The Sun.
London, England, 1856-05-09 00:00:00

RAILWAYS—roB CASH.

fr. c. fr. o
Or!eans
Northern
Lyons . , ... 1,465 New Ditto
Mediterranean 1,700 Grand Central
Lyons Genova - Teste -
Cotte

THE ROYAL ACADEMY.

(SECOND NOTIC E.)

Everything considered, we d most dispassion-
ately believe the most remarkab t.e picture in this
year's Exhibition of the Pain tin. gs of the Royal
Academy to be, curiously enoug,‘3, No. 413—a
blank in the Catalogue ! It is the production, we
understand, of a young artist n amed Burton.
Evidently a man of genius—a post in his way,
already a perfect master of colour, and a most
keen observer of Nature. The incident por-
trayed by the artist in this very notable maiden-
picture is but dimly indicated by the title gene-
rally reputed in the gallery to belong to it,
namely, that simply of " The Wounded Cavalier."
How powerfully the tragic interest of the scene is
revealed at one glance to the spectator's imagina-
tion ! How wonderfully the whole story is told
by the painting itself without any need whatever
of extraneous aid in the way of its elucidation !
The sylvan seclusion of the spot which has become
the arena of so many wild and con tending pas-
sions—how admirably that is intimated by every
(even the minutest) accessory ! The furious
Past and the sorrowful Future—how clearly,
how distinctly, how marvellously, those
are laid bare to any one's apprehension
by that one agonising glimpse of the Present,
which, by a masterly sense on the part of the
painter at once of the pathetic and of the com-
plete, has been selected by him as the moment of
representation ! Everything is, upon the instant,
comprehensible through that single glance among
the green leaves into the woodland. The be-
holder understands it all, in a manner, instinc-
tively. Understands, from the playing cards lit-
tered among the underwood, how the knightly
gamblers have rushed forth desperately and sud-
denly into the adjoining coppice to fight out their
wine-heated quarrel at once and to the Death.
Understands from the tumbled-down stones of
the boundary-wall how the victor has fled from
the duel-ground, leaving his antagonist bleeding
and groaning upon the green sward. Understands
from the broken blade of the wounded man's
sword sticking in the bark of the tree in the fore-
ground—the trunk of which tressby the way,
separates the picture (though not, as might be
reasonably conjectured, inartistically) into two
nearly equal divisions—understands, we say,
from this broken sword. blade sticking in the bark
of the gnarled tree in the foreground how the
wounded cavalier had aimed a last desperate blow
at his opponent, and how with the hilt still
clutched in his grasp of anguish, giddy with loss
of blood, sick with pain, and dizzy with passion,
ke had staggered round to the other side of
the fatal tree and had there fallen for
dead among the trampled fern and brushwood.
The observer understands all this, the picture
tells it to him plainly : it tells him more—it tells
him how the wounded cavalier must have lain
some time -bleeding upon the ground—judging
from the cobweb spun by the spider Ilona the
sword's point to the tree's trunk, and afterwards
powdered with the liquid diamonds of the dew
glittering all along the mazes of its fairy cordage !
More, even, than all this the painting reveals to
the gaze of the spectator. It tells him how tbe
Lac-lye-love of the Gallant, wandering with her
puritan Tutor through adjacent copse and meadow,
had abruptly come, quite accidentally, upon the
pale and bloodstained form of her betrothed. It
shows us the beautiful maiden looking with an-
guish upon the face of her beloved, as she sup-
ports his head upon her arm so tenderly. It
