The Sun.
London, England, 1865-04-29 00:00:00

LA TEST INTELLIGENCE.

(REUTER'S TELIGRAMS.)

AMERICA.

AlI cic il, military, and naval officers have been
ordered. to wear mourning for Mr. Lincoln for six

months.

The I Foreign Ministers have sent a deputation to

convey to Nr. Lincoln's family expression of their
sympathy.

The Governor of New York has ordered the 20th
inst., which had previously been appointed as a day
of thanksgiving, to be dedicated to the services ap-
propriate to a season of national bereavement.
The British and French residents in New York
have held a meeting, when resolutions expressive
of deep Byrn pathy were passed.
The greatest order continues throughout the
Northern States.
A universal feeling of sympathy prevails through-
out the British provinces.
The Governor of Nova Scotia announced on
Saturday that in consequence of Mr. Lincoln's
assassination he would postpone his intended visit,
and recommended the adjournment of the Legisla-
ture as a mark of sympathy.
General D ent has permanently superseded Weitzel
in command at Richmond, and the latter commands
at Petersburgh.
The order permitting the Virginia Legislature to
assemble at Richmond has been rescinded by Gen.
Ord, and delegates who had arrived were directed
to leave within 12 hours.
General Grant reached Washington on Saturday
and held a conference with Johnston and the Cabi-
net. Immediately afterwards the arrests of Judge
Campbell and ex-Mayor Mayo of Richmond were
ordered.

General Lee has arrived at Richmond, where he
was enthusiastically received both by the Unionists
and Confederates.
Lee's farewell order says that after four years
of arduous service, marked by unsurpassed courage,
the army had been compelled to yield to over-
whelming numbers and resources, and had sur-
rendered to avoid useless sacrifice of life.
It is reported that Kilpatrick's cavalry had cap-
tured the Governor of North Carolina, while bear-
ing an offer from Johnston to deliver up the State
to Sherman. Johnston was subsequently visited
by Davis, under whose direction the proposition
was countermanded.
President Davis was reported to have reached
Macon, Georgia, on the 10th.
Butler, who is now in Washington, was reported
on Thursday to have resigned ; he has since with-
drawn his resignation, and it is supposed that
Johnson will give him a command.

The Confederates have destroyed their navy
yard at Halifax, North Carolina.

General Anderson formally replaced the United
States flag on Fort Sumter on Friday (14th), when
the Rev. Ward Beecher and others delivered pat-

THE ROYAL ACADEMY,

The Private View—Yesterday.

