The Sun.
London, England, 1853-05-09 00:00:00

;enure of those faint hide blue blossoms—are

they violets that hand so soft, and fair, and
dimpled. Sir Edwin Landseer is of course, as he
always is, wonderful in his studies taken from
the animal kingdom. His great works this season
are (No. 46) " Night," and (No. 69) "Morning"—
nothing in the least like Sir E. Bulwer Lytton's
" Night and Morning "—" Night " depicting a
couple of magnificent stags at war with their ant-
lers, in the midst of lake scenery in the moonlight,
and " Morning" revealing them both stretched in
death from the effects of their ferocious struggle, a
fox sniffing stealthily towards the carcase of one,
while, in the grey glimmer of dawn, you detect,
winging its ffight towards the other, a bird of car-
rion. How all this is told no one can conjecture
who has not stood in front of those two marvellous
productions. Altogether, we believe they are re-
garded by the majority of visitors to the gallery as
constituting its principal attractions. Landseer's
remaining contributions are (No. 291) " Twins"—
astonishingly clever in all its details, but chiefly so
in regard to the woolly covering of the lamb-
kins ; and (No. 170) " Children of the Mist"
—not those described by Sir Walter Scott,
but a cluster of stags, a small composition, which
we consider in the light of a capital eccentricity.
Clarkson Stanfield displays two admirable works
of art, one of them a great national sea piece worthy
in every respect of the artist's celebrity. This is
no other than (No. 87) showing us " H.M.S. The
Victory (with the body of Nelson on board) towed
into Gibraltar, 28th of October, 1805, seven days
after the battle of Trafalgar"—the gallant old
man-o'-war battered and blackened from the con-
flict from the agonies of which she had so recently
emerged—sorrowful but triumphant. It is one of
those noble pictures that ought to be purchased by
the nation and enshrined in the painted hall at
Greenwich. Stanfield's other contribution (No.
325) portrays "An Affray in the Pyrenees with
Contrabandistas"—the blue sky and the snowy
mountain peaks glimmering out through a gap in
the surrounding darkness of cloudland. Five
paintings in all appear this season as from the
easle of David Roberts. One (No. 89), " The
Cathedral of St. Stephen, Vienna," is an
extraordinary architectural interior, and an-
other (No. 415) a masterly view of the
inside of the Crystal Palace, on the Ist of May,
1851, during the progress of the inauguration.
Francis Danby—one of the greatest names in the
Academy, although he is still only an Associate—
gives us for the present season merely a solitary
production. But it is one full of poetry and su-
blimity—(No. 155) " A wild sea-shore, at sun-
set," a splendid illustration of that golden truth
enunciated by Shakspere, and which we rejoice to
see emblazoned on the title-page of the Catalogue
as its appropriate motto :
" Nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean—so o'er that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes-
-The art itself is nature."

There is also visible on the walls of the gallery but
one contribution from the hand of Frederick Good-
all—(No. 248) "An episode of the happier days
of Charles I,"—the King and the Royal Family on
a summer's day floating in a pleasure boat to
the sound of music an festivity—a work re-
plete with grace, and beauty, and imagi-
nation. The merry monarch and James the
Second, of the hereafter, still children, are flinging
morsels of cake to the swans, while a blackamoor
attendant is holding a rich salver with the dainty
on it in the background. The gorgeousness of the
scene, and the tranquillity of it, are expressed even
in the surging waters that flash to the sweep of
the rudder, gaudy with the Royal arms of England.
William Dyce (in No. 140) depicts, with much ten-
derness of feeling, " The Meeting of Jacob and
Rachel," and Thomas Webster (in No. 116), with
admirable humour, the interior of " A ame's
School," such as may be found in almost any of
our inland villages. Yet, while recognising the
merit of both productions, we cannot but re-
gret that Dyce, this year, does nothing at all com-
parable to his famous picture of " Lear and the
Fool," any more than Webster achieves anything
worthy of comparison with his " Boys' Play-
ground." Frank Stone, besides presenting the public
with his customary glimpses of female loveliness, as
in (No. 113) "A Nile Flower," purity itself, although
verging upon the voluptuous, and in (No. 333), a
group of young rustic girls at play, delightfully
entitled "Now I'll tell you what we'll do "—soars
for once into a loftier region of art, and not by any
means unsuccessfully. This is in (No. 478), where
the artist reveals to us the emotions of awe and
pathos under which Mary is told " secretly" by her
sister, " The Master is Come." Seldom have fea-
tures so haggard by weeping, or eyes so reddened
by tears, beamed from the canvas with more be-
witching beauty. Another important contributor
to the collection remains yet to be especially parti-
cularised—Edward Matthew Ward, whose genius
has for some time, particularly during the last two
or three seasons, been wonderfully and conspicu-
ously in the ascendant. Everybody recollects his
masterly picture, the year before last, of " Louis
the Sixteenth in Prison," and his scarcely less
masterly production, last year, representing "Char-
lotte Corday on her way to Execution." Instead
of one, the artist this year contributes two large
historical paintings to the exhibition—(No. 396)
" Montrose at his Execution at the Cross of Edin-
burgh"—that execution over the memory of which
Professor Aytoun has sung in accents so impas-
sioned :

