lint arts.

THE ROYAL ACADEMY EXHIBITION.

Ix our brief note on the private view, we termed the Academy Ex- hibition "more than commonly satisfactory upon the whole." Further

inspection has confirmed us in this opinion : the gallery presents an un- usual number of pictures of emotion or incident, which have called for some exercise of the inventive faculty in the painter; it includes compa-

ratively few things repulsive or derogatory to us as a school, and is thus a

good average exhibition. Its strength, however, is only strength in the average, for the collection is by no means a striking one. Perhaps there is no single leading contributor who has not on some previous occasion surpassed,. in interest or excellence, the work by which he is represented here ; and many leading men do not exhibit. To those whom we men-

tioned in this class last week we must add the painters Creswick, Knight, Denby, and Egg ; and the sculptor Gibson. Of the younger men, we miss Messrs. Ford Brown, Collins, and Stirling ; nor is there any such first. appearance as that of Mr. Leighton last year.

On the present occasion, we shall accompany the visitor through the Great Room and into the Middle Room, confining our attention chiefly to works hung on the much-coveted " line."

We pass first Mr. Roberts's "Christmas-Day in St Peter's at Rome, 1854" ; a very large work, full of decoration, ceremonial, cardinals, and soldiers. "The Last Parting of Marie Antoinette and her Son" is the chief contribution of Mr. Ward. The. Queen is seated, clasping to her bosom the head of her boy, who looks-into her face with a glance of ter- ror ; his sister is kissing his hand ; Madame Elizabeth leans upon the Queen's chair, and'rairies _her eyes in silent prayer ; while an overgrown, over-dressed member of the Revolutionary Committee, pompous in his hard-hearted insolence, pulls out his watch to show the warder, whose look of sympathetic rebuke proves how much the parting-scene has touched him, that time is up, and little Capet must positively come away without any more of this kind of nonsense. A candle burned down to its guttering socket may serve to show that the Royal Family has been sitting up all night, to lose no moment of last mourn- ful companionship ; and the Dauphin is adorned, like a victim for slaughter, with the tricolor scarf and cockade. Such a scene cannot fail of appealing to the emotions ; but the sentiment which Mr. Ward has infused into it is, on the whole, of an obvious sort, and the tout ensemble theatrical to a degree of coarseness. We may instance the warder, who, being a sympathizer, is made, unlike all the other Revolu- tionists, a person of refined aspect, upon that first commonplace principle of effect that a good character is to be pretty and romantic, and a bad character ugly. The harder task, but surely the more impressive one in the long run, would have been, to make him a.man of hard mould, like the rest. His sympathy might then have told us that he has been softened by daily witnessing the patient sufferings of the captives, whereas the sympathy of a sensitive man. at the crowning moment goes for nothing, as being a matter of course. " The Abandoned," by Mr. Stanfield, embodies a noble subject of utter desolation—a lifeless wreck in mid ocean, unknown save to the heaving of the waves and the cry of sea-birds. "The wreck had evidently drifted about for many months; dusters of shell-fish had.fastened upon it, and long sea-weeds flaunted at its sides." Scuds of melancholy cloud pour their unfelt rain-upon the hull, and ceaselessly the breakers dash and moan against it. Mr. Stanfield is scarcely the man to realize the full, actual, and imaginative awe of such a scene ; yet he has produced a work of a high order of talent in itself, and of high rank among his own efforts. The same, in a different direction, is the case with Mr. Webster's " Hide and Seek " ; where a numerous league of boys and girls are stuffing themselves into all manner of out-of-the-way places, to perplex the faculties of a brother, who, full of fun. and confident eagerness, is at the moment of entering the cot-, tage. The girl behind the door with her &prep up to her mouth, the other keeping her head and shoulders under the grey cloak which hangs in the corner, and the demure half-smile on the.face of the mother, who is not to know anything about it when the seeker comes in, are particularly good. From this we turn to another domestic subject, Mr. Frith's " Many Happy Returns of the. Day," or birthday festival of a little girl in an affinenthome. The servant is bringing in a Noah's ark in brown paper, with a letter of presentation ; the comely mother looks on with gentle satisfaction ; the father drinks the " many happy returns " ; a lady—perhaps his sister—is pouring " not more than half a glass " for the eldest girl; one of the boys is draining his glare with all the relish of its being an, infrequent treat ; and one of the girls is handing the wine to grandpapa. Meanwhile,, the heroine of the feast sits in a wreath- crowned chair, rather grand and shy, and with a not' on that she would rather be eating something than occupy a post of so much distinction. There is a pleasant family air about the whole party, with much elegant nicety of painting; and the work counts among its author's least alloyed successes.

