B.R. HAYDON—peculiarly characteristic of the writer’s style of painting—large and bold. Whoever has seen his Napoleon, just opened for exhibition, must, we think, acknowledge the above identity. In our next Number we intend to notice the above triumph of art.
ALARIC A. WATTS—an elegant hand, worthy of the editor of the most elegant of the Annuals: this, however, is not Mr. Watts’s ordinary signature.
J. MONTGOMERY.—This hand is far more redundant in ornament than one would have expected from so gentle and talented a Quaker; but the Quaker has been lost in the poet, as an old grey wall is concealed under a luxuriant mantling of ivy. The autograph now engraved is copied from the signature attached to the original of his beautiful poem on Night, beginning—“Night is the time for rest.”—Edinburgh Literary Journ.
CH. MAURICE DE TALLEYRAND—whose life will hereafter be traced throughout a volume of the history of the last and present century. His age is 77. This signature is copied from the Frontispiece to the last edition to the Court and Camp of Bonaparte, in the Family Library, which is a fine portrait of Talleyrand, engraved by Finden, from a picture by Girard.
H. MACKENZIE—author of the Man of Feeling, &c. He died during the past year, in Edinburgh.
FINE ARTS.
PANORAMA OF HOBART TOWN.
Mr. R. Burford, the most successful panorama painter of his day, has lately completed a View of Hobart Town, Van Dieman’s Land, and the surrounding country, which he is now exhibiting in the Strand. It is not, perhaps, the most striking picture this ingenious artist has produced, yet it is certainly one of the most interesting. The embellishments of books of travels, the sketches of tourists, and the extravagant annual prints, have familiarized the stay-at-home reader with almost every city on the European continent; but a view in Van Dieman’s Land is much more of a novelty. It is comparatively a terra incognita, about which every one must feel some curiosity, though more rationally expressed than that of a King of Persia, who asked what sort of a place America was—“underground, or how?” For the purpose of giving a general idea of a country, a panoramic painting is well adapted: the size of the objects is at once natural, there is no straining of eyes to make them out, and the effect of the whole scene is that of being dropped in the midst of the country, and its surface at once spread before us.