Palmer is completing a bust of Washington Irving, which has been pronounced by the friends of the latter a successful likeness.
An essay on Gustave Doré, by B. P. G. Hamilton, will soon be published by Leypoldt of Philadelphia.
The spring exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts is now open in Philadelphia. The collections are said to be large and to represent all departments of painting.
Foreign.—The Exhibition of the Society of British Artists and the General Exhibition of Water Color Drawings opened in London in the latter part of April. The former contains more than a thousand pictures, few of which, it is said, rise above the most common average of picture-making, while the greater part fall below it. "There is something very depressing," says the Reader, "about such a large display of commonplace art. It is almost painful to have the fact forced upon one's mind, that the thought and labor represented in all these pictures is misapplied, if not wasted; for to this conclusion we must come, if we bring the display in Suffolk street to the test of comparison with any real work of art. A fine picture by Landseer or Millais would outweigh, in intrinsic value, the whole collection. Denude the Royal Academy exhibition of the works of Landseer, Millais, Philip, and other of its most accomplished contributors, and subtract from it at the same time the works of promise which lend to it so great an interest, and we should have a second Suffolk street exhibition, characterized by a similar dead level of mediocrity and insipidity; for neither highly accomplished work nor sign of promise is to be seen in this the forty-second annual exhibition of the Society of British Artists." From which it would appear that contemporary art in England gives no remarkable promise.
A large collection of the late John Leech's sketches, etc., was lately sold in London. It comprised the original designs for the political cartoons and pictures of life and character which have appeared in Punch during the last twenty years; the designs for the "Ingoldsby Legends," "Jorrock's Hunt," "Ask Mamma," "Mr. Facey Romford's Hounds," and other sporting novels, and several pictures in oil. The prices ran very high, the net result being £4,089.
The collection of paintings and water color drawings by the best modern British artists, formed by Mr. John Knowles, of Manchester, was recently disposed of in London at very handsome prices. The chief attraction was Rosa Bonheur's "Muleteers Crossing the Pyrenees," which brought 2,000 guineas. The collection realized £21,750.
Preparations are making to remove the cartoons of Raphael from Hampton Court to the new north fire-proof gallery in the South Kensington Museum, formerly occupied by the British pictures of the National Gallery.
The Great Pourtalès sale has closed [{424}] after lasting upward of a month and realizing a sum total of nearly three millions of francs. A Paris paper states that, considering the interest of the sums expended in forming the collection as money lost, the sale will give a profit on the outlay of a million and a half of francs, or about a hundred per cent.—a notable illustration of the mania for picture buying now prevailing in Europe. The owner died ten years ago, leaving directions that the collection should not be sold until 1864, for which his heirs and representatives are doubtless properly grateful. The following will give an idea of the prices fetched by the best pictures: Campagne, Ph. de: The Marriage of the Virgin, formerly the altar-piece of the chapel of the Palais Royal, sold for 43,500f. Hals, Francis: An unknown portrait of a man; his left hand leaning on his hip and touching the handle of his sword, 51,000f. Rembrandt: Portrait of a Burgomaster, 34,500f. By the same: Portrait of a veteran soldier seated at a table, 27,000f. Murillo: The Triumph of the Eucharist; with the words "In finem dilexit eos," 67,500f.; bought for the Louvre. By the same: The Virgin bending over the infant Christ, whom she presses to her bosom, 18,000f. By the same: St. Joseph holding the infant Christ by the hand, 15,000f. Velasquez: The Orlando Muerto, a bare-headed warrior, in a black cuirass, lying dead in a grotto strewn with human bones, his right hand on his breast, his left on the guard of his sword; from the roof of the grotto hangs a lamp, in which the flame is flickering, 37,000f. Albert Durer: A pen drawing, representing Samson, of colossal size, routing the Philistines with the jaw-bone of an ass, 4,500f. A portrait by Antonelli di Messina, bought years ago in Florence by Pourtalès for 1,500f., and appraised in his inventory at 20,000f., was sold to the Louvre, where it now hangs in the salon carré, for 113,000f.
Gustave Doré is announced to have undertaken to illustrate Shakespeare and the Bible.
The sale of the Due de Moray's gallery of paintings will take place in June. It contains six Meissoniers, which cost, at the utmost, not above 60,000 francs, but which will now probably fetch more than double that price.