In " The Brambles in the Way" we meet the first of a set of charming landscape subjects by Mr. Hook ; charming, like his previous works of the same kind, for their fresh enjoyment of nature, and their combination of artistic feeling and faithful um" improved" repre- sentation. There is nevertheless something monotonous and perhaps too low in key in the green of his vegetation; end his skies, as in this in- stance, are too often slurred over. Mr. Elmore's "Emperor Charles V at Yuste " portrays the incident, mentioned in Stirling's Life, of his call- ing, on the last .day before he finally took to his bed, for the portrait of his.Empress, a Last Judgment by Titian, and a picture of the Agony in the Garden. The figure of Charles is the strong point in the work, and is, indeed, the best thing Mr. Elmore has ever produced. Propped up with cushions in his chair, he can. hardly support himself from sinking ; and his wandering eyes, fallen month, ashy lips, deathly pallor, and nerveless drooping hands, form an impressive image of vital power in its last exhaustion. There is no attempt to sentimentalize the figure, or soften down its painfulness ; and all the accessories about it are painted with singular dexterity.. Of the, rest of the picture there is not much to say, except that it completes the composition. The incident of the monk bringing forward a chair with no very manifest occasion for it, is some- what trivial to be made so conspicuous ; and that of the youth to the right learning the use of the mariner's compass seems extraneous to the sub- ject The scattered series of Mr. Millsia's live pictures—all of the domestic class more or less, and with children prominent in all—commences with " Peace Concluded, 1856 " ; a Crimean officer come home, and reading the news,of peace in the Time. One of his two little girls has brought out her Noah's ark, and is displaying the animals emblematic of the warring powers—lion, cock, turkey, and Arctic bear—concluding the array with the dove bearing the olive branch. The other looks up with childish intentness at papa, as though she had hardly got well ac- quainted with him yet. The strong points of the work are its superla- tive vigour of colour and execution, the heads of the children, and the beautiful face of the wife, full of tender happiness and repose of heart. Its weak points lie in an invention of the subject somewhat puerile for the painter of the " Huguenot" and the " Rescue" ; in the wife's posi- tion, which, without being improbable, looks rather uncomfortable and constrained; and in some partial slapdash of handling, as in the figure of the standing child, and the battle-print on the wall. The dog is a splendid piece of lifelike painting ; and the whole shows a power of rapid work in the artist, fully commensurate with his power of elaboration in former works, though we should not wish to see it adopted too freely. The picture hung next to this, Sir Edwin Landseer's " Highland Nurses " —a brace of does licking the wounds of a dying deer—is also connected with the war by being "dedicated to Miss Nightingale." Nothing can be more exquisitely lovely than the sentiment of this, nothing more magical than the ease and charm of its execution. Look how a touch or two creates the colour of the triad of ptarmigans, in all its beauty and changeful play of light, and at the perfect grace of the doe and fawn to the left, and their value in the composition. Eminent among Sir Ed- win's masterpieces, this work maintains him, by its conception and touching idea, altogether at the head of animal-painters of whatever period.

The work which first arrests the eye and the attention in the Middle Room is Mr. Holman Hunt's " Scapegoat." "The scene," as the cata- logue notes, "was painted. at Oosdoom, on the margin of the salt-en- crusted shallows of the Dead Sea : the mountains beyond are those of Mom." The picture, independently of its other sources of interest, pos- sesses that of being the first exhibited result of Mr. Hunt's Eastern tra- vel. We mill to mind no other work painted for the sake of its symbolic value in which the meaning is conveyed through so strict an adherence to the absolute visible circumstances of an apparently unimportant fact. To any who care to see in it nothing beyond a natural-history study of a Syrian goat, it is exactly that—a goat astray on a desert sea-shore. The purpose and significance of it are something far different. The scape- goat, on whose head were raremenially laid the sins of the •congregation of Israel, which he was sent forth to carry away into " a land not in- habited," is understood as one of the clearest types in the Mosaic law of the Saviour Christ, who " took away the sins of the world," who " hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows "; and the goat in the picture is a religious type in precisely the same manner in which- the goat wander- ing or perishing in the wilderness was one. Piteous and haggard, hunted into the waste by every faithful Israelite, the goat pauses helplessly after a weary length of miles, amid the salt ooze of the Dead Sea. His dimmed searching eyes find nothing but barrenness--a hynena's skull, a wild-goat's horns, a camel's skeleton, a withered olive-branch, drifting half• sunk in the sea-bed, and crusted with the salt which condenses in the shallows into solid crystals,—nothing to suggest or sustain life : he bleats miserably ; and the salt yields under his hoof, like a coating of treacherous ice. The head, having round it a fillet of scarlet which was bound there " in the belief that, if the propitiation were accepted, the scarlet would become white," has as much of intense and appealing ex- pression as could be obtained without exceeding the truth of brute na- ture. The sky changes from tint to tint in the light of sunset, which strikes the distant mountains into a furrowed barrier-line of crimsons and purples, and mountains and sky shed their reflex on the ooze, intersected by the deeper tracks of pale water. The work is a solemn and impres- sive one, betraying in the plainness of its form no poverty of conception. In principle, indeed, its symbolism is of the highest kind of all,—that where the symbol is a truth, accurate and consistent in all its details, which the thing symbolized underlies and endows with life. Still, it znay be matter of grave discussion how far it is prudent to work upon a type which, to the majority of persons, or without a key first given, will convey at best an emotion, but not a symbol unmistakeably defined. As regards execution, the picture is marked by the painter's unflinching earnestness, power, and knowledge. The effect is strange and riveting, as it should be ; the colouring, considered as a matter of manipulation, has something cutting and =combined, which requires to be cared for, especially with reference to an exhibition-room.

