

present, Johnson, Garrick, Goldsmith, Reynolds, Murphy, Bickerstaff,

Davies, and Boswell._--We have heard only too often about Goldsmith’s

“bloom-coloured coat.” This is the scene of its exhibition before

Boswell’s guests. The picture may be termed a self-respecting one:

the humours of the personages and the incident are indicated without

being made to stare one out of countenance. _Per contra_, it must be

said that strength is deficient throughout: common weakish mouths

prevail in this distinguished company. Goldsmith and Reynolds are

indifferent likenesses; and Johnson’s clothes fit almost as accurately

as Goldsmith’s.

123. EDWIN LANDSEER--_Rent-Day in the Wilderness._--“After the defeat

of the Stuart army in 1715, at Sheriff Muir, Colonel Donald Murchison,

to whom the Earl of Seaforth confided his confiscated estates in

Ross-shire, defended them for ten years, and regularly transmitted the

rents to his attainted and exiled chief.” The picture shows the rent

being thus collected under difficulties. A bearded clansman, attended

by his daughter, is in the act of paying; a friar kneels close beside

Colonel Murchison; and a number of other Highlanders have assembled

for the occasion. This large and crowded picture has a peculiar look,

in consequence of the stealthy and crouching action of most of the

figures: they are keeping close amid the brushwood on one side of

Loch Affric, while some of the Government soldiers are patrolling the

opposite bank. The work has thus--besides the generic merits which any

large painting by Sir Edwin Landseer is sure to possess--plenty that is

both peculiar and interesting, not unmingled with a certain impression

of discomfort.

138. HERBERT--_The Valley of Moses in the Desert of Sinai._--This

picture (as Mr. Herbert is stated never to have been in the East) is

somewhat noticeable in point of eclectic, and at the same time diluted,

study. The light and tone are agreeable, and free from that hardness

which besets many Eastern pictures; but, on observing the comparative

faintness of the shadows upon the blazing sands, one sees at once that

the avoidance of hardness has involved some sacrifice of truth.

150. WARD--_Royal Marriage, 1477._--The detestable humbug of a sham

contemporary “MS.” is resorted to for the purpose of informing the

reader of the Academy catalogue that this painting represents the

marriage of the Duke of York, aged four, son of Edward IV., to

Lady Anne Mowbray, aged three. A bishop of almost decrepit old age

officiates, and Gloucester is naturally made a prominent witness. Mr.

Ward’s style of painting, chiaroscuro, and handling, is universally

known; it may be termed the overblown style, with about as much

retirement and repose as a peony the hour before it falls to pieces.

But this should not blind us to his solid merits of thought and

invention, always exercised in a direction which tells with the public,

and for the most part felicitously in other respects as well. The

present picture is an instance. Besides any amount of fine dresses and

demonstrative infancy, it boasts a power of association which must

take hold of every spectator: the infant bridal, the gorgeous dawn

of promise to the little sons of King Edward, and the crash of fate

reserved for them within the cerebral convolutions of the future King

Richard. We may afford, while we are about it, to recollect that this

effective subject pertains by right of priority to Mr. Houghton, who

designed it for a woodcut.

167. FRITH--_Sterne and the French Innkeeper’s Daughter._--The

imperfectly Reverend Mr. Sterne is looking at the damsel as she knits

a stocking, and pondering upon its neat adjustment to the shape of her

leg. On general grounds much the same may be said of this picture as

of No. 87: both are superior examples of the easy certainty with which

Mr. Frith can strike the key he wants, just as loud as he wishes it,

and no louder. Sterne (as Goldsmith and Reynolds before) appears to me

anything but a good likeness: the young woman is more French in feature

than in the _ensemble_ of the face.

172. T. FAED--_Worn Out._--This ranks with Mr. Faed’s best pictures: it

is very skilful, and has more equality of painting than usual--somewhat

less of obtruded knack and flourish. The various small accessories are

well related to the main incident of the hard-working father who has

fallen asleep while watching his invalid boy.

188. POOLE--_Custaunce sent adrift by the Constable of Alla, King of

Northumberland._--This moonlight picture has rather the character of a

manufacture; yet it is manufacture by a poetic eye and pictorial hand.

There is some clever handling in the water of the foreground; and the

entire absence of red from the picture--which relies for colour upon

iridescent tints of grey-blue, green, yellow, and so on--is observable.

209. HOUGHTON--_H. Bassett, Esq., in his Laboratory._--A capital

piece of peculiarity. Great pains and intelligence have gone to the

depicting of the scientific plethora of the laboratory; and the sense

of the shut-in, moderately-lit room, not lightly to be intruded upon,

is vivid. Mr. Bassett is represented smoking a pipe. This may seem

a trivial or purposeless incident. Yet it may have been introduced

to indicate some enforced pause in his work while an experiment is

maturing; and, if so, it is certainly not unsuggestive.

223. ORCHARDSON--_Mrs. Birket Foster._--This seems to me about the best

work Mr. Orchardson has yet exhibited: it is a small full-length--more

a subject than a mere portrait. The artist has a certain streaky or

gauzy touch which amounts to mannerism: here the handling and colour

have almost a _soupçon_ of Gainsborough. The bright face, the quiet

lighting of the dusky-boarded room, and the untumbled white muslin

dress, make up a picture in which elegant and artist-like taste verges

upon quaintness.

235. ELMORE--_Ishmael._--An accomplished study, perhaps (within its

limits) unsurpassed by any work of its author.

236. G. D. LESLIE--_Home News._--An English lady in her remote Asiatic

home is reading a letter from the old country. The half-hovering

smile, and the long-drawn regard of the eye as though she were in

contemplation back across the measureless ocean, are delicately caught;

also the coolness of the matted interior, jealously excluding the sun

itself, but not the sense of how it is blazing outside.

242. MILLAIS--_Stella._--A single figure, three-quarter length, and

perhaps the very best Mr. Millais has done of its class. The name

Stella naturally suggests Swift’s Stella; and Swift’s Stella holding

a letter, with a countenance of subdued long-suffering, suggests her

receipt of the letter from Vanessa inquiring whether she and Swift

were in fact married. If this is the incident really intended, the

sympathizing spectator may be startled at being reminded that Stella

was at that time about forty years of age. But Mr. Millais is not the

man to mind much whether he does or does not represent a particular

incident, or whether or not any such representation is endurably

correct. He has painted delightfully a very loveable woman, and that

will probably suffice him and us. The tint of flesh in the arm appears

hardly so pure as the rest of the colouring.

247. O’NEIL--_Before Waterloo._--This picture will certainly have

critics of two sorts. One set, incurious of artistic subtleties, will

batten upon such a purveying of British military heroism, gushing

young creatures, and harrowing family partings. Another set will turn

with æsthetic distaste from so much of ball-costume and regimentals,

and such a cross between the leaden and the garish in colour. An

intermediate set ought also to find a voice, and to aver that the

scheme of arrangement in the picture is very ingenious, and successful

in turning a serious difficulty--that the story is told with great

emphasis and much well-considered variety of detail--and that, when

one faces the picture with deliberation, one can hardly refuse it the

praise of being interesting. If Mr. O’Neil could but get somebody

else’s colour to exude through his brush, with texture and surface to

correspond!

248. SIR C. LINDSAY--_The Earl Somers._--It is only fair to cite this

picture, by an amateur and a Baronet, as one of the best portraits on

the walls. The steadiness of the figure on his feet, without compromise

and without bravado, is alone a considerable merit. A spectator may

be struck by the great number of sitters who elect to be painted in

shooting costume, or in some other dress and with other accessories of

sport. “Manly exercises” will of course account for most of this; and

knickerbockers and black velvet have their share of influence.

260. LEGROS--_The Refectory._--The eye finds repose and satisfaction in

this broadly and firmly painted picture, free from the last suspicion

of _ad captandum_ appeal. Three monks and a tabby cat have assembled to

make a meal off a mackerel--the board laid with a perfectly clean white

cloth. The monks are all men of dignified and thoughtful presence: two

of them still pause over a book of orisons or meditations before they

begin the refection. It might not be unfair to say that there is a

good deal of space to let in the large-sized canvas: but one need not

exactly quarrel with that. The painter, a man now of reputation equally

confirmed and well deserved both in his own country and in ours, knows

perfectly well what he is about; we may safely accept his point of

view, and find in the result that, if he has not done precisely what we

might have bespoken, there is nevertheless a definite value to be got

out of his method of treatment, not to be slighted because a different

method would have given some other and countervailing value. If

anybody wishes to learn (among graver things) what amount of executive

short-hand suffices for making a cat tabby, Mr. Legros’s picture will

inform him.

268. R. BUTLER--_The Lost Path._--This artist’s name is unfamiliar to

me. His little picture of children astray in a copse has great merit of

naïve expression, rendered as well by action as by countenance.

273. STOREY--_The Shy Pupil._--The painter has here attained to a high

point of force in simplicity of work. The subject is a budding girl

learning to dance in her father’s presence. With nothing that can be

called elaboration, the execution would, for purity of lighting and

directness of hand, bear comparison with many a choice Dutch picture.

If we went to Mr. Legros for a tabby cat, we may consult Mr. Storey

for a small dog peering through a door; a few twirls of the brush

have, by a species of legerdemain, produced a surprising amount of

characteristic form. This work, with much effect of solidity, is

nevertheless amenable to my opening remarks as to sketchiness: but, in

so simple and semi-humorous a subject, that need hardly be objected to.

283. DICKINSON--_George Peabody, Esq._--A very honest good piece of

work, and a most unmistakeable likeness, to be remembered among the

portraits of the year much to Mr. Dickinson’s credit.

288. COPE--_The Disciples at Emmaus._--Mr. Cope’s method of art unites

remarkable defining power with a certain thinness of the primary

material; it reminds one of good woodcarving--strong and accurate

modelling bestowed upon a substance which, after the utmost has been

done for it, retains an aboriginal crudity. In the present picture, the

artist has planned out all forcibly and distinctly--he has left nothing

vague to his own mind or the spectator’s eye. Yet no corresponding

impression of reality is produced; the work wants _imaginative_

reality, and therefore its other elements of reality do not tell as

they were intended to do. To attenuate the form of the risen Christ,

and to make his drapery transparent to the evening light, is not the

way to remove him from the regions of fleshliness.

302. HORSLEY--_Rent-day at Haddon Hall._--Considerably the best

picture Mr. Horsley has exhibited of late, or perhaps at any time.

A very moderate proportion of adult good sense may have sufficed to

discriminate it from his staple commodity.

311. G. RICHMOND--_Mrs. Brereton._--While Mr. Richmond can put into

a face so much feminine candour and amiability as we see in this

likeness, no one need be surprised at his eminent standing among

portrait painters. To look at the face seems to be like making Mrs.

