The Express.
London, England, 1852-05-03 00:00:00

FINE ARTS.

EXHIBITION OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY.

teemed Notice.)
In our brief allusion to the private view of this
exhibition, when adverting to the non-appearance of works
by some of the, most distinguished academicians, we could
not refrain from the expression of a wish that Mr. Leslie
had been among the absentees. His peculiar excellence as
is
aimariraiakisnngtee arrangement,
works,n tt,
lees of reputation by one year's failure. The masterly
1 humus evinced in his re
turyteefildineinsttspeinetnembrptedioa:ndoefpirecisi"chgeriebnicinteof:extheceurtiisoka ofin
Production of the ideuanodf qCneiert-
vantes, Fielding, and Bmollett, his truthful family groups,
have won for him a lasting reputation. But the gods have
not made Mr. Leslie poetical; they have not even endowed
him with a rich perception of oolour, and his Juliet is—
something we hasten to forget. It is not the Juliet of
Shakspeare, but a chalky complexioned, somewhat thick-
lipped young lady, with a painfully compressed and pinched
waist, studying for her debut in a character in which she is
lamentably to fail.
In Mr. Crises " Marriage of the Marquis of Fuluezo,"
the patient Urine! of Chaucer, the character of the heroine
is finely conceived. Her beauty is not of that dueling kind
which strikes at once, our is it very etherial. It is like the
marriage gown chosen by Mts. Primrose, calculated "to
wear well." It is the expression of a loving, endearing
nature, to which all gall or irritability is unknown, shining
through lineaments of negative esthete than positive love-
liness. There is deep, re-assuring pathos in the expression—
somewhat of homeliness, perhaps, es becomes Juniieda's
daughter. The figure of the marquis is leas felicitous ; he is
jaunty and priggish. Perhaps he deserves to be so repre-
sented, for his callous, heartless trials of his wife's endur-
ing patience rendeg the most detestable creature of
legendary record. at to pillory him in such an external
form as his egotistical, curious, experimentalising lack of
sympathy deserves, ie one of those hyper-relinemente which
are scarcely permissible in art. Nor do we think such a
notion was present to the artist; his marquis is rather one •
of those failings that sometimes will befall the most able.
The by-play among the astonished attendants is admirable.
The burly falconer who crowns the group has breadth and
life. And the effect of the picture, as a aiming:Aaiun, is
excellent.
A sweet and pleasing picture by Mr. Frith represents a
mother with her child lisping its prayer on her knees. The
colour is chalky, but the sentiment is fine. The " l'ope
makes love to Lady Mary Wortley bluntegee " in a pais-
. ful failure. Pope's deformity we.. redeemed Li a face, not
beautiful perhaps, but eloquent anal sprikse . Of this
there is nothing in the picture; and his expression is not
that of the agony of wounded sensibility, or even vanity, but
the sheer exaggerated contortions of a mouthing actor. TlO
female figure, too, resembles more the vulgar boisterous
mirth of the Hoyden of Caliber's " Eclipse," than tbegrace-
ful laughter of the wicked charming Lady Mary—greceful
and festinating cveu in her thoughtless and !mantas
There is great mastery of the pencil,fine and forcible eolou
in Mr. Ward's " Charlotte Corday going to execution;'
but the picture is not satisfactory. The figures are placed
together, not grouped. They arc representations, too, of
models, we hail almost said of lay figures—not of real
actors in such a scene. The elaborate, though successful
painting of costume, too, so much more impressive than its
straggling, inexpressive wearers, contributes to render the
painting still more unimpressive. In short, the work is
one in which great mechanical skill is visible, a ithout one
gleam of impassioned imagination. The picture reminds
one of a book, exquisite in style but barren of matter.
As usual in the exhibitions of the Academy, portraits
preponderate. To this, were the portraits always what they
might and ought to be, there could be no reasonable ob-
jection. One of the moat admirable privileges of pictorial
art is its power of conferring a kind of immortality on the
external lineaments of those who are dear to private affections
or revered by public admiration. The genius of Raphael,
Titian, Rembrandt, Vandyke, have imbued their portrait,
of contemporaries with a soul of poetry in addition to their
value as truthful representations of many respecting whose
visible appearance after-ages feel curiosity. The highest
powers of intellect and imagination are not un-
worthily tasked in the endeavour to produce a life-like
counterpart of the great and good, or even of the simply
beloved. But indifferent portraiture of uninteresting ob-
jects is not to be endured; and unluckily such is the far
greater proportion of the portraiture in the pre-
sent exhibition. Counterfeits of men—some of eminence,
some of mediocrity, or less—painted for obscure corpora-
tions and institutions by second-rate artists, meet us at every
turn, "flat, stale, and unprofitable." Exceptions there
unquestionably are.
The portrait of Lord Cockburn, pointed by Sir J. Wat-
son Gordon, for the Scottish Academy, is a fine subject
worthily treated. In his early and more vivacious middle
age Lord Cockburn always appeared to us a pretty exact im-
personation of the Pau/us Pkydell of " Guy Meatiering."
Ceekburn had nothing of the erudition or pedantry of that
exquisite imagination, but he had all his quaintness, all his
sparkling vivacity, all his genial, generous sentiment, all
his aristocratic bearing. As presented to us by Sir J. W.
Gordon, we have him as he is now ; " age has clawed him
le hie clutch ;" hut the mellow, subdued grace of ethane.
log
.years is, perhaps, more winning than the over
glee of his prime of life. litheetree Ronianorun
Cockburn is the last of a group which, if not everything
that national exaggeration deemed it, was fascinating and