half discloses to us at the back of the splin-
tered tree, already mentioned as occupying
so conspicuous a place in the composition,
the gaunt figure of the round-head-school-
man with his red-edged parchment-covered quarto
under his arm, with no hair at all to speak of,
with a broad-brimmed, sugar-loafed hat, and lan-
tern jaws, and the sourest and grinaliest expres-
sion imaginable, and a skinny hand nervously
clutched behind his back in the intensity of his
suppressed emotions—looking on from the back-
ground. The loveliest little gorgeous dragon-
butterfly—(exquisite type of the "soul," just
trembling upon the lips of the expiring cavalier)
—lit the while upon tho fatal sword-blade,
snapped from the haft by the tree, and spun upon
with its delicate meshes by the spider ! Alto-
gether it is a wonderful picture—a work of art,
so true -to nature, so replete with tragic interest,
so abounding with manly pathos, rather than with
sentimental affectation, so complete in itself
as a story, so various in its contrasting
characteristics of quaintness, and beauty, and
passion, and repose, that we do not
hesitate to speak of it as, everything
considered, about the most remarkable picture in
this year's Collection. It stands forth—even by
the side of paintings from the easels of Hunt and
Millais—as incontestibly one of the most note•
worthy pleas yet put forward of late years, in
deprecation of the wrath of those authoritative
judges of art who are most inimical to the old-
new school of the modern-ancients called, for
want of a better title, the Pre-Raphaelites.
Henceforth we shall look for great things from
Mr. Burton. The public, or we are much mis-
taken, will do no less, when they have rendered
themselves . familiar with the merits of this very
curious production, No. 413—" The Wounded
Cavalier." Let the young artist, guided by the
instincts of his own genius, so develope that ge-
nius wisely, and direct it sagaciously, as not to
end simply where he has begun, and so to dis-
appoint the popular expectations.
Another very notable production in the school of
the pre-Raphaelites for the present season is, of
course, No. 398, "The Scapegoat," by W. H.
Hunt—an extraordinary picture, suggested by the
sixteenth chapter of Leviticus. A painting con-
veying to the mind an astonishing sense of deso-
lation. Far away, illuminated by the gorgeous
sunset dyes of Palestine, are the mountain
peaks of Edens. The immediate scene itself
represents in the foreground (as the catalogue
tells us) the margin of the salt-encrusted shal-
lows of the Dead Sea, at Oosdoom. The
solitary figure in this region of solitude, of awful
and titter solitude, is, as the title of the piece in-
dicates, " The Scapegoat"—otherwise the Em-
inissary goat, what the Hebrews called Azazel,
and the Greeks azoropzatoc, and the Latins Caper
Emissaries. The Goat laden with the sins of the
people, and sent forth by the high-priest to be
devoured by wild beasts in the wilderness. In other
words, the typo of the Redeemer ! Mr. Hunt has
Comprehended with a poet's comprehension the pa-
thcs of this strange spectacle of solemn and dread-
ful abandonment. The vastness and barrenness of
the surrounding waste, and the wild and troubled
expression shining out of the eyes of the Scapegoat,
an expression half-supplicative, half-despairing
are " points " in this singular painting which are
rendered with surprising vividness. Yet the ge-
neral effect of the painting is so strangely gro-
tesque that many of those who involuntary
pause before it, arrested by its secret power
and startled by its chromatic splendour, smile
upon this undoubted ebullition of genius almost
—be it plainly said at once—with the smile of
derision.