Brereton’s acquaintance--or like wishing to make it.

316. CALDERON--_The Young Lord Hamlet._--Yorick is on all-fours on

the pleasance of the Danish palace, with little Hamlet riding on his

back; Queen Gertrude and some of her ladies looking on; and an infant,

presumably Ophelia, not yet “taking notice.” This is strictly a sketch;

no doubt a very able one, and only to be done by a man of long training

and solid acquirement in art. Not only is the thing full of sparkling

animal spirits as a whole, but each point, when one attends to it, is

pertinent and telling: except indeed the face of the lady who holds

Ophelia, and who exhibits a smile as hard as her teeth. This is not the

only time that Mr. Calderon has made considerable play with teeth, and

not, I think, successfully; nothing is more difficult to manage in a

picture.

323. WATTS--_The wife of Pygmalion, a Translation from the

Greek._--This is one of the few works of poetic elevation in the

gallery: it is beautiful with a noble beauty, which one hardly knows

whether rather to call womanly or impassive. It rests midway between

coldness and warmth, without being lukewarm. It should be added that

the merit is not exclusively Mr. Watts’s, the head being truly “a

translation from the Greek,” _i.e._, adapted from the fine antique bust

pointed out not long ago for admiration among the Arundel Marbles in

Oxford.

328. LEIGHTON--_Ariadne abandoned by Theseus. Ariadne watches for

his return; Artemis releases her by death._--This also is a picture

which claims to be of the poetic order, and sustains the claim; it

may without rashness be pronounced the loftiest work Mr. Leighton has

produced, reckoning together subject-matter, scale, and the result

attained. To ignore the limitations of his style, or the symptoms of

them which this picture also presents, would be futile. One might

sum them up by saying that there is a certain hiatus between his

perception of the poetic in art, and his power of expressing it;

and that, though he bridges this over with a readiness of resource

which is to himself almost as natural as the first perception, yet to

others the artificiality of the bridge is glaringly and even irksomely

apparent. But the picture of Ariadne is sufficiently noble to keep

these considerations in the background, as soon as we have once for

all fairly stated or implied them. The face is wrung with sorrow,

yet is free from what we mean to condemn in a work of art when we

term it “painful.” One might say that this woman has died of the very

weariness of daily renewed grief. But the calm now is as profound as

the yearning heretofore; profound as the blue sea violet-tinted in its

distant intensity, or as the lulling oppression of its clang in the

sultry meridian, barely audible as a faint murmur at the dizzy height

of Ariadne’s rock-seat. There is a sensation of stationariness, as if

Phœbus Apollo might be pausing in heaven to see how his sister Artemis

has accomplished her mercy upon the outworn Ariadne. As I looked at the

picture, a divine reminiscence of Shelley intervened:--

“Yet now despair itself is mild,

Even as the winds and waters are.

I could lie down like a tired child,

And weep away the life of care

Which I have borne and yet must bear,

Till death like sleep might steal on me,--

And I might feel in the warm air

My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea

Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.”

329. MASON--_Evening Hymn._--Again a very poetical and beautiful

picture, one of the enduring glories of the present exhibition. It

reaches higher than anything Mr. Mason had hitherto done; and shows him

qualified to paint figures on a fair scale of size, and with an amount

of positive beauty which, in his previous productions (though well

traceable), was to some extent overlaid by the _picturesque_, as that

is popularly understood. This work glows with the light of a spring

sunset, and with the unbidden fervour of a group of young village-girls

who are carolling the Evening Hymn as they saunter homewards. It

seems almost churlish to object to a leading point of treatment in so

delightful a picture; but I confess to some suspicion that the men

who are shown listening might with advantage have been missed out of

the subject altogether--and more especially the youth who comes close

behind a girl in white, holding a rose in her hand. Mr. Mason is a

painter who never loses sight of facts in his pursuit of the beautiful;

this is the one of his works which goes nearest to merging all other

its material in a general ideal of loveliness and solemnity.

331. PETTIE--_Tussle with a Highland Smuggler._--Here we revert to the

category of sketchy work; and we see in this picture and in another by

its author (No. 484, “_Weary with present cares and memories sad_”),

an unpleasant and unrepaying development of style which might be

described as “the offhand squalid.” No. 331 shows extreme--indeed,

excessive--cleverness: but its unsightly violence of action embodies

a subject of little consequence to any one, and of less still to the

cause of fine art.

347. EDWIN LANDSEER--“_Weel, sir, if the deer got the ball, sure’s

deeth Chevy will no leave him._”--A masterpiece of Landseerian art:

the good hound Chevy is seen couched amid high mountain ice and snows,

by the side of a dead deer, which the ravens have already scented from

afar.

356. MILLAIS--_Pilgrims to St. Paul’s._--A more rational title would

be “Greenwich Pensioners at the Tomb of Nelson.” One of them has lost

his left arm--a very resolute, bluff old seaman, whom “foreigneers” may

have been shy of tackling in his time; the other halts upon two wooden

legs, more senile and commonplace, but also, in his undemonstrative

way, one of those who, like his hero, “never saw fear.” His face is

most triumphantly painted; whether regarded as a mere study of a head,

or as a piece of character, or with reference to its intense lighting

by the flare of the sepulchral lantern. Indeed, the picture is quite

admirable throughout, and in power of painting not to be surpassed

by Mr. Millais, nor approached by any competitor. There is in its

materials something which verges towards a _tour de force_; but all is

so manly, and so free from sentimental overdoing, that no charge arises

against it on this ground.

363. YEAMES--_Lady Jane Grey in the Tower._--An able satisfactory

picture; perhaps the best of its author. Lady Jane is in a

controversial colloquy with the Chaplain Feckenham: her face expresses

very successfully that she is weighing his arguments in her mind, and

considering what may be the true answer to them, but with no prospect

of her coming to the conclusion that answer there is none. Feckenham

also is appropriately conceived and painted, without any exaggeration.

Of costume and accessory there is enough, and not overmuch.

369. HOUGHTON--_In the Garden._--A very handsome boy of eight is

lifting his little sister of five to smell a rose upon its bush. A

kitten which has already made some advances towards cat-hood is romping

around the stem. The feeling of the subject would be improved were

there more of a look of smelling in the girl’s face; and the colour

is hardly on a level with the other merits of the picture. It is,

however, a very choice and complete little work; fine in design and

draughtsmanship, and charming in general impression--quite free,

moreover, from that sort of nursery silliness which has infected

some canvasses of late, and has even been aptly enshrined in a title

reproducing the broken utterance of babes. Mr. Houghton knows that

“ta-ta” or “tootsicums,” whether written with the pen or rendered into

the language of the brush, is a mild effort of art.

401. G. D. LESLIE--_Kate Leslie._--This artist is almost always

attractive, and often most engagingly so: the present work may be

cited in proof. But he is “painty” (as the profession terms it) in the

generality of his work, and especially in his flesh-tints. Here the

face has far too much of a tawny or ligneous hue; which is the more

to be regretted as the work, on the whole, comes nearer than usual to

ranking Mr. Leslie among colourists.

402. POYNTER--_The Catapult._--Great knowledge, great power of

combination, and much disciplined artistic capacity, have gone to the

making of this picture. It has more effect, and is on the whole more

pictorial, than the very striking work which Mr. Poynter exhibited last

year--_Israel in Egypt._ Some people may refuse to take much interest

in a scene in which the work of the artificer or mechanician plays so

large a part; but, bating this objection (which to many will be no

objection at all), it is difficult to award anything but praise to the

picture. The event is the use of a catapult as an engine of war in the

siege of Carthage: we see written on one of the beams “Delenda est

Carthago, S.P.Q.R.” The officer is supervising, archers are shooting;

the monster hand of the catapult is about once more to launch a red-hot

bolt against the doomed city: pots of blazing pitch are being hurled

by the defenders at the assailants. The solidity and good balance of

all parts of the subject, the agreeable tone of colour in flesh and

otherwise, the sound drawing, unfaltering and unpretentious, command

high respect.

410. WYNFIELD--_Oliver Cromwell’s First Appearance in the

Parliament._--To find this picture uninteresting would be difficult.

Hampden is represented introducing his cousin to Cromwell; Pym,

Elliot, Sir Robert Phillips, Strafford, and many other famous men, are

present. The arrangement pleases one from its obvious adaptation to

the more important demands of the subject, irrespectively of artistic

conventions. The method of the painting, however, is so excessively

opaque and heavy that, until Mr. Wynfield shall manage to correct this

blemish, one cannot expect his pictures to get cordially accepted by

the public, or to please critical eyes.

424. T. GRAHAM--_The Dominie._--Mr. Graham has powers of a high order;

but he has seemed of late only too likely to be led away by the offhand

practice, semi-grotesque picturesqueness, and rapid success, of some

of his compatriots from beyond Tweed. _The Dominie_ is about the least

laudable picture he has exhibited--tending much to caricature, and to

coarseness of handling. Of course, along with this, there is a deal of

ability; and the figure of the boy still attests a genuine sense of

beauty. Let us trust that Mr. Graham will have “pulled up” by next year.

434. HOOK--_Are Chimney-sweepers Black?_--A most delightful picture,

fully equal to the best productions of its distinguished author. There

are two others in this gallery (Nos. 48 and 270) also excellent:

but so little remains now-a-days to be said about Mr. Hook’s works,

except that they afford deep, pure, and vivid pleasure, and show their

painter to be one of the most artist-like colourists and executants

of the British school, that I have passed them by, and limited myself

to specifying the present one only. A begrimed (not _over_ begrimed)

chimney-sweeper, with the implements of his craft, presents himself

to the startled eyes of a naked infant, as fresh and bright as a

Cupid, who has just been bathing on the margin of the sea: he is still

paddling in a sand-pool, and takes refuge against his young mother’s

dress, hardly so scared as not to be a little amused. This group of the

mother and child is most charming; and all other parts of the picture

are worthy of it.

439. MACLISE--_The Sleep of Duncan._--The first aspect of this work, as

of so many of Mr. Maclise’s, gives an impression of unreality, huddled,

and oppressed with decorative exuberances. A more deliberate inspection

shows that it possesses, in ample measure, the fine qualities which

rank him so high in our school--qualities of invention and design,

associated with remarkable, though bounded and monotonous, gifts of

execution. The moment is when Lady Macbeth, having drugged the guards,

and “laid their daggers ready” (one of these lies within the circlet of

the crown), relinquishes any thought of herself assassinating the old

king, who “resembles her father as he sleeps.” The tragic air of crime

in Lady Macbeth, her superfluous stealthinesses of action, are grandly

given; though it cannot be said that her face differs much from the

type so constant and familiar in Mr. Maclise’s productions. Duncan and

the two guards are all three fine figures. The lighting of the picture

is not obvious: it would appear to be the union of soft moonshine and

pale diffused grey dawn-light which comes through the loop-hole at the

back; but this does not seem to account for all the light in front, as

on the figures of the guards; while neither can one discern, on the

other hand, that much (if any) influence of artificial light has been

intended by the painter. Real the picture would, of course, never be

made to look; but I think it would look considerably less unreal at one

point if Duncan’s head lay deeper in the silken pillows.

