# Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868/Part 1

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.
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 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.
10. Leys—La Famille Pallavicini de Génes 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—Téte 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, Esg., 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 ​carving—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 pictare 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 colouriste.
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 Septimus.—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, hang 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, Esg—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. Farther 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—Relic 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. Elmorr—"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.
394. Calthrop—The Last Song of the Girondins, 1793.
400. Orchardson—Scene from "King Henry IV."
403. Stanhope—The Footsteps of the Flock.
416. Whaitte—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. Prinser—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. C. N. 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. ApGriffith—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.
* ↑ 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 begun 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.
* ↑ "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.
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