The Sun.
London, England, 1863-05-02 00:00:00

THE ROYAL ACADEMY.

(FIRST NOTICE.)
Yesterday's Private View of Toe Royal Academy's
Collection of Paintings for Exhibition during the
present season has left upon our minds—we cannot
but frankly acknowledge this at once---a general
impression anything but satisfactory, True, no
doubt, that there are altogether here 1,205 works
of art of various kinds, including among them even
a few waifs and strays of sculpture : the majority of
our sculptors contributing, as a matter of course, by
preference this year to their own especial
display, now rapidly beginning to adorn the
nollonades bordering the Gardens of the Horti-
cultural Society down at South Kensington.
Sculpture, oil painting, crayon drawing, etching,
works large end small, ambitious of their kind, and
others, wholly unpretending—there are altogether,
we repeat, now ranged there along the walls or
upon their pedestals, upwards of a thousand indivi-
dual works of art ready to be thrown open to public
view on Monday morning—ready to be banquetted
in the midst of by the notabilities of the land this
Saturday evening. Among those thousand and odd
works of art—more particularly contributed, as
many of them are, by artists of undoubted, some of
them even of very rare and exceptional genius—there
are, it is nearly needless to remark, pictures of
singular beauty, and in one way or another of very
particular excellence. And yet, for all that, we
have not hesitated to assert, we do not for an in-
stant hesitate now deliberately to reiterate that the
general impression left upon our mind, after hav-
ing, according to our annual wont, attended the
Private View yesterday afternoon—we have
not simpler words in which to express
one meaning—is anything but satisfactory.
To begin with—the Exhibition on the present occa-
sion is certainly not above the average of the Royal
Academy Exhibitions during several years past. It
is rather, we will add quite bluntly, according to our
view, decidedly below it. Scarcely one among all
the men of note who are numbered amongst the
Exhibitors contrives—to put the matter plainly—
to be upon a level with his own reputation. Several
of them unmistakeably appear to us to have sunk
considerably beneath it. Better than which it
would have been for them, perhaps, to have made
no appearance whatever in the 1863 collection. As
no less than ten out of the thirty-eight Academi-
cians (whose names are at this moment inscribed
upon the role of the Royal Institute or Corporation)
have decided upon doing—including amongst them,
these ten non-exhibiting R A.'s, the President, Sir
Charles Eastlake, the Treasurer, Sydney Smirke,
and the Auditor, William Mulready. The last-
mentioned may be regarded as having long since
retired— to repose upon his well reaped and pe-
rennial laurels. One of the foremost of the great
artists of his age, again, Daniel Maclise is otherwise,
as all the nation knows, more nobly occupied we
might say, than upon any work he might possibly
have contributed to the Exhibition—engaged as he
still is—happily for the country and for his own fame,
upon that grand picture of " Nelson at Trafalgar,"
which is to be the companion to the" Wellington at
Waterloo," already adorning the walls of the Houses
of Parliament, John Gibson, too, in his Roman
studio, is known to ba no defaulter to the continued
cultivation of the high art of which his contempora-
ries already recognise him to be so great a master.
Besides this, however, there will still be noticed
among the non-exhibitors, not only Richard West-
macott, John Foley and Philip Hardwicke, but
William Dyce and Sir Edwin Landseer. By the
public at large the two here mentioned, but

more especially the one last mentioned will be
peculiarly regretted in regard to this total non-
appearance. The frequenters year after year of the
Royal Academy have become so accustomed--until
it might be said to have actually grown into a
fashion, otherwise, almost, we are fain to say
into a popular weakness—to admire to absolute
excess the shaggy hounds and sleek steeds of the
great animal painter. Landseer's numerous ad-
mirers, however, will look for these—for once—
in vain. Seven other of the Royal academicians
who do exhibit, exhibit only a single work of
art, Herbert, Poole, Frith, Scott, Nlacdowell,
Pickersgill, and Charles Landseer being the seven
—but three only of these seven do we care here to
particularise. Herbert's " Judith" (50) is one of
the very few pictures in this Exhibition conceived
in the loftiest spirit of the art, and carried out upon
the canvass with something like corresponding
thought and power. Even the mere accessories of
the picture shew this. The grand pose of the figure,
the graceful disposition of the drapery, the full-
strung will of the dauntless Hebrew beauty--se
shown in every muscle of the arm and in every nerve
and outline of the lovely but terrible visage of the
heroine—all tend to enhance tho effect of this
scriptural-historical painting, a work worthy, so
far as it goes, of the gifted hand that produced
it, and yet very far indeed from taking rank
as the artist's masterpiece. As for Frith's" Juliet"
(100), pretty though the features of the lovesick
maiden are, and charmingly truthful though the
white satin of her dress undoubtedly is—it is al-
together unworthy of the painter of the Darby Day
and of the Railway Station, and, worst of all, is any-
thing, in the sentiment of it, but Shaksperian. Poole,
the third of the Academicians contributing a single
picture to the present collection, presents to view
this season, as that one solitary specimen of
his powers, a painting unluestionably poetical
both in its thought and in its treatment, but still,
one so vague in the root idea of it, that it remains
without a title upon the Catalogue, being simply
numbered (191) there, with five maundering lines,
from " A Greek Pastoral," tagged to the number.
An idyllic picture, it is essentially—" pastoral," as
the hint from the verses indicate, rather than syl-
van. Two figures only—stripling and maiden—.
appear in the foreground of the landscape. Charm-
ingly grouped and tenderly coloured, with a fainter
greenish yellow than usual, here again this picture
we are commenting upon is very far indeed from I