440. WELLS--_Letters and News at the Loch-side._--A landscape with

portraits and incident. I pick it out from among the contributions of

its able painter, for the sake of noting the great amount of space,

light, and air, which he has got into this picture, although there

is no single glimpse of sky: the ground rises all round from the

lake-side. This is no small thing to have managed.

449. LEIGHTON--_Acme and Septimius._--Remarkable for its elegant skill

of concentrated composition. The knee of Acme’s left leg--the foot of

the same leg being set underneath her right thigh as she sits--appears

to me to project too much laterally. This may be a convenient place

for calling attention (with implied apology for not speaking of them

with the detail they properly claim) to Mr. Leighton’s three remaining

pictures: Nos. 227, _Jonathan’s Token to David_; 234, _Mrs. Frederick

P. Cockerell_; 522, _Actæa, the Nymph of the Shore._

453. HODGSON--_Chinese Ladies looking at European Curiosities._--A

quaint and amusing notion, and a pleasant picture. A Chinese gentleman

is exhibiting to his wives and their women a pair of European white

satin slippers, which the small-footed fair (or rather dusky) ones

regard as elephantine eccentricities. An Englishwoman looking at a

Chinese “six-marker,” or at a Japanese masterpiece of woodcut design

or colouring, is not more tickled. Perhaps the best head of all is

that of the elderly woman to the right. The peculiarities of Chinese

physiognomy are not at all overdone--indeed, I doubt whether the eyes

are quite sidelong enough. It would have been admissible to make one

of the wives prettier, and (if I am not mistaken) clearer-complexioned

also.

461. LEGROS--_Sir Thomas More showing some of Holbein’s Pictures to

Henry VIII._--Without tampering with his own style, Mr. Legros comes

more than hitherto, in this picture, within the same general lines as

English art. The work, in essentials, is extremely good; and simplicity

of execution does not interfere with its keeping its place well and

solidly amid those which surround it. Sir Thomas More does not strike

me as much of a likeness. Henry is excellent: he sits (if a bull may

be excused) as he would sit in a contemporary portrait, though not as

he _does_ sit in any of those I remember. Perhaps his eyes are less

small than in the likenesses. Holbein looks the best man of the lot:

well able to have done the fine things Sir Thomas is displaying, and

to do as many more as bluff Harry may commission. Three ladies are

also present. One of them gives her head a turn in which the manner

of a connoisseur is dimly anticipated; and one might fancy her to be

saying to herself, “Really, most excellent; but, were I to sit to him,

should I come good-looking enough?” Capitally as the whole subject is

kept together, I think a single little touch would still improve it in

this respect: one of the ladies might be glancing from the picture to

Holbein, and so helping to identify the work with its worker.

477. WALKER--_In the Glen, Rathfarnham Park._--This is a halt of

gipsies, who are lighting a fire; and perhaps there is something more

of incident implied than I happen to catch. Mr. Walker’s pictures

have a certain mottled look and grainy surface which might be called

mannerism, though not too confidently. At any rate, after making some

abatement for this, and for a too easily contented choice of subject,

one is fairly surprised at a sureness of hand which seems to have at

its finger-ends the power of realization without labour, and at a

sturdiness of work which yet picks up (as it were) at every stroke

refinements of drawing and colour. The evidences of ability are so

profuse that a non-practical critic like myself may well, in modesty

and self-knowledge, feel his mouth shut to objections. I should doubt

whether there are in Europe many artists more accomplished than Mr.

Walker, within his own sphere of work.

494. H. S. MARKS--_Experimental Gunnery in the Middle Ages._--Mr. Marks

has done nothing better than this picture; probably nothing equally

good. The subject involves just the sort of out-of-the-way humour

which is his _specialité_; and he has made this the informing spirit

of a full composition without condescending to any burlesque. There is

much varied and capital by-play of incident and expression; and the

subject is so treated as to allow one, even in these days of Armstrong

guns and Chassepots, to feel a good-humoured respect for the primitive

artillerists.

499. PRINSEP--_A Venetian Lover._--The gist of this subject is made

so evident that we could dispense with the motto--“De deux amans, il

y en a toujours un qui aime, et l’autre qui se laisse aimer.” Handled

with marked fulness and breadth, and with a very painter-like choice of

the _tints_ of colour, the picture proves once again that Mr. Prinsep

is well qualified to work on a large scale; having at command a fund

of really pictorial material, on which he may draw with full stress

of faculty, secure that it will not fail him at his need. As a matter

of sentiment, the picture leaves a certain feeling of discontent; the

impassivity of the woman is so extreme as to provoke one first with

her and next with her impassioned adorer. But no doubt this is only

what the artist intended. In some parts the surface may be considered

too smooth--as especially in the lady’s face, which has hardly the

pulpiness of flesh. Possibly, however, this impression would be

corrected could one examine the picture closer.

510. A. HUGHES--“_Sigh no more, Ladies, Sigh no more._”--Mr. Hughes’s

pictures are always full of refined sentiment; and this is eminently

so, and in all respects one of his best successes. The lady is so

tender, uncomplaining, and beautiful, that one takes her part on

the instant. Happily, she seems, after an interval of disconsolate

dejection, to be dimly awaking once more to the interests of life; and

soon she will be taking the advice of the song, and tempting fate with

another affair of the heart. She is at once sentimental to the romantic

point, and domestically feminine. It was a happy thought to introduce

the thrush at her window, trilling a cheerful ditty, which one can

imagine that her heart translates into the spoken language of the song.

This picture has in it a gentle but real poetry which places it on a

very different footing from most of the work in the exhibition.

511. STOREY--_Saying Grace._--The small denizens of a nursery have

seated themselves with impeccable propriety for their early dinner,

regulated by (as one might infer from her physiognomy) a foreign

nursery-governess. The baby has joined his hands with dispread fingers,

and enacts (he is too young to pronounce) the grace with a solemnity

which would do credit to a parish-clerk. No doubt the children are all

portraits, with inordinate heads of hair; but the baby’s irregularity

of contour seems to exceed infantine bounds. Let us trust that his

mamma will insist upon his growing up with a modified profile, and

that “’tis his nature to.” The picture has a genuine distinction of

quaintness and zest.

513. CALDERON--_Œnone._--Mr. Tennyson, with the magic fetters of

genius, has enslaved all Englishmen to the conviction that Œnone can

only be contemplated as in a state of heartbroken dereliction; and I

suppose that Mr. Calderon intends his nymph to be so understood. I

cannot, however, perceive that sentiment in her face or action; she

appears to the eye rather in a mood of rampant laziness and florid

self-display. This is a very singular piece of colour. White or

whiteish tints occupy a considerable space; the extremely blue hills

are the second important constituent; and the pea-green mantle of

Œnone is the third. The pea-green appears to me a discord, though some

other hue of green, along with a texture more like drapery, might

have proved much the reverse. On the whole, I should say that, in its

colour as in other respects, the painting has much boldness, with no

corresponding proportion of felicity.

517. R. CARRICK--_After the Sortie._--This is a very large picture,

hung so high that one cannot fully estimate it in detail. It represents

a wounded knight borne up the winding castle-stairs by three of his

retainers; his wife, with a horrible sinking of the heart, totters and

clings about for support as she follows. It seems to be a strongly

designed and carefully executed work, of very superior merit; the most

important production of Mr. Carrick, and about the best.

524. H. W. B. DAVIS--_A Summer Forenoon._--A landscape and sheep-piece,

warm, gentle, and genial. Landscape and the allied forms of art occupy

a very small space, comparatively, in the present exhibition. There are

nevertheless several works of this kind which call for examination and

praise: their being left unnoticed in this pamphlet does not imply any

indifference to their merits.

540. MISS M. E. FREER--_Red Roses._--Coquetry is the predominant

spirit of this work. But it is not painted with the slightness which

a coquettish picture from a fresh female hand might be expected to

display. On the contrary, there is a good deal of careful realization,

and an amount of general skill and force which places Miss Freer high

among lady artists. No. 446, _Margaret Wilson_, by the same painter,

hung too high to be scrutinized, seems to be equally good, or better.

585. MACLISE--_Madeline after Prayer._--The useful adage which Mr.

Maclise will never lay to heart is that “Enough is as good as a feast.”

We find Keats’s Madeline encumbered with items of furniture and

ornamentation. Moreover, the painter’s decorative taste is anything

but chastened; witness the horrible pattern which she has begun in her

broidery frame. A graver objection is the want of any real luminosity

in the moonlight which Keats has made so resplendent; the painted

window itself is the very maximum of opacity, and the light (if light

it can be called) seems to fall _upon_ it, not to be transmitted

through its panes. Whatever his failings in execution, Mr. Maclise

can depict light vastly better than this when he chooses. So much for

objections. After any quantity of them, it remains that the picture is

highly attractive, and the Madeline a very beautiful creature--perhaps

the sweetest woman Mr. Maclise has painted. She is a personage _not_

made

“For human nature’s daily food,”

and yet she is sympathetic. To be that, she must be poetic also.

589. BURCHETT--_Measure for Measure._--Mr. Burchett follows up his

remarkable work of last year with another of corresponding importance.

Matured consideration, and strong powers of working and of development,

have gone to the making of this picture; which represents the great

crisis in the action of _Measure for Measure_, where the Duke of

Vienna, disguised as a friar, is revealed by the unwitting Lucio to

the eyes of the abashed Angelo and Escalus, and of the now almost

hopeless Isabella and Mariana. The story is told with much judgment and

penetration (so far as such a complicated story _can_ be told) by the

Duke’s vacated chair of state, with coronet and sceptre laid upon it,

between the seats of Escalus and Angelo; the young courtier, facing the

just uncowled Duke, and recognising him on the instant, and raising

his cap; the frothy bluster of Lucio dying out on his scared visage

as he gasps to see whom he has been mauling and traducing; and other

well-chosen and well-combined incidents. The countenance of the Duke is

German and searching; that of Escalus true to the good-natured cynicism

of the substantially upright old man; Isabella has much of the nun

about her. Angelo is, I think, too much the burly insolent oppressor;

for we must understand from the drama that he really looked and was

an abstinent Pharisee, led on by temptation and opportunity into

vilenesses quite unlike the man that all others and himself supposed

him to be. There is much able and accurate painting in this work,

though it would benefit by more breadth of general harmonizing.

