The English critics complain that they have not any longer a great portrait painter. This branch of art is declining, and the walls of the Academy this year bear testimony to the fact. From the death of Lawrence to the present time, now more than twenty years, it has been gradually subsiding into the mere record of literal fact—ignoring those great principles which made it once a means of historical record. In America we have occasion for no such regrets. Elliot is equal to any man in the world for a masculine and noble head, and Hicks and several others would in any country or in any time command the applause due to great masters.
For three years Mr. Pyne, the landscape painter, has been taking a series of views in the lake counties of England. The pictures comprise all the important objects in a tour through the country they illustrate, treated under a variety of aspects, which renders the collection valuable in an artistic point of view. A feeling for atmospheric distance is one of Mr. Pyne's most important attributes, and in representing wide reaching views of mountains and lakes he has had full scope for his talent. The pictures are to be copied in a series of colored lithographs, and published in a volume.
Among the pictures in the Royal Academy this season are several by British army officers on foreign duty. By the Hon. Lieutenant Colonel Percy there are, A Study of Niagara from the under Horse-Shoe Fall, The River St. Lawrence and Mouth of the Saguenay, and a view on the same river Near the Chaudiere Bridge, Quebec.
Rauch, the sculptor, whose statue of Frederic the Great has just been erected in Berlin, has been the object of an artistic ovation. The Academy of Sciences gave a banquet in his honor, the king, royal family, and ministers assisted, and Meyerbeer composed a Cantata for the occasion.
Mr. Healy's picture of Mr. Webster replying to Colonel Hayne is completed, in Paris, and will be brought to New-York in the present month (of August). It is twenty-eight feet long. The painter has published proposals for engravings of it, at twenty dollars per copy.