The Press.
London, England, 1858-05-15 00:00:00

THE PRESS, MAY 15,1858.

betrays nothing of the sort; she takes her seat with
the quietest confidence, performs her task without
the quiver of a muscle, and rises from the piano with
a little laugh of triumph. It is a wonderful thing to
hear, but still more wonderful to see. Not only is
every note played without slip or failure, but played
with the most utter sangfroid. Miss Goddard was
assisted in Mendelssohn's air variee by Mr. Horatio
Chipp, and the violin part of Mozart's sonata was
beautifully played by M. Sainton. Our young English
pianists is becoming every day a greater favourite,
and the applause which was liberally bestowed u pen
her was well-deserved.

TEE Times seems to have recently acquired some
musical notions of a novel character. In its number
of yesterday, in describing the new Opera•house .it
says, " In one corner the men are building up, with
all its intricacies of diapasons and fugues, a large
organ, big enough for a church." In another column,
in describing the new bell for the clock tower, we are
told that, in the first bell, " the thickness of metal
in one part caused its note to alter from what it was
intended—E, to E natural. With the present
monster no accident of the kind has occurred, and
its note is exactly what it was intended it aliottkd bac
namely, E."
_ , 4e°,/ ••

lint gi4rll

ROYAL ACADEMY.
(Third Notios.)

Mn. FRITH'S " Derby-day "is still the lion of the ex-
hibition. A railing has been fixed before it, and
crowd surrounds it from morning to night. With a
good deal of patience it is possible to examine the
various groups which compose the picture ; but a
general view is not at present to be had. This, how-
ever, does not so much signify for the detail is the
great thing ; an English mob, though it affords a good
opportunity for the study of character, is nothing very
picturesque when seen from a distance. The arrange.
ment of the subject shows extraordinary skill ; the
figures are distributed into a number of groups,
many of which would form picture.' in themselves, and
yet nothing of the tumult and disorder of the scene
is lost. All the principal features and incidents
of a racecourse are presented at one view, though
there is nothing formal or artificial about the
composition. The number of figures introduced is
very large ; but there is character in all : nothing is
put in merely to fill up. A good deal of humour is
displayed and some feeling ; and there is a life and
vigour about the whole picture quite sufficient to ac-
count for its great popularity.
Webster's three pictures are called " Summer,"
" Sunday Evening," and " Grace before Meat "—all
rustic subjects, of course. " Sunday Evening " is
perhaps the best; but we do not feel much satisfac-
tion in any of them. Not that we have any great
fault to find, but there is a feebleness about them,
and a repetition of old faces and old expressions, not
at all like the results of honest work. Hook's pic •
tures of country life are taken from a somewhat
similar point of view ; we do not mean, of course,
that he has any of Webster's humour, but he sets
himself to depict the simpler rustics virtues. It is
happy country life that be paints for the most part ;
but he takes country people very much as he finds
them, and does not refine like Webster. There is
no want of vigour in his conceptions, but he is some-
what too regardless of beauty and rather coarse in
his execution. In this latter respect be has not
improved during the past year, but rather the
reverse. He has a picture from the same subject as
Webster's " Summer "—a labourer in the Selds rest-
ing himself at midday and playing with his child, the
mother and grandfather looking on. The rough
vigour of the one picture presents a strong contrast
to the feeble prettiness of the other. Hook's land-
scape in this, as well as in his other work, the
" Pastoral," is well studied and very true.

" Fairy Tales," by Dobson, is a charming picture
of a little girl seated on • cushion, with her doll
propped up beside her, and taking her first draught
of the pleasures of imagination. A very young
child buried in thought is always a pretty sight, but
prettier than ever in Mr. Dobson's picture. " Hagar
and Ishmael sent away," by the same artist, is a
highly respectable production, not altogether worthy
of the subject, nor yet absurdly below it. A painter
of very similar powers is Mr. Le Jenne, whose pic-
ture of "The Early Days of Timothy" may be
described in much the same terms. His " Children
Gathering Water-lilies" is also a very pretty, graceful
group.
Mr. Feed is not so successful this year as he has
been of late. His principal piece is entitled, " A
listener never hears gude o' himsel ; " the listener
is a ill-favoured elderly man, who has sent a love-
letter to a "braw " cottage lass, and is coming to
follow it up. He finds her with a young lover and