600. PARSONS--_The Wayfarer._--A peculiar and delicate piece of subdued

execution, deserving of inspection; _so_ peculiar in its granulated

texture that it hardly proclaims itself to be oil-painting.

613. HICKS--_Escape of the Countess of Morton to Paris, with Henrietta,

infant Daughter of Charles I._--The most important and best production

of Mr. Hicks. Like Mr. Burchett’s picture, its incidents require to be

analysed one by one: when that process has been gone through, one finds

a great deal of ingenious skill standing to the painter’s credit.

614. PRINSEP--_A Study of a Girl Reading._--Mr. Prinsep deserves real

thanks for this painting. The girl is an exquisite person, and the

picture also may without flattery be called exquisite. It has a most

charming sense of the womanly in the maidenly. The fair one is about to

sit down to luncheon, but holds and reads her book up to the moment of

drawing in her chair. Perhaps she will violate etiquette by persisting

in “reading at meals:” and who will not forgive her?

621. A. MOORE--_Azaleas._--This will be remembered as one of the

_illustrations_ (as the French phrase it) of the Exhibition of 1868. It

presents, in life size, a Grecian lady (or at any rate Grecian-robed),

at a pot of azaleas, some of which she plucks and drops into a basin.

Whether or not azaleas were known to Grecian ladies, whether or not

they came from America, are questions not difficult of solution, but of

sublime indifference to Mr. Moore. (The flowers in Mr. Watts’s Grecian

picture, No. 323, are also, I apprehend, azaleas.) The study of the

blossom-loaded plant is most delicate and lovely; and the lady has

elevated classic grace, though her face hardly sustains comparison with

the rest of the picture. For a sense of beauty in disposition of form,

and double-distilled refinement in colour, this work may allow a wide

margin to any competitors in the gallery, and still be the winner. On

the other hand, it is proper to remember that such a painting as this

presupposes certain _data_ in art, which _data_ some people not wholly

unworthy of a hearing demur to: chiefly, it presupposes once for all

that that innermost artistic problem of how to reconcile realization

with abstraction deserves to be given up. How much could be said on

this question from differing points of view, I need not here indicate.

You linger long to look at Mr. Moore’s picture, and return to it again

and again: and that justifies him in taking, individually, the benefit

of one of those points of view. He unites with singular subtlety of

grace a phase of the evanescent to a phase of the permanent: colour and

handling which withdraw themselves from the eye with a suggestion (or,

as one might say, with a whisper), to statuesque languor and repose of

form.

624. BRETT--_Christmas Morning, 1866._--In scale combined with subject,

this is far the most important picture Mr. Brett has produced. We see

a manned boat and a wrecking ship upon the immense ocean, with its

swirling drift blown across like a tongue of tormented flame; and huge

volumes of grey cloud over the horizon, walling out from the sea the

gorgeous dawn of a new day, on fire with the blaze of sunlight. The

painting of the vast sea-surface is a very great effort of knowledge

and mastery, and a very successful one.

629. A. GOODWIN--_The Dead Woodman._--A picture of highly remarkable

effect, and poetic perception. A blue-grey bloom of sunset broods

luminously over all. The work has a kind of intellectual analogy to

the _Dead Stonebreaker_ which Mr. Wallis painted years ago: but in all

points of externals it is entirely different.

632. MILLAIS--_Souvenir of Velasquez_ (_Diploma-work deposited in

the Academy on his election as an Academician_).--It is not for an

outsider to surmise whether or not the Academicians court the deposit

of diploma-pictures which may have cost their painters, working with

the quick-handedness of a Millais, perhaps a couple of days’ labour.

However this may be, they have here got a diploma-picture of that

description, and an admirable one in its way it certainly is. The

resemblance to Velasquez is hardly such as to justify the title.

685. WATTS--_A. Panizzi, Esq._--That this is about the finest portrait

of the year need scarcely be specified, Mr. Watts being its author. It

was presented to Mr. Panizzi by the Officers of the British Museum,

on his retirement; and happily expresses, in the sitter, great powers

of work, long in active exercise, and now in well-earned repose. A

sketch-plan of the Museum reading-room forms an appropriate and not

undecorative device in the right-hand upper corner.

735. SANDYS--_Study of a Head._--We have now got out of the

oil-pictures, and have come to the drawings. This is an excellent

study of a wilful, tameless-spirited beauty, who bites her hair in

her gathering mood. Further on (816) is an equally well-done head

of _George Critchett, Esq._, a head that seems to teem with defined

calculation. It will be known to many besides myself that Mr. Sandys

sent to the Academy an oil-picture of Medea in an act of incantation,

not only worthy, but more than worthy, of his highly disciplined powers

and determined accomplishment. It has dropped out of the Exhibition

when the pictures came to be actually hung; leaving some food for

pondering to those who care for the higher and completer forms of

pictorial work. They may feel--and the feeling would be only enhanced

by some other things they may have heard, and a great deal of what

they see on the Academy walls--that an off-hand style of painting,

now predominant, has interests of its own clashing with those of some

graver phases of art; and that judicial equity in adjusting these

interests may sometimes be in default. Sir Francis Grant, detailing

after-dinner statistics, may fancy that the whole question is settled

by saying that there is space for so many pictures only, and that

so many more were sent in; but this is far from being the _dernier

mot_. Efficiency No. 1 and semi-efficiency No. 2 may be contending

for a residue of space, and the admission of either is obviously the

exclusion of the other; but he would be a very innocent President,

non-academician artist, or private and unprofessional person, who

should thence conclude that the Pompey and the Cæsar have coequal

claims, especially the Pompey. Anybody, who has experienced, written,

read, heard, or seen, even a little of this ever-recurrent hanging

controversy, loathes its very atmosphere, and gladly retreats from it,

seldom without a sense of protest, and a chafing at injustice.

753. J. F. LEWIS--_Bedouin Arabs._--One of the very finest studies of

the kind produced by a hand unrivalled in its own way.

943. MUNRO--_The Sisters._--We are now in the Sculpture Room. Mr. Munro

has earned great popularity and a defined position by works of this

class, in which groups of children are treated with some graceful

incident and execution, and very genuinely graceful feeling. The

present group counts among the best of them.

948. WOOLNER--_Elaine with the Shield of Sir Launcelot._--The maiden

loves and muses, and pines as she muses; but as yet her doom only

hovers over her pityingly. The feeling of reserve and purity, of the

new experience of love timidly entertained, and yet already permeating

her whole life, and absorbing all her forces into its own surging and

resistless current, is predominant in this figure. Along with this,

and with much simplicity of pose and motive, one readily perceives

that the whole thing is uncommonly treated--_uncommonly_ rather than

_unusually_. The face has more of personal individuality, the turn

of the figure more shades of variety within unity, the execution

throughout more distinction, than British sculpture accustoms us to. So

also with the hands and feet: their peculiarities are all significant

and forecast, though to my eye they do not sufficiently partake of

the beauty of delicacy. Compare--or contrast would be the word--this

statuette with

981. J. S. WESTMACOTT--_Elaine._

984. ARMSTEAD--_Astronomy._--A bronze colossal figure, destined for the

Prince-Consort memorial in Hyde Park. It has a good decorative look,

and adequate grandeur of pose and line. It might fairly (so far as one

can judge before it is placed _in situ_) be termed a _proportional_

work; one, that is, in which the conception, treatment, and general

force of impression, have relation to its scale, and to its destination

as one in a series of impersonating figures.

987. LEIFCHILD--_The Dawn._--The sentiment of this figure is well

expressed in two lines from the MS. quotation:--

“The Dawn, whose splendour is a promise still,

Heralding more than Day can e’er fulfil.”

It is the sentiment of an ushering-in, an announcement, something

to come. Mr. Leifchild has produced several sculptural works eminent

for thoughtfulness in concentration. The present figure belongs to a

different order of work, yet something of the same spirit can be traced

in it.

1007. WOOLNER--_Thomas Carlyle._--The strong, emphatic, penetrating

style of Mr. Woolner, who searches under the surface of his sitter’s

face, and records on its surface what he has found beneath, gave

him the best of rights to deal with such a magnificent head as

Carlyle’s--marked as that is by a most powerful dominating expression,

with abundant points of subordinate detail and individuality. Mr.

Woolner had, indeed, done a medallion of the great writer many years

ago; now we get a bust worthily recording so memorable a man.

1027. WOOLNER--_Reliefs from the Iliad_ (_pedestal of the Bust of the

Right Honourable W. E. Gladstone_).--Here are three subjects executed

on a small scale, with a singular amount of original force. The third,

_Thetis consoling Achilles_, does not appear to me, in composition and

suggestion, so remarkable as the other two. _Pallas and Achilles at the

Trenches_, where the hero shouts to the Greeks a superhuman cry, while

Pallas overshadows him with her ægis, is a most vigorous and admirable

composition; indeed, but for its small size, one would be minded to

call it the finest thing Mr. Woolner has yet exhibited. _Thetis praying

to Zeus on behalf of Achilles_ is hardly second to it. The sea-goddess

rises on tiptoe to stroke the beard of the omnipotent cloud-compeller;

and no single touch perhaps could have given the amplitude and

primitiveness of the Homeric Pantheon more keenly than this. It is not

exactly _naïveté_, and still less exactly humour, but something happily

between both.

1053. WATTS--_Clytie_; _Marble Bust, unfinished._--This is an

experiment in sculpture by our distinguished painter. I find it a very

interesting one, and (_pace_ the professional sculptors) a remarkable

success. The head reverts over the right shoulder with a graceful and

energetic turn; and these qualities, especially that of energy, are

preserved in all points of view. The modelling of the bust and arms is

pulpy and creased--more comparable in tendency to that of the Elgin

Marbles than of later Greek sculpture. Indeed, I should surmise that

the thoughts of Mr. Watts, as he worked, were mostly shared between

Phidias and Michael Angelo. The spectator who finds some parts lumpy or

rude should bear in mind that the work is avowedly “unfinished”--even

if he does not deem the general conditions under which the experiment

has been made sufficient to abate the picking of holes.

* * * * *

Possibly some readers of this pamphlet may use it to be referred to as

they range through the Academy rooms, examining their contents. If this

is the case, I should regret to pass over without a word of mention

several works which, according to the scope and limitations of the

pamphlet, I have not found an opportunity of reviewing in any detail in

their proper order. After all, a great number of works against whose

skilfulness and merit I neither raise nor suggest any imputation will

be remaining totally unnamed. Meanwhile, a simple numerical list of

contributions may be added to which I would rather direct attention

thus barely than not at all. Some of them are productions of leading

importance: others have modest graces which should not pass unobserved.

