Again, in 1868, the "Art Journal" says of Sir Frederic's Actæa: "The artist has made some attempt to paint flesh in its freshness and transparency, and indeed the more he renounces the opacity of the German school, and the more he can realize the brilliance of the old Venetian painters, the better."
In 1869, the "Athenæum" praised the Sister's Kiss, as "a lovely group," but complained that the execution was a "little too smooth,"—a complaint not infrequently echoed from time to time by the artist's critics. Some years later we find Mr. W. M. Rossetti making the same complaint in criticising Winding the Skein.
In 1875 the picture, Portions of the Interior of the Grand Mosque at Damascus, won great praise, as "a remarkably delicate piece of work, in which the beautiful colouring of the tiled walls and mosaic pavement are skilfully rendered."
In 1876, the quondam hostile "Art Journal" is completely converted by the Daphnephoria: "To project such a scene upon canvas presupposes a man of high poetic imagination, and when it is accompanied by such delicacy and yet such precision of drawing and such sincerity of modelling, the poet is merged in the painter and we speak of such a one as a master. There is, indeed, nothing more consolatory to those who take an interest in British art than the knowledge that we have among us a man of such pure devotion and lofty aim."
It was in 1875, that Mr. Ruskin, resuming his rôle of an Academy critic, claimed Leighton as "a kindred Goth," and confessed, "I determined on writing this number of 'Academy Notes,' simply because I was so much delighted with Mr. Leslie's School, Mr. Leighton's Little Fatima, Mr. Hook's Hearts of Oak, and Mr. Couldery's Kittens."
In his lectures on the Art of England, the same critic, speaking of Leighton's children, says: "It is with extreme gratitude, and unqualified admiration, that I find Sir Frederic condescending from the majesties of Olympus to the worship of those unappalling powers, which, heaven be thanked, are as brightly Anglo-Saxon as Hellenic; and painting for us, with a soft charm peculiarly his own, the witchcraft and the wonderfulness of childhood."
Upon the Egyptian Slinger of the same year, which Mr. Ruskin terms the "study of man in his Oriental function of scarecrow (symmetrically antithetic to his British one of game preserver)," his criticism is interesting, but adverse. The critic who elsewhere acknowledged fully the artist's acutely observant and enthusiastic study of the organism of the human body, confesses himself unable to recognize his skill, or to feel sympathy with the subjects that admit of its display. It is, he goes on to say further of the Slinger, "it is, I do not doubt, anatomically correct, and with the addition of the corn, the poppies, and the moon, becomes semi-artistic; so that I feel much compunction in depressing it into the Natural History class; and the more, because it partly forfeits its claim even to such position, by obscuring in twilight and disturbing our minds, in the process of scientific investigation, by sensational effects of afterglow and lunar effulgence, which are disadvantageous, not to the scientific observer only, but to less learned spectators; for when simple persons like myself, greatly susceptible to the influence of the stage lamps and pink side-lights, first catch sight of this striding figure from the other side of the room, and take it, perhaps, for the angel with his right foot on the sea and the left on the earth, swearing there shall be Time no longer; or for Achilles alighting from one of his lance-cast-long leaps on the shore of Scamander, and find on near approach that all this grand straddling and turning down of the gas mean practically only a lad shying stones at sparrows, we are only too likely to pass it petulantly without taking note of what is really interesting in this eastern custom and skill."
EGYPTIAN SLINGER (1875)