" He is coming !—he is coming !
Like a bridegroom from his room,
Came the hero from his prison
To the scaffold and the doom.
There was glory on his forehead,
There was lustre in his eye ;
And he never walked to battle
More proudly than to die.

He mounted up the scaffold,
And he turned him to the crowd,
But they dared not trust the people,
So he might not speak aloud.
But be looked upon the heavens,
And they were clear and blue,
And in the liquid ether,
The eye of God shone through."

Different, though hardly less mournful, is the
subject selected by the same artist for his other his-
torical composition—(No. " Josephine sign-
ing the Act of her Divorce" in the presence of Na-
poleon. Painful as this subject is in itself, Mr.
Ward seems to have been anxious to render it still
more painful by the manner of its treatment.
Nothing more sallow, or rather bilious, was ever
seen than the flesh tints of the picture throughout.
Several of the portraits introduced are admirably
clever without doubt, from the brilliant Murat to
the sardonic Talleyrand, from the beautiful Hor-
tense to the handsome Eugene Beauharnais—but
the lights are so numerous and scattered that the
effect of the whole is marred, the work being, we
conceive, distressingly deficient in its want of con-
centration.

The collection of the Royal Academy is more
surprisingly rich than ever in landscapes. Wither-
ington, as usual, in his particular department, is
facile princeps. Although merely three pictures
constitute the whole of his contributions, those

three are sufficient, and more than sufficient, to
sustain his reputation. In some respects we are
scarcely satisfied with (No. 129) " The Village
Post-office," remembering that the same subject
was treated a season or two ago so much better by
Goodall ; but then we are more than compensated
for that sense of disappointment by the ,exceeding
beauty and truthfulness of (No. 142), " A Sum-
mer Afternoon," and still more by the incompar-
able merits of (No. 332), " The Way Round the
Park." The last mentioned work of art, in parti-
cular, is really exquisite. Redgrave again appears
this season to singular advantage (No. 182), " The
Forest Portal" tempting onto penetrate the sylvan
solitudes beyond ; (No. 541), "An Hour with the
Poets" reminding one instinctively of the approach-
ing season so daintily named by Spencer
" The leafy month of June ;"
and, best of all (No. 340), " The Lost Path," in
which the story is told with matchless ability
throughout. Looking elsewhere than at the foli-
age, it is possible to perceive that Redgrave has
" taken a leaf" from the pre-Raphaelites. Of these
same pre-Raphaelites several are again this season
contributors. W. H. Hunt has, in (No. 44) " Claudio
and Isabella," a grotesque group from " Measure
for Measure," in which we know not which is the
more grotesque, the nun or the prisoner. A deli-
cious glimpse of a blossoming apple tree, or May-
tree, seen through the dungeon bars, compensates
in some degree for the twisted position in which
Claudio is wedged into the angle of the casement.
J. Stirling portrays in the same microscopic fashion
(No. 497) " A Lassie and a Lamb," suggested by a
couplet from Wordsworth. E. Rainford, too, m
the Octagon Room, has an equally odd delineation
of that incident in "As you Like It" of (No. 1288)
" Celia telling Rosalind that Orlando is in the
forest." But incomparably the most admirable of
all these strange and startling compositions is that
(No. 520) of " The Proscribed Royalist, 1651," by
J. E. Millais—the king of the pre-Raphaelites.
There is another picture by the same artist in the
collection (No. 265), " The Order of Release, 1651;"
but the " Proscribed Royalist " is, in this depart-
ment of the art, the gem and glory of the Exhibi-
tion. Replete with passion and resplendent in
colouring, true to nature and abounding in poetry
of sentiment, the painting, in none of its minuter
details, approximates in any way towards extrava-
gance. Excellent, however, as we consider it to
be, we scarcely regard it as comparable to either of
those surprisingly clever productions exhibited by
Millais last season at the Royal Academy—
" Ophelia " and the " Huguenot.' Both Lee and
Cooper shine as ever conspicuously on the walls of
the larger apartments. Separate or united, their
powers are in every respect brilliant and harmonious.
Lee especially commands our admiration by his
sylvan or rather piscatory solitudes— (No. 35)
" The Poacher—scene on a Highland river ;" and
again a companion picture (No. 109), likewise so
entitled. Anthony, though scarcely in this equal-
ling the merit of his Fern-sketch of last year, has
a marvellous piece of leaf-painting in (No. 480)
" The Monarch Oak"—embellishing, according to
the catalogue, a passage from Wordsworth. Mr.
Inchbold seems to have been infected by the pecu-
liar style of the preceding master, as may be re-
cognised, we fancy, on even the most cursory
glance at (No. 489) "The Chapel, Bolton." Every
fibre in the stalks, every wrinkle on the boles,
every crack in the ripe fragments of foliage, haws by
each been pencilled with painful minuteness.