piquant, intelligent and honourable in a high degree. Sir
J. Wiwi* Gordon's portrait of Win. Herrick, Esq., is, in
respect of execution, one of the very beet he has painted.
Mr. Boxall's portraits are all more or less marked by
that ripening mastery—that quiet truth and unobtrusive
grace—which promise to make him in time one of the best
portrait painters of the day. Mr. Frank Grant's are, as
usual, marked by grace and eleirance in his female figures,
and an unsubstantial unfinished character that would be
pardonable in an amateur. There are two ways of making
a painting attractive, by excellence in conception and exe-
cution, and by the choice of some fashionable or popular
subject. Mr. Grant is but too apt to make up for short-
comings in the former attribute by falling hack upon the
latter. To this we owe his hunting scenes and battles of
former years, and his portrait of the new Chancellor of the
Exchequer of the present. Mr. Desangea has two fine
female portraits, tinged a little with his mannerism: Mr.
Mance has a graceful and finely felt female portrait.
Turning to the landscape department, we are disposed to
assign the next place after the works of Roberta and Star
Beal, which we noticed on Saturday, to Me. Niemmaan'a
rich and tranquil picture of trumpets crossing a moss in an
extern evening. Widely different in love and sentiment,
but noway* inferior is the cool, quiet, freshness of Mr
Redraws's " Woodland Mirror." Mr. Lee's landscapes
are as they always are fresh and true to nature, with some-
thing perhaps of a sameness and calf-repetition. " The Road
Across the Common," by this artist is of high merit. Mr.
Creewick's " Sunset Hour," and his " Mountain Lake
Moonrise," are worthy of all praise. The earlier produc-
tions of Mr. Creswick's pencil were chiefly remarkable for
a delicate sense of natural beauties, and a faithful literal
re-production of them. Of late years a ripened imagina-
tion, capable of presenting in original combinations the
varied and lovely images tie had by this process stored up,
his begun to develops itself. His First Glimpse
of the Sea," exhibited last year, was a work of this
higher kind; and the two we have named above show that
he continues to make progress. In a subeequent notice we
shall probably have to do justice to more than one work in
this department. The unobtrusive beauties of a tree landscape
painter are but too apt to escape the first hurried aispection,
especially ia the ease of those who yet struggling for fame
bass neither friends nor the prestige of an established repu-
tation to win for them prominent plums:
It is our intention to devote the remainder of the present
notice to a few words on the Pre-Raphaelite brethren ; not
that we are going to waste time in criticising their
strange theory and affectations. Whenever a painter is re-
duced to the necessity of explaining the theory upon which
his weak is executed, he may rest assured that it is a failure.
If it cannotopeek for itself, no words can eke out its defects.
No puMag—either of the artist or his friends—can write
away distaste or indifference in the beholders; and dispa-
ragement of the works of rival artists as it in a more un-
worthy, so it is an equally ineffectual means of seeking to
establish a reputation. But genius will eyeatually work it-
self free from the fetters and indiscretions of a false theory;
and this it seems now certain is to be the case with Mr.
Millais.
There are two paintings by this artist in the present
exhibition —"A Huguenot on St. Bartholomew's day
refuting to shield himself from danger by wearing the ea-
tholie badge," and "Ophelia," in which tha lingering
affectations of his school are so far outweighed by the
beauty and skill of his painting, as to be rather amusing
and piquant than repulsive. In the former, we have still
the minute pains-taking study of general details, sad
some of the self-willed ungainliness in form, setitude, and
action, by which it is the ambition of the school to distin-
guish themaelves. In the latter, the position of the heroine
inspires a suspicion that it was selected rather for the ma-
mma of showing the artist's power of overcoming difficulties
of execution, than from a genuine srtistical love of the
beautiful. But in neither are we attacked with those wilful
preference. of awkward ugliness which rendered Mr.
"Holy Family" of last year disgusting,
and his " Ferdinand and Ariel" simply absurd. There Is
beauty in all his forms. There is simple, intense, yet play-
ful pathos in the action by which the Huguenot repels the
attempt of the female to bind the abhorred and fraudulent
badge on his arm. The Ophelia is a work of high and true
genius. Exquisitely lovely, her whole soul rapt in her own
melody, unconscious of danger, she is visibly being " pulled
from her melodious lay to muddy death." The exquisitely
mournful conception of Shakspeare is made visible to the
eye in a congenial spirit. The transparent glum if the
deep water, the bright weeds that float on its surface, the
flowers dropped by the doomed gratis maniac and borne
away by the stream, the reties of the sky in the watery
mirror, the o'er-embowering willows, are presented with
I literal fidelity yet with poetical beauty. Mr. Millais is be-
coming a great painter in spite of himself.
The verdict on the offences of the remainder of " the
Brethren" must unfortunately be less favourable. Mr.
Haut, the next in talent and power to Mr. Millais, has an
illustration of the ballad of the jolly shepherd who slept
when his sheep were in the corn, in which all the defects of
his last year's picture of a missionary hunted by the pagan
Britotus—in colour and form—are exaggerated. Instead
of unconsciously working off its errors, like the more
healthy genius of Mr. Millais, that of Mr. Hunt's is grow-
was I ing more perverse.

Till MILITIA "W.l.—Stn.—By some error my name
appears in the majority on the Militia Bill in your paper of
the 23(1. I was in Dublin on the night of the debate.—
Ifour's Me., IL WlLLiusts.—Dublin, April 29, 1852.