510. A. Hughes—“Sigh no more, Ladies, Sigh no more.”—Mr. Hughes’s pictures are always full of refined sentiment; and this is eminently so, and in all respects one of his best successes. The lady is so tender, uncomplaining, and beautiful, that one takes her part on the instant. Happily, she seems, after an interval of disconsolate dejection, to be dimly awaking once more to the interests of life; and soon she will be taking the advice of the song, and tempting fate with another affair of the heart. She is at once sentimental to the romantic point, and domestically feminine. It was a happy thought to introduce the thrush at her window, trilling a cheerful ditty, which one can imagine that her heart translates into the spoken language of the song. This picture has in it a gentle but real poetry which places it on a very different footing from most of the work in the exhibition.
511. Storey—Saying Grace.—The small denizens of a nursery have seated themselves with impeccable propriety for their early dinner, regulated by (as one might infer from her physiognomy) a foreign nursery-governess. The baby has joined his hands with dispread fingers, and enacts (he is too young to pronounce) the grace with a solemnity which would do credit to a parish-clerk. No doubt the children are all portraits, with inordinate heads of hair; but the baby’s irregularity of contour seems to exceed infantine bounds. Let us trust that his mamma will insist upon his growing up with a modified profile, and that “’tis his nature to.” The picture has a genuine distinction of quaintness and zest.
513. Calderon—Œnone.—Mr. Tennyson, with the magic fetters of genius, has enslaved all Englishmen to the conviction that Œnone can only be contemplated as in a state of heartbroken dereliction; and I suppose that Mr. Calderon intends his nymph to be so understood. I cannot, however, perceive that sentiment in her face or action; she appears to the eye rather in a mood of rampant laziness and florid self-display. This is a very singular piece of colour. White or whiteish tints occupy a considerable space; the extremely blue hills are the second important constituent; and the pea-green mantle of Œnone is the third. The pea-green appears to me a discord, though some other hue of green, along with a texture more like drapery, might have proved much the reverse. On the whole, I should say that, in its colour as in other respects, the painting has much boldness, with no corresponding proportion of felicity.
517. R. Carrick—After the Sortie.—This is a very large picture, hung so high that one cannot fully estimate it in detail. It represents a wounded knight borne up the winding castle-stairs by three of his retainers; his wife, with a horrible sinking of the heart, totters and clings about for support as she follows. It seems to be a strongly designed and carefully executed work, of very superior merit; the most important production of Mr. Carrick, and about the best.
524. H. W. B. Davis—A Summer Forenoon.—A landscape and sheep-piece, warm, gentle, and genial. Landscape and the allied forms of art occupy a very small space, comparatively, in the present exhibition. There are nevertheless several works of this kind which call for examination and praise: their being left unnoticed in this pamphlet does not imply any indifference to their merits.
540. Miss M. E. Freer—Red Roses.—Coquetry is the predominant spirit of this work. But it is not painted with the slightness which a coquettish picture from a fresh female hand might be expected to display. On the contrary, there is a good deal of careful realization, and an amount of general skill and force which places Miss Freer high among lady artists. No. 446, Margaret Wilson, by the same painter, hung too high to be scrutinized, seems to be equally good, or better.
585. Maclise—Madeline after Prayer.—The useful adage which Mr. Maclise will never lay to heart is that “Enough is as good as a feast.” We find Keats’s Madeline encumbered with items of furniture and ornamentation. Moreover, the painter’s decorative taste is anything but chastened; witness the horrible pattern which she has begun in her broidery frame. A graver objection is the want of any real luminosity in the moonlight which Keats has made so resplendent; the painted window itself is the very maximum of opacity, and the light (if light it can be called) seems to fall upon it, not to be transmitted through its panes. Whatever his failings in execution, Mr. Maclise can depict light vastly better than this when he chooses. So much for objections. After any quantity of them, it remains that the picture is highly attractive, and the Madeline a very beautiful creature—perhaps the sweetest woman Mr. Maclise has painted. She is a personage not made
“For human nature’s daily food,”
and yet she is sympathetic. To be that, she must be poetic also.
589. Burchett—Measure for Measure.—Mr. Burchett follows up his remarkable work of last year with another of corresponding importance. Matured consideration, and strong powers of working and of development, have gone to the making of this picture; which represents the great crisis in the action of Measure for Measure, where the Duke of Vienna, disguised as a friar, is revealed by the unwitting Lucio to the eyes of the abashed Angelo and Escalus, and of the now almost hopeless Isabella and Mariana. The story is told with much judgment and penetration (so far as such a complicated story can be told) by the Duke’s vacated chair of state, with coronet and sceptre laid upon it, between the seats of Escalus and Angelo; the young courtier, facing the just uncowled Duke, and recognising him on the instant, and raising his cap; the frothy bluster of Lucio dying out on his scared visage as he gasps to see whom he has been mauling and traducing; and other well-chosen and well-combined incidents. The countenance of the Duke is German and searching; that of Escalus true to the good-natured cynicism of the substantially upright old man; Isabella has much of the nun about her. Angelo is, I think, too much the burly insolent oppressor; for we must understand from the drama that he really looked and was an abstinent Pharisee, led on by temptation and opportunity into vilenesses quite unlike the man that all others and himself supposed him to be. There is much able and accurate painting in this work, though it would benefit by more breadth of general harmonizing.