Several- of the miscellaneous contributions
yet require to be mentioned as highly me-
ritorious. About the boldest, and certainly
not the least admirable, effort at histo-
rical composition for the present season is that
large painting by J. Cross (No. 582), depicting
the memorable " Death of Thomas 4 Becket"—a
picture fraught with passion, pathos, and majesty.
Another considerable work in a different quarter of
the Gallery (No. 36), " The Incredulity of St.
Thomas," is interesting as one of the celebrated
productions of Overbeck. Cope has, in No. 174,
cleverly delineated " Othello relatilig his adven-
tures ;" while Horsley, in No. 171, has given a
lovely portraiture of " Lady Jane Grey discovered
by Roger Ascham," reading the Phredo of Plato,
in Greek, at Bradgate. Hart reads a solemn, or
indeed awful, lesson through that wierd limning
(No. 207) of " Solomon at the rock-hewn dial, pon-
dering o'er the flight of Time." There is a pathos
in the age visible in the very hands of the glorious
Sovereign, and a fantastic appropriateness in the
ugly bosses of the cacti, and in the fluted shafts of
of those oriental tree-trunks. Charles Land-
seer's picture (No. 217) of " The Iron Mask,"
commands, as it deserves to do, a wide
and scrutinising observation. And Jones's
renowned painting of " Waterloo" (No. 224)
derives a new interest from the comparatively
recent date of the demise of the Duke of Welling-
ton. Besides these, must be noticed Elmore's
awkward group of (No. 320) " Queen Blanche
ordering her son Louis IX. from the presence of
his Wife," if only for the talent which shines out
of that very awkwardness. Plenty of chain
armour, moreover, may be seen delightfully con-
trasting with the flesh tints, through (No. 304)
that gorgeous production of F. R. Pickersgill, dis-
playing the bride rescued from the pirates by
Angelo Participazio.
Unhappily, of portraits there are "enough
and to spare." Rather more, in fact, than
customarily. They sprout forth each season after
the manner of those abominable reasons of Fal-
staff, " as plentiful as blackberries." Several
of them, however, will be examined with
curiosity and satisfaction—this, too, not only from
the recognised skill of the artists, but also from the
popularity or celebrity of the originals. Gordon
and Grant, of course, bear off the palm, according
to their wont in the school of art dignified by ,the
labours of Reynolds and Lawrence. Among the
individuals whose effigies appear upon the walls,
there are personages from every grade and profes-
sion. Here (No. 66) Mr. Cobden, there (No. 70)
Sir Charles Napier—here (No. 176) the Duke, and
there (No. 209) the Duchess of Montpensier—in
this direction (No. 159) the veteran Walter Savage
Landor, and in that (No. 130) George Wilson, the
chairman of the Anti-Corn-Law League. Beyond
these and many others, there are observable the por-
traits also of (No 312) the Marquis of Anglesea,
of (No. 284) Lord Campbell, of (No. 277)
the Lord Chancellor, of (No. 376) the Duke
of Portland, of (No. 383) Hiram Power,
the sculptor of the " Greek Slave," of (No.
483) William Penny, the Arctic navigator, and of
(No. 429) George Dawson, the popular lecturer.
There are plenty of likenesses of the late Duke of
Wellington—and some horrible caricatures. Take
that one (No. 473) by J. W. Glasse, as a melan-
choly and ludicrous specimen. " Uncle Tom," as