The visitor must form his own opinion of whether and why they deserved

specification.

28. SWINTON--_The Earl Bathurst._

29. T. S. COOPER--_Descending from the Rock Grazing,

East Cumberland._

49. MAC WHIRTER--_Old Edinburgh, Night._

67. GRANT--_Miss Grant._

68. FLEUSS--_G. Makgill, Esq._

120. GRACE--_The Curfew tolls the Knell of parting Day._

124. GRANT--_The Earl of Bradford._

158. EDEN--_On the Thames near Pangbourne._

160. HARVEYMORE--_The Point, near Walton on the Naze._

168. J. B. BURGESS--_A Portrait._

170. H. MOORE--_Ebb-tide, Squall coming on._

176. CATHELINAU--_The Nurse._

184. HALLE--_Miss Jessie._

199. E. GILL--_Storm and Shipwreck on a Rocky Coast._

205. ELMORE--“_Two Women shall be grinding at the Mill._”

206. ZUCCOLI--_Wine Gratis._

208. Ditto--_Preparing to cook Indian Corn._

222. YEAMES--_The Chimney-Corner._

241. LEHMANN--_Portrait of a Gentleman._

251. NICOL--_A China Merchant._

267. GOODALL--_Mater Purissima._

272. ARCHER--_Burial of Guinevere._

290. WATTS--_The Meeting of Jacob and Esau._

298. V. COLE--_Sunlight Lingering on the Autumn Woods._

303. WELLS--_James Stansfeld, Esq., of Halifax._

321. POTT--_The Minuet._

322. G. D. LESLIE--_Mrs. Charles Dickens, Jun._

327. PRINSEP--_A Portrait._

340. FRITH--_Scene from “She Stoops to Conquer.”_

344. PERUGINI--_Daphne._

345. MRS. ROBBINSON--_The Firstborn._

346. RADFORD--_“No Man that Warreth” &c._

348. LUCY--_The Forced Abdication of Mary Stuart._

367. MISS A. THORNYCROFT--_Study of a Head._

378. BOUGHTON--_A Breton Pastoral._

387. WYLLIE--_Dover Castle and Town._

390. CALTHROP--_The Last Song of the Girondins, 1793._

400. ORCHARDSON--_Scene from “King Henry IV.”_

403. STANHOPE--_The Footsteps of the Flock._

416. WHAITE--_Harvest on the Mountains._

420. WADE--_A Stitch in Time._

452. H. MOORE--_Weather Moderating after a Gale._

467. MRS. WARD--_Sion House, 1553._

474. CROWE--_A Chiffonnier._

478. WELLS--_The Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne._

490. E. FRÈRE--_La Sortie de l’Ecole des Filles._

503. HEMY--_By the River Side, Antwerp._

504. NICOL--_Waiting at the Cross-roads._

520. ARMITAGE--_Herod’s Birthday Feast._

521. LIDDERDALE--_The Exiled Jacobite._

523. PRINSEP--_A Greek Widow at a Tomb._

529. HILLINGFORD--_Before the Tournament._

531. ARMSTRONG--_Daffodils._

532. OPIE--_The Musical Genius._

542. HAYLLAR--_Midsummer, Parham Hall, Suffolk._

551. GALE--_Nazareth._

552. GOLDIE--_A Child Martyr borne across the Roman Campagna

to one of the Catacombs._

571. MISS SANDYS--_Enid._

579. CALDERON--_Whither?_

580. MASON--_Netley Moor._

615. HODGSON--_Off the Downs in the Days of the Cæsars._

616. A. HAYWARD--_The Haunted House._

636. J. E. WILLIAMS--_The Bishop of Gloucester._

646. ARCHER--_Bringing home Fern, Evening._

648. MCCALLUM--_Near the Buck Gates, Sherwood Forest._

656. TOURRIER--_The Cloisters._

657. G. D. LESLIE--_The Empty Sleeve._

671. BRENNAN--_Via della Vita, Rome._

673. CROWE--_Mary Stuart, February 8th, 1586._

683. A. HUGHES--_Mrs. Edward Rhodes._

689. LOBLEY--_Fancies in the Fire._

727. R. DOYLE--_The Enchanted Tree._

754. A. C. H. LUXMOORE--_Searching for Treason._

763. J. F. LEWIS--_Camels._

764. COUNT G. V. ROSEN--_A Street in Cairo._

833. HARDWICK--_The Woods in Early Spring._

908. E. EDWARDS--_Four Etchings, Wells, &c._

915. C. N. LUXMOORE--_Pen and Ink Sketches from Nature._

1001. WOOLNER--_Hon. W. E. Frere, late of Bombay._

1029. Ditto--_The late Robert Leslie Ellis._

1040. BÖHM--_Miss Cumberbatch._

1052. AP GRIFFITH--_Cain preparing his Sacrifice._

1106. G. A. LAWSON--_The Maiden’s Secret._

1164. TUPPER--_Dr. Hyde Salter._

1169. G. MORGAN--_Study of a Head._

1194. LEIFCHILD--_The Rev. Thomas Jones._

_PART II._

BY

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

I have been asked to note down at random my impressions of some few

among this year’s pictures. These I am aware will have no weight or

value but that which a sincere and studious love of the art can give;

so much I claim for them, and so much only. To pass judgment or tender

counsel is beyond my aim or my desire.

Returning from the Academy I find two pictures impressed on my memory

more deeply and distinctly than the rest. First of these--first of

all, it seems to me, for depth and nobility of feeling and meaning--is

Mr. Watts’ “Wife of Pygmalion.” The soft severity of perfect beauty

might serve alike for woman or statue, flesh or marble; but the eyes

have opened already upon love, with a tender and grave wonder; her

curving ripples of hair seem just warm from the touch and the breath

of the goddess, moulded and quickened by lips and hands diviner than

her sculptor’s. So it seems a Greek painter must have painted women,

when Greece had mortal pictures fit to match her imperishable statues.

Her shapeliness and state, her sweet majesty and amorous chastity,

recall the supreme Venus of Melos. In this “translation” of a Greek

statue into an English picture, no less than in the bust of Clytie,

we see how in the hands of a great artist painting and sculpture may

become as sister arts indeed, yet without invasion or confusion; how,

without any forced alliance of form and colour, a picture may share

the gracious grandeur of a statue, a statue may catch something of the

subtle bloom of beauty proper to a picture.

The other picture of which I would speak, unlike enough to this in

sentiment or in tone, has in common with it the loftiest quality of

beauty pure and simple. Indeed, of all the few great or the many

good painters now at work among us, no one has so keen and clear a

sense of this absolute beauty as Mr. Albert Moore. His painting is to

artists what the verse of Théophile Gautier is to poets; the faultless

and secure expression of an exclusive worship of things formally

beautiful. That contents them; they leave to others the labours and

the joys of thought or passion. The outlines of their work are pure,

decisive, distinct; its colour is of the full sunlight. This picture

of “Azaleas” is as good a type as need be of their manner of work.

A woman delicately draped, but showing well the gentle mould of her

fine limbs through the thin soft raiment; pale small leaves and bright

white blossoms about her and above, a few rose-red petals fallen

on the pale marble and faint-coloured woven mat before her feet; a

strange and splendid vessel, inlaid with designs of Eastern colour;

another--clasped by one long slender hand and filled from it with

flowers--of soft white, touched here and there into blossom of blue:

this is enough. The melody of colour, the symphony of form is complete:

one more beautiful thing is achieved, one more delight is born into the

world; and its meaning is beauty; and its reason for being is to be.

We all owe so much to Mr. Leighton for the selection and intention of

his subjects--always noble or beautiful as these are, always worthy of

a great and grave art; a thing how inexpressibly laudable and admirable

in a time given over to the school of slashed breeches and the school

of blowsy babyhood!--we owe him, I say, so much for this that it seems

ungracious to say a word of his work except in the way of thanks and

praise. I find no true touch of Greek beauty in the watery Hellenism

of his Ariadne: she is a nobly moulded model of wax, such a figure

as a mediæval sorceress might set to waste before a charmed fire

and burn out the life of the living woman. The “Actæa” has the charm

that a well-trained draughtsman can give to a naked fair figure; this

charm it has, and no other; it has also a painful trimness suggestive

of vapour-baths, of “strigil” and “rusma,” of the toilet labours of

a Juvenalian lady; not the fresh sweet strength of limbs native to

the sea, but the lower loveliness of limbs that have been steamed and

scraped. The picture of Acme and Septimius is excellently illustrative

of Mr. Theodore Martin’s verse; it is in no wise illustrative of

Catullus. I doubt if Love would have sneezed approval of these lovers

either to left or to right. As for detail, surely one arm at least of

his and one leg at least of hers are singular samples of drawing. In

his two other pictures Mr. Leighton has, I think, reached his highest

mark for this year. The majestic figure and noble head of Jonathan are

worthy of the warrior whose love was wonderful, passing the love of

woman; the features resolute, solicitous, heroic. The boy beside him is

worthy to stand so near; his action has all the grace of mere nature,

as he stoops slightly from the shoulder to sustain the heavy quiver.

The portrait of a lady hard by has a gracious and noble beauty, too

rare even among the abler of English workmen in this line.

The genius of Mr. Millais is of course a thing indestructible; but

all that can be done to deaden or distort it the Academy has done.

“They have scotched the snake, not killed it”--being as it is a

“Serpent-of-Eternity.” There is nothing here to recall the painter of

past years. There is no significance or depth, no subtlety of beauty;

there is the fit and equal ability of an able craftsman. The group of

three sisters is a sample of this excellent ability; no man needs to

be told that. There is no lack of graceful expressive composition;

there is no stint of ribbons and trimmings. There is a bitter want

of beauty, of sweetness, of the harmony which should hang about the

memories of men after seeing it as an odour or a cadence about their

senses: and this beauty, this sweetness, this harmony, all great and

all genuine pictures leave with us for an after-gust, not soon to pass

or perish. The picture called “Rosalind and Celia” gives us graver

and deeper offence. Of the landscape nothing evil shall be said, and

nothing good; but the figures cry aloud for remark and reprobation.

