The Portfolio : January. (Seeley and Co.) — The Portfolio com- mences
the second year of its latest form of life with an admirable number, "The Early Work of Raphael," by Julia Cartwright (Mrs. Henry Ady). Mrs. Ady sketches the life of the great painter as far as his visit to Rome in 1508. As his first (undoubted) picture belongs to the year 1499, and he was born in 1483, and died in 1520, this date divides nearly equally his artistic life. Of the period which Mrs. Ady has taken as her subject we have here a most interesting account. To understand Raphael it is necessary to understand the artists under whose influence he came. Of all great painters he was the most susceptible of such influence. But he assimilated it more than he was dominated by it (the ex- pression, in reference to his visit to Florence, "He has forgotten Perugino, and put away Umbrian things," is a little too strong, in view of Mrs. Ady's own statement that "while he was always receiving fresh impressions and learning new lessons, he never forgot the old or lost the knowledge to which he had once attained"). The illustrations have all the excellence which we are accustomed to find in the Portfolio, and they are given in liberal number. The plates are four, the subjects being the "Madonna del Granduca," "St. Sebastian," "The Marriage of the Virgin," and the "Portrait of Raphael," perhaps the finest of the set. There are also eight fall-page illustrations and seventeen others.
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