467

another girl, and behind the cottage door he hears
them all making merry over his letter. There is
really great talent displayed in the picture;. it is
perfectly natural, the expression of every face is
quite right, and there is a dry kind of humour about
it. But yet one does not feel much pleasure in
looking at it, perhaps because it is too natural. The
subject would be amusing if it were a little carica-
tured—if it were not so real ; in itself, it is rather
an unpleasant one. The " Ayrshire Lassie" is merely
a study of a single figure, and the " Sunbeams "
represents a mother playing with her child, and the
child playing with its own shadow on the wall. The
child is decidedly ugly, and the shadow simply im-
possible : the mother is very handsome, and sits like
a Cleopatra. We do not know whether Scotch
peasants fall naturally into such magnificent atti-
tudes, but they are not common on this side of the

Border ; and why in a picture aiming only at pretti-
ness should such a miracle of ugliness have been
introduced as that old crone of a grandmother? She
looks like a witch meditating the manufacture of a
philtre out of the baby's liver.
Mr. Solomon has taken to comedy this year, and
two very funny pictures ho has made. The "Lion
in love " is an old officer seated on the sofa beside s
pretty young lady, who plays the Dejanira with the
red-coated Hercules, making him thread her needle
and hold her Berlin wool. " Madam Blaine"
slumbers in her pew, as Goldsmith described her,
" in silks and satins new, and hoop of monstrous
size ;" but Mr. Solomon has added also a touch or
two of his own; the sunlight through the crimson
curtain is good, and increases the gorgeousness of
the figure ; but what is the meaning of the young
girl beside her? She seems to be there merely for
the sake of contrast ; but she forms as prominent
an object in the picture as Madam herself. "The
Flight "is something more serious—a group of ladies
and children escaping from the sepoys—rather a
feeble production, and seems to have been painted,
as people say, all out of the artist's own head.
Mr. Hughes' picture of " The Nativity " is one of
the very few which can be picked out at any distance
as Pre-Raphaelite. It has some great merits, but
eems to us a piece of affectation. Three figures,
all having precisely the same heads, occupy the fore-
ground; two of them furnished with wings we take
to be angels ; one holds a lantern and the other the
Infant, about whose body the third, whom we may
safely conclude to be either the Virgin or somebody
else, is wrapping the swaddling clothes. Looking
in at the window of the stable are three cherubs
strictly limited to heads and wings, and very gym-
metrici.lly drawn up. On the floor lies a sheep, and
a kind of mystic or symbolio straw. Now we call
this affected because it is not the way in which a
man living and thinking in the nineteenth century
would naturally treat the subject. Mr. Hughes
affects a style which to the early Italian painters
was natural. lie copies, too, something of their
manner of drawing. We heartily admit all that can
be said of the expression of the angel who is looking
upwards—it is exquisitsly pure and beautiful, and
the light emitted from the face is painted with won-
drous skill—but look at the contour of the figure ;
Goat throat to knee is one bard, straight line. If
such an attitude be possible, surely there is nothing
to recommend it. Why should we go out of our way
for something that is ugly, when what is beautiful
ties before us ? The colouring of the picture is very
remarkable, and in some parts very beautiful, bat
we do not think the artist has succeeded in the
mother-of-pearl tints he has attempted to impart to
the angels. He has only given the raw colours,
without the softness and the radiance. We are a
good deal puzzled, too, on first looking at the picture,
by those red bars that cross one of the lower corners ;
and it is only after some little consideration, and
putting of things together, that we discover them to
be a part of an angel's wing. The new hieroglyphic
which Mr. Hughes has adopted to express this ima-
ginary limb is singularly original.
" Weary Life," by Mr. Carrick, is a painting in
which the Pre-Raphaelite principles are partially car-
ried out. A country girl finds a travelling mounte-
bank and his little daughter asleep under a rick.
There is something very pitiful and touching in
these sleeping figures, and they are painted with
great accuracy and minuteness, but the picture is
injured by a false effect of light and shadow, and
the action of the girl is very feeble.

HERE Josclux.—This celebrated artiste will per-
form Bach's Chaconne for the Violin, at the concert
of the Vocal Association, to take place at St. James's-
hall, on Friday evening next, May 21st. The Vocal
Association, of three hundred voices, will also per-
form some of their most popular part-songs and
madrigals.

HER MAJESTY'S TimAnat.—The admirers of
Mlle. Titiens--and they include all the musical con-
noisseurs of London—will next week have an oppor
innity of seeing her in each of the three characters
ih which she has appeared.