These women are none of Shakspeare’s. Think but in passing of the

fresh grace, the laughters as of April, the light delicate daring,

the tender and brilliant sweetness of the true “Ganymede;” what is

left of all this? She figures here as a fair-faced ballet-girl, with

a soul absorbed by the calf of her leg. And this dull, sickly, stolid

woman huddling heavily against her is Celia; this is the purest rarest

type that Shakspeare could give of heroic and sweet devotion; this is

she who alone even among his women could not live but in another’s

life. And Touchstone--can this sour ape-cheeked face be the face that

Jaques “met i’ the forest?” these the lips that rallied Corin and wooed

Aubrey? “Bear your body more seemly,” Touchstone. And with all this

debasement and distortion of Shakspeare’s figures, we do not even get

by way of amends a well-wrought piece of work; forget if you will the

names attached, this is still but an unlovely picture. It seems that

Mr. Millais has forgotten how to paint a lady; his women here all smack

of the side-scenes or the servants’ hall. Admirable for its strong sure

power of painting, the “Stella” is, nevertheless, pitiably vacuous.

If the sailors at Nelson’s tomb appeal somewhat overmuch to popular

sentiment of no deep or delicate kind, the picture is yet a noble one

and impressive. The faces are full of simple and keen feeling, of tacit

and loyal reverence. There is a superfluous ugliness in the two wooden

stumps; and perhaps the knack by which the light is arranged so as to

strike out severally from each pane of the glass lantern is too like

one of those petty feats which are as lime-twigs laid to catch the

eyes and tongues of the half-trained sightseers who jostle and saunter

through a gallery, pausing now and again to “wonder with a foolish face

of praise.” The worst of these pictures, painted by a meaner man, would

justly win notice and applause; but it is no small thing that a great

man should do no greater work than some of this. The clear eye and the

strong hand have not forgotten their cunning; it is a master whom we

find too often at work fit only for a craftsman. Surely a painter who

has done things so noble will not always be content to take for his

battle-cry, “Philistia, be thou glad of me.”

I return now to the works of Mr. Watts. His little landscape is full

of that beauty which lives a dim brief life between sunset and dusk.

The faint flames and mobile colours of the sky, the dim warm woods, the

flight of doves about the dovecote, have all their part in the grave

charm of evening, are all given back to the eye with the grace and

strength of a master’s touch; the stacks that catch the glare and glow

of low sunlight seem crude and violent in their intense yellow colour

and hard angles of form: natural it may be, but a natural discord that

jars upon the eye. “The Meeting of Jacob and Esau,” though something

too academic, has in part the especial, the personal grandeur of Mr.

Watts’s larger manner of work. In the pale smooth worn face of Jacob

there is a shy sly shame which befits the supplanter: his well-nigh

passive action, as of one half reassured and half abashed, bares to

view the very heart and root of his nature; and the rough strenuous

figure of Esau, in its frank grandeur of brave sun-brown limbs, speaks

aloud on the other side of the story, by the fervid freedom of his

impetuous embrace. Far off, between the meeting figures, midmost of the

remote cavalcade, the fair clear face of a woman looks out, pale under

folds of white, patient and ill at ease; her one would take to be Leah.

It is noticeable that one year, not over rich in excellent work, should

give us two admirable pictures drawn from the Hebrew chronicles. What

they call scriptural art in England does not often bear such acceptable

fruit. I know not if even Mr. Watts has ever painted a nobler portrait

than this of Mr. Panizzi; it recalls the majestic strength and depth of

Morone’s work: there is the same dominant power of hand and keenness of

eye, the same breadth and subtlety of touch, the same noble reticence

of colour.

Before I pass on to speak of any other painter, I will here interpolate

what I have to say of Mr. Watts’s bust of Clytie. Not imitative, not

even assimilative of Michel Angelo’s manner, it yet by some vague

and ineffable quality brings to mind his work rather than any Greek

sculptor’s. There is the same intense and fiery sentiment, the same

grandeur of device, the same mystery of tragedy. The colour and the

passion of this work are the workman’s own. Never was a divine legend

translated into diviner likeness. Large, deep-bosomed, superb in arm

and shoulder, as should be the woman growing from flesh into flower

through a godlike agony, from fairness of body to fullness of flower,

large-leaved and broad of blossom, splendid and sad--yearning with

all the life of her lips and breasts after the receding light and the

removing love--this is the Clytie indeed whom sculptors and poets have

loved for her love of the Sun their God. The bitter sweetness of the

dividing lips, the mighty mould of the rising breasts, the splendour of

her sorrow is divine: divine the massive weight of carven curls bound

up behind, the heavy straying flakes of unfilleted hair below; divine

the clear cheeks and low full forehead, the strong round neck made for

the arms of a god only to clasp and bend down to their yoke. We seem to

see the lessening sunset that she sees, and fear too soon to watch that

stately beauty slowly suffer change and die into flower, that solid

sweetness of body sink into petal and leaf. Sculpture such as this has

actual colour enough without need to borrow of an alien art.

The work of M. Legros is always of such a solid and serious excellence

as to require no passing study. His picture of Henry VIII. and

courtiers is, I must think, an instance of absolute error; it has

no finer quality of its own, and the reminiscence of Holbein is not

fortunate. “The Refectory” makes large amends: he has never done more

perfect work than this. The cadence of colours is just and noble;

witness the red-leaved book open in one monk’s hand on the white cloth,

the clear green jug on the table, the dim green bronze of the pitcher

on the floor; beside it a splendid cat, its fur beautiful with warm

black bars on an exquisite ground of dull grey, its expectant eye and

mouth lifted without further or superfluous motion. The figures are

noble by mere force of truth; there is nothing of vulgar ugliness

or theatrical holiness. As good but not so great as the celebrated

“Ex-voto” of a past year, this picture is wholly worthy of a name

already famous.

The large work of Baron Leys stands out amid the overflow all round it

of bad and feeble attempts or pretences at work in all the strength

of its great quality of robust invention. It has the interest of

excellent narrative; in every face there is a story. A great picture

is something other than this; but this also is a great thing done. It

is a chapter of history written in colours; a study which may remind

us of Meinhold’s great romances, though the author of “Sidonia the

Sorceress” may stand higher as a writer than Leys as a painter. All the

realistic detail is here, but not the vital bloom and breath of action

which Meinhold had to give. Rigour of judicial accuracy might refuse to

this work the praise of a noble picture; for to that the final imprint

and seal of beauty is requisite; and this beauty, if a man’s hand be

but there to bestow it, may be wrought out of homely or heavenly faces,

out of rare things or common, out of Titian’s women or Rembrandt’s.

It is not the lack of prettiness which lowers the level of a picture.

Here for imagination we have but intellect, for charm of form we have

but force of thought. Too much also is matter of mere memory; thus

the clerk writing is but a bastard brother of Holbein’s Erasmus. Form

and colour are vigorous, if hard also and heavy; and when all is said

it must in the end be still accepted as a work of high and rare power

after its own kind, and that no common kind, nor unworthy of studious

admiration and grave thanksgiving.

It is well to compare this with the work that passes for historical in

many English eyes. Doubtless it may be said that such things as some of

these are not worth mention in a study so imperfect and discursive as

this must be; that they were better passed by in peace and left to find

their level. But it has been well said, “Il est des morts qu’il faut

qu’on tue;” and though undesirous in general to take that duty out of

abler hands, I will choose but one sample at random, on which I came by

chance, looking up from Sir E. Landseer’s dog and deer, a work of brute

ability, excellently repulsive as all brutish pain must be if duly

rendered. This select sample of historic art in England is a picture

of Mary Stuart about to sign her abdication. Posthumous parasites have

often libelled her with praise of pencil or of pen; but retribution

never yet fell heavier on her memory. She, the woman of such keen clear

wits, such indomitable nerves, such pitiless charms and such tameless

passions, that the very record of them can yet seduce and daunt men as

she daunted and seduced them of old--the fairest, subtlest, hardest

among women, with a heart of iron and fire--she shows here a fool’s

face, doubtful between a simper and a sob, raised in pitiable appeal

to a ring of stagestruck ruffians. The picture is worth notice as a

tangible piece of proof that certain men do really accept this as the

historic type of a figure so famous as hers. Another hand has drawn her

portrait, perhaps somewhat nearer life, to this effect; (I take leave

to cite the lines as a corrective, being reminded of them at sight of

this picture. They may perhaps find place here, as the Queen of Scots

figures thrice in this year’s show:)--

“Nor shall men ever say

But she was born right royal; full of sins,

Dyed hand and tongue with bloody stains and black,

Unmerciful, unfaithful, but of heart

So high and fiery, and of spirit so clear,

In extreme danger and pain so lifted up,

So of all violent things inviolable,

So large of courage, so superb of soul,

So sheathed with iron mind invincible

And arms unbreached of fireproof constancy--

By shame not shaken, fear or force or death,

Change, or all confluence of calamities--

And so at her worst need beloved, and so,

(Naked of help and honour when she seemed,

As other women would be, of their strength

Stript) still so of herself adorable,

She shall be a world’s wonder to all time,

A deadly glory watched of marvelling men

Not without praise, not without noble tears,

And if without what she would never have

Who had it never, pity--yet from none

Quite without reverence and some kind of love

For that which was so royal.”

Having delivered my soul as to this matter, I return not unrelieved

from historic ground, with some hope that this aberration may prove

pardonable when the provocation has been taken into account.

I have compared Albert Moore to Théophile Gautier; I am tempted to

compare Mr. Leslie to Hégésippe Moreau. The low melodious notes of his

painting have the soft reserve of tone and still sweetness of touch

which belong to the idyllic poet of the Voulzie. Sometimes he almost

attains the gentle grace of the other’s best verse--though I hardly

remember a picture of his as exquisite for music and meaning as the

“Étrennes à la Fermière.” His work of this year has much of tender

beauty, especially the picture called “Home News;” his portraits have

always a pleasant and genuine quality of their own; and in the picture

called “The Empty Sleeve,” though trenching somewhat nearly on the

obvious and facile ground of family feeling and domestic exhibition,

there is enough of truth and grace visible to keep it up on the proper

level of art.

The “Evening Hymn” of Mr. Mason is in my mind the finest I have seen

of his works, admirable beyond all where all are admirable. A row of

girls, broken in rank here and there, stand and sing on a rough green

rise of broken ground; behind them is a wild spare copse, beyond it

a sunset of steady and sombre fire stains red with its sunken rays

the long low space of sky; above this broad band of heavy colour the

light is fitful and pale. The raised faces and opening mouths of the

singers are as graceful as those carved by Della Robbia or Donatello

in their choral groups; nothing visible of gape or strain, yet the

action of song is made sensible. Their fine features are not over fine;

they have all an air of the fields and the common country, which is

confirmed in the figures, cast in a somewhat ruder mould, of the two

young peasants who stand listening. One girl stands off a little from

the rest, conning the text with eyes set fast upon her open book; the

rest sing freely at large; the middle group of three girls is most

noble and exquisite. Rich at once and grave in the colour, stately and

sweet in the composition, this picture is a model of happy and majestic

temperance.