might have been conjectured would be the case to
a dead certainty, is rendered a theme for illustra-
tion. We were not surprised, therefore, to find
him visited by Cassy in the picture from the hand
of A. Rankey, any more than we were surprised to
find " Eva," as depicted by Papworth (No. 1,334),
among the sculpture. Scarcely anything is de-
serving of particular mention, by the way, in the
lower apartment, devoted to Sculpture, if we ex-
cept a few meritorious busts, such as that (No.
1,436) of Douglas Jerrold, by Baily, and that (No.
1,452) of his Holiness Pope Pius IX., by Tadolini
or as Monti's (No. 1,312) statue of " Truth Unveil-
ing Herself," or Macdowell's (No. 1304,) lovely
figure, typical of a "Day-dream"—strangely as it
may sound—an embodied idealisation.
It remains for us now to glance briefly at the
South-room, with its varied collection of drawings
and miniatures. Remarkable in every respect
among the latter, are Mr. T. Carrick's delicately
pencilled portraitures on porcelain. Several of
these are really exquisite works of art, and some of
them quite inimitable for their verisimilitude. Let
us especially direct attention to (No. 684)
Mrs. W. P. Johnson, and (No. 755) the
companion miniature, or again to (No. 789)
W. Edgar, Esq., or to (No. 795) Mrs. Water-
house Kaye, or to (No. 863) Mrs. George
W. Hodge—as brilliant examples of the artist's
power as a depicter of " the human face divine"—
productions truthful not only to the contour of the
features, but the subtlest shade of expression.
Besides these charming products of the skill of Mr.
Carrick, we must in justice speak of Mr. Anthony
de Solome's contributions to the same apartment
in the highest terms of commendation. There is
(No. 682), for instance, a portrait in coloured
chalks, described in the catalogue as that of
" Madlle. de Solome," but bearing about it so
conspicuously the semblance of a fancy head,
that we should conceive it to be precisely the
sketch adapted for publication at the hands of
the engraver or the lithographer. Further on the
same artist has (No. 984) a masterly crayon draw-
ing of the family of Samuel Whitfield Daukes,
Esq.—to all appearance executed exclusively with
black chalk, and constituting, as such, we conjec-
ture, about the largest drawing of the kind ever
attempted, or, at any rate, ever exhibited. Poked
away in the room dedicated to architectural de-
signs, is one of the most exquisite masterpieces in
the collection—the fruit of the fancy and genius of
a Frenchman. This is (No. 1,056) " La Fee et
la Peri poursuivant l'ame de l'enfant," by E. Sig-
nol. In conception, in treatment, in grouping,
in colouring—though to some it may seem
fantastic—it is, to our thinking, absolutely' deli-
cious as a work of art born from an un-
fettered and refined imagination. Altogether
there are nearly one thousand five hundred con-
tributions exhibited this year by the Royal
Academy—(l46s)--variously in drawings, paintings
and sculpture, or, in other words, in oil, water-
colours, crayons, marble, or plaster-of-Paris. And
while the visitor cannot fail to be delighted with
several of the remarkable productions which we

have here particularised, scarcely any one call
the porch of the Academy without—if it be only, If
reference to the indolence of so many living artb"
of celebrity—some sense of disappointment.