Great though the expectations excited by rumour
in regard to the Exhibition this season at the Royal
Academy, those expectations have not, upon the
whole, been disappointed. They have not, at any
rate, been disappointed in our own view. And
we hardly think it likely they will be in regard to
the general public. One or two radiant expecta-
tions, it is true, have not been realised, but these
are, it should be said at once, purely exceptional.
Mr. Maclise, for example, abstains after all from
placing on view on the walls of the Academy Gallery
the replica of his great water glass painting just
now completed at the Houses of Parliament. That
distinguished artist, as it is generally understood,
having refrained from exhibiting the work mainly
by reason of his picture being so large in its dimen-
sions, that he most generously shrank from occupy-
ing so much space, upon a superficial area for ex-
hibition in itself necessarily restricted. Most of
the other Academicians, however, it is grati-
fying to know, are among the band of
actual exhibitors. The three most pro-
minent names among the list of absentees
being—two of our greatest living Sculptors, John
Gibson and John Foley, and one of the most accom-
plished among our living Painters, the President
himself. Of Sir Charles, however, it should be borne
in mind that he has of late years accustomed us
overmuch to his being in this way an annual de-
faulter. Six R.A.'s contribute a single painting
each to the present collection—Cooke, Elmore,
Goodall, Herbert, Charles Landseer, and the two
Pickersgills. Seven contribute two respectively
M'Dowell, Calder Marshall, Philip, Poole, Stan-
field, Webster, Ward, and Weekes. From three
we have three a-piece—Creswick, Frith, and Jones.
From seven of them four each—Boxall, Cooper,
Cope, Grant, Sir Edwin Landseer, Lee, and Red-
grave. Three of them contribute as many as five
each—namely, Hart, the Academy's Librarian;
Hook, the sea-painter, and Knight, the Academy's
Secretary. Turning to the smaller band of Asso-
ciates, we find that two alone among those abstain
from exhibiting—namely, Calderon and Baron Maro-
chetti. From three we have one a-piece—Frost,
Faed, and Stephens. Three have two works of art
each in the collection—Horsley, Lewis, and Le
Jenne. Four have three each—Cooper, O'Neil,
Ansdell and Barry. One has four—W. C. T. Dob-
son. Two have five—Thorburn and Leighton. The
distinctive characteristic of the whole exhibition,
however, is this--that it yields so much of •fair,
bright, exhilirating promise in regard to artists
hitherto unknown or unnoticed. Hardly one of the
famous artists already particularised, whether Asso-
ciates or Academicians, comes up to the full height
of his reputation. Exceptions there are, of course,
to that—but, upon the whole, they can really
hardly with justice be said to have done so. With
several of the young exhibitors, however, it is
quite otherwise. One or two of them have,
at a single bound, sprung forward into the very
front rank among the most rarely-gifted of the
exhibitors. One of them has done so, in fact, so
very conspicuously that we may at once mention
his name and particularise his achievement without
running the slightest hazard, as it appears to us, of
being invidious to any one else among the numerous
throng of new exhibitors. Around a picture that
will be found in the Middle Room, numbered
304, and entitled in the catalogue " Bravo,
Toro !"—a picture by one J. B. Burgess (a name
wholly strange to us) there will surely be
gathered during tthe course of the season
that is now about to commence on Monday
next, the May Day of 1865, as numerous
a throng of observers (or we are very much
mistaken) as will be collected together round
any other picture in the Gallery. Even, let us say,
though that other be Mr. Frith's magnificent Court
painting of the " Royal Marriage !" Yet the sub-
ject selected by Mr. Burgess for delineation is simple
enough in itself—the theme being nothing more
remarkable in its way than a cluster of spec-
tators at a Spanish Bullfight. The Bullfight itself
you, the spectator of the picture don't see ! But you
do see those who are supposed to be looking at it.
And you can recognize at once that the fight—that
must be going on (unseen by you) down below in
the amphitheatre—must h ave reached a point marked
almost; poignantly, may we not say it, by a
very climax of excitement. Look at those faces !
Look at that motley cluster of human beings visible
within the four lines of the framework of the
picture ! Veritable effigies of real flesh and blood
human beings—look at them ! Creatures about each
of whom you might write a life's history—every one
of them having their vivid shadowing forth of an in-
dividuality, of an idiocyncrasy, at once, instanta-
neously, and perfectly distinguishable ! For its ex-
pression of character, we have seen no such realistic
picture as this for a very long time. It is as true,
in its way for what it purports to be, as the laughing
audience, or the singing chorestkrs of Hogarth. The
excited fellow who has just snatched his cigarette
from his lips to clap his other hand to the side of
his mouth, bawling out at the utmost pitch of his
lungs the words giving the title to the painting,
Bravo, Toro! What a creation that one head alone
is in itself Then the old man in the background
to whose dull hearing the girl is screaming hurriedly
an account of what 's going on in the arena below
—the girl herself looking askance out of the corners
of her eyes at the progress of the incident
while she is describing it ! And the child
above her, who is turning away from the
sight in evident alarm, an alarm that her mother
endeavours to dissipate by her caresses--at the very
moment that the middle-aged Spaniard above them,
looking down at them on the broad grin, showing
all his teeth, is luxuriating in some sly joke of his
own at their expence ! And the three ladies in the
box above, each with her distinctive character, one
with her kid-gloved hand raised and her deli-
cate nostrils distendedin an eager exercitation,
that almost partakes of the anguish of sus-
pense ! And the insouciante blase air of the lavender-
gloved fop lounging in the slips, yet higher up
in the grouping of the picture, carelessly permitting
his gaze to fall, through his half-closed eyelids, on
what is going forward, as though really for once, in a
way, there seemed to be a something within the range
of his vision worth looking at perhaps for the vestige
of a moment ! Altogether it is the production of a
veritable student of human nature, as well as of an
artist quite safe and certain, if he will but go on as he
has here commenced, of winning for himself a
high and honourable reputation. So well do
we think of the work he has here done, of the gifts
of art and powers of observation he has here evi-
denced,
,that in regard to his future career we have
now at once formed the very highest expectations.
In the North Room, again, there is noticeable a pro-
duction contributed to the walls of the Academy by
another artist whose name is as yet unfamiliar to
the public, the painter of No. 603, " Hamlet and
Ophelia," namely, one W. L. Orchardson. In
a homelier way, too, upon the opposite
side of the same apartment, there is no-
ticeable a picture of which similarly kind and
equally truthful words might be spoken, No. 514,
painted by E. Nichol, and entitled, simply, " A
Departure." A production, this last, evidently the
work of a skilled humourist. As for the productions
of the more famous artists who exhibit on these walls,
while the majority of them are hardly, as we have
already remarked, quite up to the height of the re-
putations those artists have long since won for
themselves, there are many of them that are works
of singular beauty and excellence—works reflecting
the highest honour—some few among them—upon
the name, even, here and there, of an illustrious aca-
demician. Sir Edwin Landseer, it is true, appears to
us this season to have frittered away his great
powers upon four pictorial jeux d'esprit, as we might
term his contributions this year to the Gallery,
instead of applying those powers of his, by pre-
ference, rather, to the production of one solitary
painting of genuine importance. Mr. Herbert has
contented himself with a single Scripture piece
delineative of ancient customs and oriental scenery,
but it is one—(46) " The Sower of Good Seed"—
worthy, if only by reason of its astonishing
truthfulness, of one of the most gifted among
the great artists of our generation. Else-
where in the Exhibition there are evidences of