Mr. Walker’s picture of “Vagrants,” has more of actual beauty than

his “Bathers” of last year; more of brilliant skill and swift sharp

talent it can hardly have. The low marsh with its cold lights of grey

glittering waters here and there; the stunted brushwood, the late and

pale sky; the figures gathering about the kindling fire, sad and wild

and worn and untameable; the one stately shape of a girl standing

erect, her passionate beautiful face seen across the smoke of the scant

fuel; all these are wrought with such appearance of ease and security

and speed of touch, that the whole seems almost a feat of mere skill

rather than a grave sample of work; but in effect it is no such slight

thing.

In Mr. Armstrong’s “Daffodils” there is a still sobriety of beauty, a

quiet justice and a fine gravity of manner, far unlike the flash and

flare of obtrusive cleverness which vexes us so often in English work

of this kind. The sombre sweetness of a coming twilight is poured upon

hill and field; only the yellow flowers wreathed about the child’s

hat or held by the boy kneeling on the stile relieve the tender tone

of sunless daylight with soft and tempered colour. The action of the

figures has all the grace of simple truth and childlike nature.

“The Exiled Jacobite” of Mr. Lidderdale is full of the noble sadness of

the subject, excellent also as a genuine picture, a work of composed

harmony. The noble worn face of the old man, stamped with the sacred

seal of patience and pain, looks seaward over the discoloured stonework

of the low wall, beyond the dull grey roofs of a low-lying town that

slope to the foreign shore. His eyes are not upon the dusky down

sweeping up behind, the rough quaint houses and deep hollow, veiled all

and blue with the misty late air; they are set, sad and strong, upon

things they shall never see indeed again. From the whole figure the

spirit of the old song speaks:

“Now all is done that man can do,

And all is done in vain.”

The pathos of the picture is masculine and plain as truth; the painter

might have written under it the simple first words of the same most

noble song:

“It was a’ for our rightful king.”

Mr. Poynter’s picture of “The Catapult” has an admirable energy of

thought and handiwork; the force and weight of faculty shown in it

would be worthy remark if the result were less excellent. Excellent of

its kind it is, but not delightful; surprise and esteem it provokes,

but not the glad gratitude with which we should welcome all great work.

The labouring figures and the monstrous engine are worthy of wonder and

praise; but there is a want on the whole of beauty, a want in detail of

interest. The painter’s “Israel in Egypt” had more of both qualities,

though there is this year a visible growth of power; it left upon our

eyes a keen impression of gorgeous light and cruelty and splendour and

suffering; it had more room for the rival effects at once of fine art

and of casual sentiment.

The two pictures of Mr. Hughes show all his inevitable grace and tender

way of work; they are full of gentle colour and soft significance. The

smaller is to us the sweeter sample; but both are noticeable for their

clear soft purity and bright delicacy of thought and touch. In the

larger picture the bird singing on the sill, delicious as it would be

anywhere, has here a double charm.

There is a genuine force and a quaint beauty in Mr. Houghton’s

picture--portrait it can hardly be called--of a gentleman in his

laboratory. His other picture, of a boy lifting up a younger child

to smell a rose on the tree, while a kitten bounds at his feet, is

admirable for its plain direct grace of manner.

The head of a priest by Mr. Burgess has a clear air of truth and

strength; its Spanish manner recalls the style of Phillip, whom the

painter, it seems, has sought to emulate. Among the few portraits worth

a look or a word, is that of Mrs. Birket Foster by Mr. Orchardson;

though the showy simplicity be something of a knack, and the painting

of woodwork and drapery rather a trick of trade acquired than a test

of accomplished power, the work is so well done and the action so

plain and good as to bear and to reward a second look.

The show of this year is noticeably barren in landscape. Nothing is

here of Inchbold, nothing of Anthony. The time which can bring forth

but two such men should have also brought forth men capable to judge

them and to enjoy. Even here however the field is not all sterile:

there are two studies of sea by Mr. H. Moore, worthy to redeem the

whole waste of a year. One of these shows an ebbing tide before the

squall comes up; the soft low tumult of washing waves, not yet beaten

into storm and foam, but weltering and whitening under cloud and wind,

will soon gather power and passion; as yet there is some broken and

pallid sunlight flung over it by faint flashes, which serve but to show

the deepening trouble and quickening turmoil of reluctant waters. The

shifting and subtle colours of the surging sea and grey blowing sky are

beautiful and true. The study of storm subsiding as the waves beat up

inshore, though vigorous and faithful, is in parts somewhat heavy; but

the jostling breakers muster and fight and fall with all the grace and

force of nature.

In these stray notes I had meant to set down nothing in dispraise of

this picture or that, but merely to say of such as I found good the

best I had to say; passing by of necessity many well worthy of praise

or blame, and many more not wholly worthy of either. Of these indeed

the main part of an exhibition must usually be made up; of mediocrities

and ingenuities which art must on the whole ignore and put aside

without rebuke, though they may not call aloud for fire to consume

them. But a word may here be said of M. Édouard Frère; a name that

carries weight with it. He has been likened to Wordsworth; it must be

a Wordsworth shorn of his beams. In the large field of the poet there

are barren and weedy places enough; he may at times, with relaxed hand

and bedimmed eye, drop from the hills to the quagmires, and croak there

to children, instead of singing to men; but the qualities which at such

times a great poet may have in common with a small painter are not the

qualities which make him great. When we find in M. Frère the majesty

and music of thought, the stately strength and high-toned harmonies,

the deep sure touch and keen-edged pathos of the poet, then only we may

grant the kinship. To the rags and tatters, the stubble and sweepings

of Wordsworth, he meantime is more than welcome. What is there in this

year’s picture well conceived, well composed, well painted? what of

effect, of harmony, of variety in these crude monotonous figures? A

great artist in verse or in colour may assuredly make some great thing

out of the commonest unwashed group of dull faces; but the workman must

first be great; and this workman, without force of hand or delicacy,

without depth or grace of painting, would pass off on us, in lieu of

these, such mere trickeries of coarse and easy sentiment, fit only

to “milk the maudlin” eyes of M. Prudhomme and his wife. Turn from

his work to that of M. Legros, and compare the emasculate with the

masculine side of French art.

Among the drawings here are two studies by Mr. Sandys, both worthy of

the high place held by the artist. One is a portrait full of force

and distinction, drawn as perhaps no other man among us can draw; the

other, a woman’s face, is one of his most solid and splendid designs;

a woman of rich, ripe, angry beauty, she draws one warm long lock of

curling hair through her full and moulded lips, biting it with bared

bright teeth, which add something of a tiger’s charm to the sleepy and

couching passion of her fair face. But of that which is not here I have

also something to say. Exclusion and suppression of certain things in

the range of art are not really possible to any academy upon earth, be

it pictorial or literary. It is natural for academies to try, when any

rare or new good thing comes before them in either kind; witness much

of academic history in England as in France; but the record of their

ill-will has always been the record of their impotence. Mr. Sandys’

picture of “Medea” is well enough known by this time, wherever there

is any serious knowledge of art, to claim here some word of comment,

not less seasonable than if it were now put forward to grace the great

show of the year. Like Coriolanus, the painter might say if he would

that it is his to banish the judges, his to reject the “common cry” of

academics. For this, beyond all doubt, is as yet his masterpiece. Pale

as from poison, with the blood drawn back from her very lips, agonized

in face and limbs with the labour and the fierce contention of old

love with new, of a daughter’s love with a bride’s, the fatal figure

of Medea pauses a little on the funereal verge of the wood of death,

in act to pour a blood-like liquid into the soft opal-coloured hollow

of a shell. The future is hard upon her, as a cup of bitter poison set

close to her mouth; the furies of Absyrtus, the furies of her children,

rise up against her from the unrisen years; her eyes are hungry and

helpless, full of a fierce and raging sorrow. Hard by her, henbane and

aconite and nightshade thrive and grow full of fruit and death; before

her fair feet the bright-eyed toads engender after their kind. Upon the

golden ground behind is wrought in allegoric decoration the likeness of

the ship Argo, with other emblems of the tragic things of her life. The

picture is grand alike for wealth of symbol and solemnity of beauty.

The present year has other pictures to be proud of, not submitted to

the loose and slippery judgment of an academy. Of one or two such I am

here permitted to make mention. The great picture which Mr. Whistler

has now in hand is not yet finished enough for any critical detail to

be possible; it shows already promise of a more majestic and excellent

beauty of form than his earlier studies, and of the old delicacy and

melody of ineffable colour. Of three slighter works lately painted,

I may set down a few rapid notes; but no task is harder than this

of translation from colour into speech, when the speech must be so

hoarse and feeble, when the colour is so subtle and sublime. Music or

verse might strike some string accordant in sound to such painting,

but a mere version such as this is as a psalm of Tate’s to a psalm of

David’s. In all of these the main strings touched are certain varying

chords of blue and white, not without interludes of the bright and

tender tones of floral purple or red. In two of the studies the keynote

is an effect of sea; in one, a sketch for the great picture, the soft

brilliant floor-work and wall-work of a garden balcony serve in its

stead to set forth the flowers and figures of flower-like women. In

a second, we have again a gathering of women in a balcony; from the

unseen flowerland below tall almond-trees shoot up their topmost

crowns of tender blossom; beyond and far out to west and south the

warm and solemn sea spreads wide and soft without wrinkle of wind. The

dim grey floor-work in front, delicate as a summer cloud in colour,

is antiphonal to the bluer wealth of water beyond: and between these

the fair clusters of almond-blossom make divine division. Again the

symphony or (if you will) the antiphony is sustained by the fervid or

the fainter colours of the women’s raiment as they lean out one against

another, looking far oversea in that quiet depth of pleasure without

words when spirit and sense are filled full of beautiful things, till

it seems that at a mere breath the charmed vessels of pleasure would

break or overflow, the brimming chalices of the senses would spill

this wine of their delight. In the third of these studies the sea is

fresher, lightly kindling under a low clear wind; at the end of a pier

a boat is moored, and women in the delicate bright robes of eastern

fashion and colour so dear to the painter are about to enter it; one

is already midway the steps of the pier; she pauses, half unsure of

her balance, with an exquisite fluttered grace of action. Her comrades

above are also somewhat troubled, their robes lightly blown about by

the sea-wind, but not too much for light laughter and a quivering

pleasure. Between the dark wet stair-steps and piles of the pier the

sweet bright sea shows foamless here and blue. This study has more of

the delight of life than the others; which among three such may be most

beautiful I neither care to guess nor can. They all have the immediate

beauty, they all give the direct delight of natural things; they seem

to have grown as a flower grows, not in any forcing house of ingenious

and laborious cunning. This indeed is in my eyes a special quality of

Mr. Whistler’s genius; a freshness and fulness of the loveliest life

of things, with a high clear power upon them which seems to educe a

picture as the sun does a blossom or a fruit.

