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

(FIRST NOTICE.)
Yesterday's Private View of The 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
uollonades bordering the Gardens of the Horti-
cultural Society down at South Kensington.
Sculpture, oil painting, crayon drawing, etching,
works large and small, ambitious of their kind, and
ethers, 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 deliberatelyto 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
our 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 ono 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 imscribed
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 be 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 last 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, Macdowell,
Pickersgill, and Charles Landseer being the seven
—but three only of these seven do we care here to
particularise. Herbert's "Judith" (509) 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 di4position of the drapery, the full-
strung will of the dauntless Hebrew beauty---as
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 the 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 Derby 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 unquestionably 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
'e are commenting upon is very far indeed from
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 moonlight as
his 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 mat-
ter, but untruth and sheer) ugliness, and utter
extravagance of treatment, this picture has nothing
whatever about it rendering it in any way entitled
to an instant's notice. The painter pro-
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 wildbeasts," 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 !" A lovelier
child .portrait Sant never painted, and one possess-
ing 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
❑eighbourhood. But it is in the flagrant
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 f