being an adequate exemplar of the artist's capabi-
lities. Who will not coincide with us—will
not the Painter himself P—when we pass by this
his latest production as by a work of comparatively
slight account (for him), if we go back no further
than to those two wonderful moonlight love scenes of
his, one relating a few years back to the Days of
the Troubadours, the other more recently to the
escape of Glaucus and lone across the Sicilian Sea
upon the heavenly night following the hellish
" Last Days of Pompeii" and Herculaneum. If he

could but.have afforded a just idea of n'oonlight as

nis eyes behold the silvery lustre, and as his brush

has depicted it—say to Frith in his " Juliet"
picture already mentioned, or still more

to Millais', in his hideous, ghostly, ghastly,
eyrie, eltritch limning of poor Keats's heroine from

The Eve of St. Agnes" (287).

Mr. Pepper's

• phantom at the Polytechnic Institution is- far

beyond it in the mere glammour of its effect. As to
beauty or grace—or anything at all, for that rnat-
.

ter, but untruth and sheer: ugliness, and utter
extravagance of treatm-nt, this picture has nothing
whatever about it rendering it iu any way entitled
to an instant's notice. The painter p•o-
-duced it, we should suppose, in an interval
of hallucination or almost, we had said, of aberra-
tion. It is an outrage upon public opinion. One all
the more to be regretted from one's knowledge of
the real genius of the man. More than the glim-
mering of which genius, by the way, is caught in his
fantastic rendering of a childish romp under a piano
(like that of " Peepy playing at wildbeaats," in
Dickens's Bleak House long ago) entitled " The
Wolf's Den" (498)—but still more in what is indis-

putably the happiest of Millais' three contributions
to the gallery (7) "My First Sermon !" lovelier

child •portrait Sant never painted, and one possess•

ng other merits than mere loveliness that Sant

could never aspire to. Phillip's great picture this year
of " The House of Commons" in 1860—we grieve to

note here as, in our estimation, little better than a

distinct failure. It is no more than a bit of The House
after all—the Speaker's Chair and the Government
and Opposition Benches in its immediate

neighbourhood. But it is in the &grant
ill success of the artist in his attempt at
anything like a truthful portraiture of the chief
men in that great assembly, that we recognise, what
appears to us, the main insufficiency of the Work as
a whole. Lord John (as the noble earl of now-a•days

