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

ROY AL ACADEMY.

It is deeply to be regretted that so many of our
distinguished artists, still living, have abstained
this year from contributing the aid of their genius
to the present collection of the Royal Academy,
that of the season of 1853, being the eighty-fifth
anniversary of its foundation. Latterly death had
accustomed us, it is true, to the absence of several
important names from the catalogue. Recently,
for example, we had come at last to be habituated
to the non-appearance among the annual exhibitors
of such illustrious masters as Etty and Turner.
But we were not prepared for that reason to find
so considerable a body of their survivors remaining,
in the full vigour and maturity of their powers,
indifferent to the incitements of competition.
Mulready, no doubt, had long disappointed his
admirers by his indolence : but, until now, Maclise
had always delighted us by his activity. Besides
Maclise, we have to regret as absent this season
from the " storied walls" in Trafalgar-square, men
no less important than A. Leopold Egg, and W.
Powell Frith, and W. Edward Frost, and P.
Falconer Poole. Not one of them has added to the
treasures of the Gallery even a single contribution.
Happily, with a few minor exceptions, the rest of
the Associates and Academicians have proved, on the
contrary, both industrious and ambitious. The
President himself has afforded them, in the latter
respect at least, the benefit of an example at all
times influential. Although he has produced this
year only two pictures, those pictures are in many-
ways worthy of Sir Charles Eastlake's high reputa-
tion. The larger work of the two (No. 124), a
Scriptural subject, is conceived in an elevated style,
and executed with consummate ability, although the
exquisite finish degenerates almost into the effemi-
nate softness of enamel. It represents " Ruth
Sleeping at the Feet of Boaz," and perhaps the
only portion of the " design" that could reasonably
be cavilled at is the attitude of Ruth, which is cer-
tainly anything but calculated to dispose the
daughter-in-law of Naomi to somnolency. The
other production of the same master (No. 186) is,
this time, not Scriptural, but Shaksperian. It
portrays Violante, the gentle and beautiful. There
is something most lovely to us in the delicate
tenure of those faint little blue blossoms—are
they violets ?—in 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 flight 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, 1605, 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 n 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 t'ie
inside of the Crystal Palace, on the Ist of May,
1851, during the progress of the inauguration.
Francis Danby—one or 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 and 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 Dame'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 thepublic
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 I
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 he 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. 512) " 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