It is well known that the painter of whom I now propose to speak has

never suffered exclusion or acceptance at the hand of any academy. To

such acceptance or such rejection all other men of any note have been

and may be liable. It is not less well known that his work must always

hold its place as second in significance and value to no work done by

any English painter of his time. Among the many great works of Mr. D.

G. Rossetti, I know of none greater than his two latest. These are

types of sensual beauty and spiritual, the siren and the sibyl. The one

is a woman of the type of Adam’s first wife; she is a living Lilith,

with ample splendour of redundant hair;

She excels

All women in the magic of her locks;

And when she winds them round a young man’s neck

She will not ever set him free again.

Clothed in soft white garments, she draws out through a comb the heavy

mass of hair like thick spun gold to fullest length; her head leans

back half sleepily, superb and satiate with its own beauty; the eyes

are languid, without love in them or hate; the sweet luxurious mouth

has the patience of pleasure fulfilled and complete, the warm repose of

passion sure of its delight. Outside, as seen in the glimmering mirror,

there is full summer; the deep and glowing leaves have drunk in the

whole strength of the sun. The sleepy splendour of the picture is a fit

raiment for the idea incarnate of faultless fleshly beauty and peril

of pleasure unavoidable. For this serene and sublime sorceress there

is no life but of the body; with spirit (if spirit there be) she can

dispense. Were it worth her while for any word to divide those terrible

tender lips, she too might say with the hero of the most perfect and

exquisite book of modern times--_Mademoiselle de Maupin_--“Je trouve

la terre aussi belle que le ciel, et je pense que la correction de la

forme est la vertu.” Of evil desire or evil impulse she has nothing;

and nothing of good. She is indifferent, equable, magnetic; she charms

and draws down the souls of men by pure force of absorption, in no wise

wilful or malignant; outside herself she cannot live, she cannot even

see: and because of this she attracts and subdues all men at once in

body and in spirit. Beyond the mirror she cares not to look, and could

not.

“Ma mia suora Rahel mai non si smaga

Dal suo miraglio, e siede tutto ’l giorno.”

So, rapt in no spiritual contemplation, she will sit to all time,

passive and perfect: the outer light of a sweet spring day flooding

and filling the massive gold of her hair. By the reflection in a deep

mirror of fervent foliage from without, the chief chord of stronger

colour is touched in this picture; next in brilliance and force of

relief is the heap of curling and tumbling hair on which the sunshine

strikes; the face and head of the siren are withdrawn from the full

stroke of the light.

After this faint essay at an exposition, the weighty and melodious

words in which the painter has recast his thought (words inscribed

on the frame of the picture) will be taken as full atonement for my

shortcomings; I fear only that the presumption and insufficience of the

commentator will now be but the more visible.

LADY LILITH.

Of Adam’s first wife, Lilith, it is told

(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve)

That, ere the snake’s, her sweet tongue could deceive,

And her enchanted hair was the first gold.

And still she sits, young while the earth is old,

And, subtly of herself contemplative,

Draws men to watch the bright net she can weave,

Till heart and body and life are in its hold.

Rose, foxglove, poppy, are her flowers: for where

Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent

And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?

Lo! as that youth’s eyes burned at thine, so went

Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent,

And round his heart one strangling golden hair.

The other picture gives the type opposite to this; a head of serene and

spiritual beauty, severe and tender, with full and heavy hair falling

straight in grave sweet lines, not like Lilith’s exuberant of curl

and coil; with carven column of throat, solid and round and flawless

as living ivory; with still and sacred eyes and pure calm lips; an

imperial votaress truly, in maiden meditation: yet as true and tangible

a woman of mortal mould, as ripe and firm of flesh as her softer and

splendid sister. The mystic emblems behind her show her power upon

love and death to make them loyal servants to the law of her lofty and

solemn spirit. Here also the artist alone should first be heard; and

I, having leave to act as his outrider, give him the due precedence.

SIBYLLA PALMIFERA.

Under the arch of life, where love and death,

Terror and mystery, guard her shrine, I saw

Beauty enthroned; and though her gaze struck awe,

I drew it in as simply as my breath.

Hers are the eyes which, over and beneath,

The sky and sea bend on thee,--which can draw,

By sea or sky or woman, to one law,

The allotted bondman of her palm and wreath.

This is that Lady Beauty, in whose praise

Thy voice and hand shake still,--long known to thee

By flying hair and fluttering hem,--the beat

Following her daily of thy heart and feet,

How passionately and irretrievably,

In what fond flight, how many ways and days!

After these all weaker words must fall flat enough; but something of

further description may yet be allowed. Behind this figure of the ideal

and inaccessible beauty, an inlaid wall of alternate alabaster and

black marble bears inwrought on its upper part the rival twin emblems

of love and death; over the bare carven skull poppies impend, and

roses over the sweet head with bound blind eyes: in her hand is the

palm-branch, a sceptre of peace and of power. The cadence of colour is

splendid and simple, a double trinity of green and red, the dim red

robe, the deep red poppies, the soft red roses; and again the green

veil wound about with wild flowers, the green down of poppy-leaves, the

sharper green of rose-leaves.

An unfinished picture of Beatrice (the Beata Beatrix of the Vita

Nuova), a little before death, is perhaps the noblest of Mr. Rossetti’s

many studies after Dante. This work is wholly symbolic and ideal; a

strange bird flown earthward from heaven brings her in its beak a

full-blown poppy, the funereal flower of sleep. Her beautiful head

lies back, sad and sweet, with fast-shut eyes in a death-like trance

that is not death; over it the shadow of death seems to impend, making

sombre the splendour of her ample hair and tender faultless features.

Beyond her the city and the bridged river are seen as from far, dim

and veiled with misty lights as though already “sitting alone, made

as a widow.” Love, one side, comes bearing in his hand a heart in

flames, having his eyes bent upon Dante’s; on the other side is Dante,

looking sadly across the way towards Love. In this picture the light is

subdued and soft, touching tenderly from behind the edges of Beatrice’s

hair and raiment; in the others there is a full fervour of daylight.

The great picture of Venus Verticordia has now been in great measure

recast; the head is of a diviner type of beauty; golden butterflies

hover about the halo of her hair, alight upon the apple or the arrow in

her hands; her face has the sweet supremacy of a beauty imperial and

immortal; her glorious bosom seems to exult and expand as the roses

on each side of it. The painting of leaf and fruit and flower in this

picture is beyond my praise or any man’s; but of one thing I will here

take note; the flash of green brilliance from the upper leaves of the

trellis against the sombre green of the trees behind. Once more it must

appear that the painter alone can translate into words as perfect in

music and colour the sense and spirit of his work.

VENUS VERTICORDIA.

She hath it in her hand to give it thee,

Yet almost in her heart would hold it back;

She muses, with her eyes upon the track

Of that which in thy spirit they can see.

Haply, “Behold, he is at peace,” saith she:

“Alas! the apple for his lips--the dart

That follows its brief sweetness to his heart--

The wandering of his feet perpetually!”

A little space her glance is still and coy;

But if she give the fruit that works her spell,

Those eyes shall flame as for her Phrygian boy;

Then shall her bird’s strained throat the woe foretell,

And her far seas moan as a single shell,

And through her dark grove strike the light of Troy.

Another work, as yet incomplete, is a study of La Pia; she is seen

looking forth from the ramparts of her lord’s castle, over the fatal

lands without; her pallid splendid face hangs a little forward, wan

and white against the mass of dark deep hair; under her hands is a

work of embroidery, hanging still on the frame unfinished; just touched

by the weak weary hands, it trails forward across the lap of her pale

green raiment, into the foreground of the picture. In her eyes is a

strange look of wonder and sorrow and fatigue, without fear and without

pain, as though she were even now looking beyond earth into the soft

and sad air of purgatory: she presses the deadly marriage-ring into

the flesh of her finger, so deep that the soft skin is bloodless and

blanched from the intense imprint of it. Two other studies, as yet only

sketched, give promise of no less beauty; the subject of one was long

since handled by the artist in a slighter manner. It also is taken

from the Vita Nuova; Dante in a dream beholding Beatrice dead, tended

by handmaidens, and Love, with bow and dart in hand, in act to kiss

her beautiful dead mouth. The other is a design of Perseus showing to

Andromeda the severed head of Medusa, reflected in water; an old and

well-worn subject, but renewed and reinformed with life by the vital

genius of the artist. In the Pompeian picture we see the lovers at

halt beside a stream, on their homeward way; here we see them in their

house, bending over the central cistern or impluvium of the main court.

The design is wonderful for grace and force; the picture will assuredly

be one of the painter’s greatest.

Wide and far apart as lie their provinces of work, their tones of

thought and emotion, the two illustrious artists of whom I have just

said a short and inadequate word have in common one supreme quality of

spirit and of work, coloured and moulded in each by his individual and

inborn force of nature; the love of beauty for the very beauty’s sake,

the faith and trust in it as in a god indeed. This gift of love and

faith, now rare enough, has been and should be ever the common apanage

of artists. _Rien n’est vrai que le beau_; this should be the beginning

and the ending of their belief, held in no small or narrow sense,

but in the largest and most liberal scope of meaning. Beauty may be

strange, quaint, terrible, may play with pain as with pleasure, handle

a horror till she leave it a delight; she forsakes not such among her

servants as Webster or as Goya. No good art is unbeautiful; but much

able and effective work may be, and is. Mere skill, mere thought and

trouble, mere feeling or dexterity, will never on earth make a man

painter or poet or artist in any kind. Hundreds of English pictures

just now have but these to boast of; and with these even studious and

able men are often now content; forgetful that art is no more a matter

of mere brain-work than of mere handicraft. The worship of beauty,

though beauty be itself transformed and incarnate in shapes diverse

without end, must be simple and absolute; hence only must the believer

expect profit or reward. Over every building made sacred to art of any

sort, upon the hearts of all who strive after it to serve it, there

should be written these words of the greatest master now living among

us:--

La beauté est parfaite,

La beauté peut toute chose,

La beauté est la seule chose au monde qui n’existe pas à demi.

THE END.

LONDON:

SAVILI, EDWARDS AND CO., PRINTERS, CHANDOS STREET, COVENT GARDEN.

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Transcriber’s Note:

Punctuation has been standardised; hyphenation has been retained as it

appears in the original publication.

The following changes have been made:

Page 30

1052. APGRIFFITH _changed to_

1052. AP GRIFFITH

Page 42

But a word may here be said of M. Edouard Frère _changed to_

But a word may here be said of M. Édouard Frère

Page 47

And soft-shed fingers and soft sleep shall snare? _changed to_

And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?