The recognised Chief among our youthful and
gifted band of Pre-Raphaelites, facile princeps
by reason not only of a daring priority in
point of time, but by right also of un-
questioned pre-eminence, both in regard to
innate abilities and in refereine to their mi-
nute, and exquisite, and laborious cultivation
—John Everett Millais—appears during the
past twelve months to have been more than ordi
narily industrious, and in one or two instances
more than usually successful. What cannot fail
to lend a peculiar charm to his five remarkable
contributions to this year's Exhibition, is the cir-
cumstance that in each of those five paintings the
young artist has depicted with a most loving and
appreciative pencil the multiform and manifold
graces of little children. No. 293, "Portrait of
a. Gentleman," is capital—just the very urchin
who would look up with a face full of latent fun
hidden by a varnish of sudden gravity--a boy_
sage caught feasting his sense of the ridiculous
over a scrap-book of caricltures ! No. 586, "The
Blind Girl"—a limning painfully true to reality
—is a portraiture which at once assumes to itself
among the works stored up in our galleries of art

a place kindred to that occupied by the
pathetic shade of Nydia in the records of
imaginative literature. No. 553, "L'Enfaut du
Regiment," we have already spoken of, as a very
exquisite production—exquisite beyond all marl
ner of doubt, whether viewed in reference to the
subject itself, or in regard to the method of its
treatment. As to the subject—that is told in
two minutes. It simply consists of a child lying
(anyhow) sound asleep upon an old knightly
monument, carved in stone, with the re-
cumbent figure of the mailed dead—may be the
effigy of some grand old Bayard among the
Crusaders—the slumbering figure of the child
half covered by a regimental coat of blue and
scarlet, the colours of which contrast exquisitely
with the stony hue of the crumbling old ceno-
taph. No. 445, " Autumn Leaves"—perhaps
one of the finest pictures of its kind yet exhibited
by Millais—represents a group of children and
maidens busy piling up and burning in the waste
corner of some weedy, flowery, fruitful " plea-
saunce" towards the close of the yellow leaf-dropping
month of September—a gorgeous heap of fallen
foliage, ruddy, green, brown, goldQn, purple,
! Looking at the picture, you-can almost
hear the rustle of the moving footsteps, you can
almost smell the fragrance of the scented smoke
—you can hardly fancy it is, after all, merely so
much paint and canvass, it looks so wondrously like
a cluster of living girls and a pile of dying leaves :
not the image of the two, but the very
girls and leaves themselves. No. 200, " Peace
Concluded, 1856"--the largest and the most ela-
borate of all these five pictures—is (we can have
little doubt of that) in some respects the most
clever of the five, and yet altogether beyond all
question decidedly the most unsatisfactory. The
mere arrangement of the picture is—upon the
very face of it—preposterous. Papa, with
a very coarse sandy moustache, and ha-
bited in a dressing gown the texture of
which resembles sacking, sprawls at full
length upon a particularly narrow sofa—at the
extremest edge of which, Mamma is somehow (in
a very Acrobatty or W. H. Payeey mariner) sit-
ting upon nothing at all—for we can't fur an
instant suppose she is sitting upon Papa's unseen
waistcoat, like the comeliest Daymare in a brown
velvet boddice and skirt ! Trotty- and Toddles,
children both wonderfully child-like in
look and gesture stand by : one of
them having ingeniously hauled out of the Noah's
ark in the corner such effigies of a Lion and a
Bear as would have puzzled M. Buffon very much
indeed could he have seen them. The lid of the
said Noah's ark we take, by the way, to be one of
the most glaring among Mr. Millais' affectations
—you can all but smell that dealy 'minty smell
familiar to those who know what it is to handle
the toys of children. The grease in Papa's hair,
again, is another of these affectations—it ought
to have been brushed into it with the best un-
bleached bristles purchasable at Truefits or
Gillingwater's—not left to cake there en masse
under the pressure of Papa's recently doffed
sills.- ventilator, or possibly that of his lately
unbuckled helmet. For we are left to
conjecture, somehow, that this same youthful,
sandy, poinatumed, sprawling paterfamilias has
just come back from the wars to repose at home
—a circumstance which can alone account for his
shaking Mamma's hand with one of his, and with
the other holding at arm's length a damp copy of
the Times newspaper.
Another of these pre-Raphaelites, R. Hannah,
to wit, reveals to us in No. 230, " Master Isaac
Newton, in the autumn of 1665, sitting in his
garden at Woolsthorpe." The greenest of apples
(how it ever came to drop off the bough no one
can possibly imagine) lying upon the most me-
tallic colourel of greensvards—and the rosiest,
ripest, mellowest of fruits sticking up aloft on one
of the branches, as though it never intended
to fall even through all the snows, and
frosts, and rain, and wind, and hail of the most
pitiless of on-coming Winters.
So much, this year, for the more conspicuous
among the pre-Raphaelites—a school steadily
rising in note and influence even in spite of Mr.
Etuskin's exaggerated adulation now of Mr. Hol-
man Hunt, and now of Mr. Everett Millais—lie
Prophet and the High-Priest of this old-new
Religion of the Painter's Art.
MARKET NEWS.—(This Day.)