was there and then, in 1860 in the 110°8
of Commons'., Mr, Disraeli, the Speaker him
self, Sir Buiwer Lytton, the late Sir Georg.
Lewis, Lord Stanley and othets are bu
feeble approximations to anything like likenesEes
Lord Palmerston—though even his effigy Is fa,
from completely satisfactory—is the nearest Per
haps among the cluster of notabilities her
bearing a resemblance to the original. Till
rest we recognise as intended respectively ful
so-and-so—and that is all. Possibly W,l
should hardly have particularised the Pramier!
portrait as in any way preferable, but for the cart
natures of him upon a larger scale in other parts of
the Exhibition—one (330), painted by W. T. Roder
for the Town Hall of Tiverton, representing the
veteran statesman in everyday costume, the other
(612), painted by E. B. Morris for the Town Ilan
of Dover, portraying the First Lord of the Trete
sury in his ridiculous livery, as Lord Warden of the
Cinque Ports, giving his lordship a very striking
resemblance indeed to a sort of a sublimated
Twopenny Postman. Hook has three of his re-
freshing Sea Views in the Gallery for 1863 —yet even
the best amongst them not painted at his best. Air'
Ruskin, himself, we should think, would abstain
for once from raving so very extravagantly abou.,.
their beauties. Lee's " Where the Trout lie" (195)
lovely though it is, and true to nature, as nature Is
here known to us in England, is nevertheless hardly
enough for Lee's admirers, to feel satisfied with as
his ! -Ward contributes too pictures to the Gallery
this year—the smaller of them, the more to our
liking (124), Charlotte Corday's Toillette ! The
toilette of the " Angel of Assassination," as Lamar"
tine called her. " Hogorth'6 Studio, 1739," is 111-
teresting as a subject, of course, but to our fan*
in no other respect, agreeable to look at. Whether
we turn to the fuzzy-wigged Hogarth, or to the
self-complacent philanthropist beside him, or to
the red-headed lout of a charity Loy to the
ridiculous little charity girl in front of
—gawking at Capt. Coram's portrait ! Intentionally
or not we don't know, but at any rate very apPrn"
priately, Mr. Peabody's Portrait (206), cleverly
painted by Pickeisgill, hangs close by, and is here
numbered the very next in the Catalogue. Dobson
(with the many initials) has three of his pretty child
pictures, the prettitst of all three being, to our mind
(181), the chicken feeding " Fiji tiling." Elmore!
" Lucrezia Borgia" (130) is full of power, and I°
singularly beautiful in the richness of its colour`
ing. Out of Roberts' four contributions for
1863, commend us to the boldest of them all
both in subject and treatment (114) "St. Paul
from the River Thames." Premising that the "hit
of the season—a hit made this year by an outsider'
is Marcus Stone's (345)—(it is safe,
we should OP
to win him his Associateship)—we shall close
our remarks upon the gallery for to-dill'
with a reference to that eminently success.
ful and very beautiful historical picture'
At a single bound young Marcus Stone has-1
the production of this one picture—gone far beyond
his accomplished father. The work will engrave
admirably, and cannot but at once ensure, thus
early in his career, the popularising of the
artist's reputation. The subject is from Beranger!
noblest Ballad of the French People, and of their
love for the deathless glory of the Great Napolealj.
In our next notice of the Royal Academy We
shall be tempted to return to this picture"'
indifferently entitled, we cannot but think, " 011
the Road from Waterloo to Paris"—(it should 1)13
called " Napoleon after Waterloo," or some brie`,
title of that kind)—but already, upon the instant'
we uncover our head to the young artie
we hail him as a painter gifted with the power °
winning a reputation. Were we a French soldier"
we should infallibly accord to him, and even 1,1:
picture, the military salute—gazing upon the pier
ture his brush has painted, through our team

ONE X MARKET

AND

COMMERCIAL INTELLIGENCE.

CITY, TWELVE O'CLOCK.

There is no alteration in the general appearance
of the discount market, the inquiries being steadily
maintained, while the rates continue easy.
A supply of gold, amounting to £90,000, was
taken into the Bank of England.
Since Monday last the imports of specie have
amounted to £772,000, and the exports to only
£160,000.

Notwithstanding the large number of joint-stock
companies lately introduced, many others are in
course of formation, and, if respectably constituted,
they are likely to meet with support, the public
being still disposed to effect investments on a large
scale.

Two O'CLOCK.
At the Paris Bourse this morning, the French 3
per Cent. Rentes, according to Mr. Reuter's tele-
gram, were 69f. 65c. Firm, in consequence of the
rise in English Funds,

Further indications of buoyancy have prevailed
today in the market for the English Funds, owing
to continued speculation for an advance. Consols
have been dealt in to some extent at 931 a for trans-
fer and the 7th pros., and 933 I for June, and they
have closed with firmness at those quotations. The
New Threes and the Reduced Annuities have risen
to 91; 92, and Exchequer Bills continue firm at ss.
to Bs. prem. Bank Stock has been marked 235,
and business has taken place in Indian 5 per Cents.
at 1093 110.

The Foreign Market to-day has presented a
very animated appearance, and a very large
amount of speculative business has been trans-
acted, and a decided rise has taken place in
quotations. Turkish 6 per Cents of 1858 have
improved to 694 70 ; ditto 1862. to 71k 72 ;
ditto Consolides, to 60 501 ; Mexican, to 36 1 ;
Spanish Passive, to 36 1; ditto Certificates, to 111,
; Italian, to 71f 4 ; Ev,yptian, to 99 ; New
Grenada, "ex all," to 161 17; ditto 2 per Cents, to
33 34; ditto Deferred, to 91 10; ditto Land War.
Tants, to 61 71; Portuguese, to 48k 1; Sardinian
to 871 k ; and the Confederate Loan is firm at lf
21 prem. _

Business in the Railway Share Market has been
more animated, and prices have generally exhibited
an upward movement. Great Westerns and South
Easterns have improved 55.; Great Easterns, Lan-
deashire and Yorkshire, North Western, South Wes-
tet n, and North Eastern (Berwick), 10s. ; Caledo-
nian 155., Midland £1 10s., and Great Northern £2.
In the Foreign and Colonial Markets the
dealings continued active. Great Luxembourg are
firm at 141 ; Dutch-Rhenish at 161 17; Sambre
and Meuse at 101 111 i Grand Trunk of Canada
realise 191; Great Western of Canada, 111 12 ; and
East Indian, 1091 1.