Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.”
329. Mason—Evening Hymn.—Again a very poetical and beautiful picture, one of the enduring glories of the present exhibition. It reaches higher than anything Mr. Mason had hitherto done; and shows him qualified to paint figures on a fair scale of size, and with an amount of positive beauty which, in his previous productions (though well traceable), was to some extent overlaid by the picturesque, as that is popularly understood. This work glows with the light of a spring sunset, and with the unbidden fervour of a group of young village-girls who are carolling the Evening Hymn as they saunter homewards. It seems almost churlish to object to a leading point of treatment in so delightful a picture; but I confess to some suspicion that the men who are shown listening might with advantage have been missed out of the subject altogether—and more especially the youth who comes close behind a girl in white, holding a rose in her hand. Mr. Mason is a painter who never loses sight of facts in his pursuit of the beautiful; this is the one of his works which goes nearest to merging all other its material in a general ideal of loveliness and solemnity.
331. Pettie—Tussle with a Highland Smuggler.—Here we revert to the category of sketchy work; and we see in this picture and in another by its author (No. 484, “Weary with present cares and memories sad”), an unpleasant and unrepaying development of style which might be described as “the offhand squalid.” No. 331 shows extreme—indeed, excessive—cleverness: but its unsightly violence of action embodies a subject of little consequence to any one, and of less still to the cause of fine art.
347. Edwin Landseer—“Weel, sir, if the deer got the ball, sure’s deeth Chevy will no leave him.”—A masterpiece of Landseerian art: the good hound Chevy is seen couched amid high mountain ice and snows, by the side of a dead deer, which the ravens have already scented from afar.
356. Millais—Pilgrims to St. Paul’s.—A more rational title would be “Greenwich Pensioners at the Tomb of Nelson.” One of them has lost his left arm—a very resolute, bluff old seaman, whom “foreigneers” may have been shy of tackling in his time; the other halts upon two wooden legs, more senile and commonplace, but also, in his undemonstrative way, one of those who, like his hero, “never saw fear.” His face is most triumphantly painted; whether regarded as a mere study of a head, or as a piece of character, or with reference to its intense lighting by the flare of the sepulchral lantern. Indeed, the picture is quite admirable throughout, and in power of painting not to be surpassed by Mr. Millais, nor approached by any competitor. There is in its materials something which verges towards a tour de force; but all is so manly, and so free from sentimental overdoing, that no charge arises against it on this ground.
363. Yeames—Lady Jane Grey in the Tower.—An able satisfactory picture; perhaps the best of its author. Lady Jane is in a controversial colloquy with the Chaplain Feckenham: her face expresses very successfully that she is weighing his arguments in her mind, and considering what may be the true answer to them, but with no prospect of her coming to the conclusion that answer there is none. Feckenham also is appropriately conceived and painted, without any exaggeration. Of costume and accessory there is enough, and not overmuch.
369. Houghton—In the Garden.—A very handsome boy of eight is lifting his little sister of five to smell a rose upon its bush. A kitten which has already made some advances towards cat-hood is romping around the stem. The feeling of the subject would be improved were there more of a look of smelling in the girl’s face; and the colour is hardly on a level with the other merits of the picture. It is, however, a very choice and complete little work; fine in design and draughtsmanship, and charming in general impression—quite free, moreover, from that sort of nursery silliness which has infected some canvasses of late, and has even been aptly enshrined in a title reproducing the broken utterance of babes. Mr. Houghton knows that “ta-ta” or “tootsicums,” whether written with the pen or rendered into the language of the brush, is a mild effort of art.
401. G. D. Leslie—Kate Leslie.—This artist is almost always attractive, and often most engagingly so: the present work may be cited in proof. But he is “painty” (as the profession terms it) in the generality of his work, and especially in his flesh-tints. Here the face has far too much of a tawny or ligneous hue; which is the more to be regretted as the work, on the whole, comes nearer than usual to ranking Mr. Leslie among colourists.
402. Poynter—The Catapult.—Great knowledge, great power of combination, and much disciplined artistic capacity, have gone to the making of this picture. It has more effect, and is on the whole more pictorial, than the very striking work which Mr. Poynter exhibited last year—Israel in Egypt. Some people may refuse to take much interest in a scene in which the work of the artificer or mechanician plays so large a part; but, bating this objection (which to many will be no objection at all), it is difficult to award anything but praise to the picture. The event is the use of a catapult as an engine of war in the siege of Carthage: we see written on one of the beams “Delenda est Carthago, S.P.Q.R.” The officer is supervising, archers are shooting; the monster hand of the catapult is about once more to launch a red-hot bolt against the doomed city: pots of blazing pitch are being hurled by the defenders at the assailants. The solidity and good balance of all parts of the subject, the agreeable tone of colour in flesh and otherwise, the sound drawing, unfaltering and unpretentious, command high respect.
410. Wynfield—Oliver Cromwell’s First Appearance in the Parliament.—To find this picture uninteresting would be difficult. Hampden is represented introducing his cousin to Cromwell; Pym, Elliot, Sir Robert Phillips, Strafford, and many other famous men, are present. The arrangement pleases one from its obvious adaptation to the more important demands of the subject, irrespectively of artistic conventions. The method of the painting, however, is so excessively opaque and heavy that, until Mr. Wynfield shall manage to correct this blemish, one cannot expect his pictures to get cordially accepted by the public, or to please critical eyes.