"'Philip IV of Spain knighting Velasquez " furnishes Mr. Herbert junior with a subjeini et for the first important work he has exhibited, and one which marks out as a man of assured promise. The Bing, it is-related, on seeing the picture called "Las Menirras," "said that one thing was wanting, and, taking a brush, he painted on the portrait of the artist the red cross of the order of Santiago." The story is told clearly, but in a manner somewhat eccentric, as we do not see the can- vaas itself on which the King is touching, but only the reflection of it in a glass. Philip is handsome and princely, and Velasquez expresses his gratitude by an action at once manly and respectful. The extreme sim- plicity and straightforwardness both of design and of handling recall Mr. Leslie's manner, but without servility. Mr. Dobson sends two Bible sub- jects ; of which the more notable is "The Parable of the Children in the Market-place," in which Christ contrasts his own mission with that of John the Baptist—" Whereunto shall I liken the men of this generation, and to what are they like ? They are like unto children sit- ling in the mar place, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept." What to make of such a subject is a -very dif- ficult question; and Mr. Dobson, while he shows some thoughtful in- tention, and some perception of its requirements, has hardly succeeded so far as to justify the choice. Christ and the Baptist are represented as Children ; the first addressing the other " children in the market-place " with earnest mildness, the second absorbed in mournful thought. The audience pursue their own frivolous or baneful wills ; a girl treads on the pure lilies and holds the flaunting poppy, one boy drags along a leg- tied dove, one closes his ears perversely, others catch after butterflies. There is delicate and careful painting in the work, with nothing-to shock the fastidious whether in religion or in art ; but also, as usual, with a want of strength and reality. One feels that such a scene could not be actual, at the same time that it lacks the severity of an abstract treat- ment. " Mid Spring " by Mr. Inchbold justifies the motto which he has chosen from Tennyson—" You scarce could see the grass for flowers "the whole of the sylvan bank which forms his foreground being. starred with numberless clusters of the wild hyacinth, fresh with morning dew, and breaking into sun and shadow in the light which penetrates the leafy thicket. The picture is more fully successful in its realization of natural profusion and detail than of light; but it is a charming little thing, and its minute truth almost baffles the eyes, which discover here and there, with some of the unexpectedness of nature, a squirrel, a bird flying, or a bird peering through the grass.

We quit the exhibition for the present with two Spaniah pic- tures : Mr. Phillip's " Dona Pepita,"—a brilliant soft coquette, deep in the science of fan and mantilla, and the most agreeable of the various Iberian subjects, all striking to the eye, which the artist contri- butes; and the " Corrillo Andaluz" of Mr. D. C. Gibson,—which, with qualities of execution far leas conspicuous, possesses a quiet, accurately studied look of life and fact not often met with. A mufcteer is stopping at a farrier's shop ; a little girl peeps out of window overhead; and a group of men and women in the street rest, argue, talk, and lounge, with national gravity and-propriety. Besides the works we have mentioned, we may bespeak attention to the following, which occur upon the same route, as being either superior examples of their authors, or works of merit which might in haste be overlooked.

17. Love's Labour's Lost F. B. Piekersgill. 39. The Stream from Llyn Idwal A. W. Hunt. 58. Cinderellaafter her Sisters have leftfor the Ball Miss .B. Threk.

59. The White Owl . J. Webbe.

154. After Sunset T. 3. Cooper.

205. Madame Moreau Miss J. M. Boyce. 209. A Passing Cloud J. C. Hook. 221. The Breakwater at Plymouth F. B. Lee. 229. The Invalid .8. 4. Farwell. 262. The Village Postman J. M. Carrie*. 293. Portrait of a Gentleman . ..... J.A. Millais.

296. Scene near Bonney . A. Yurnesa. 300. An Interior .F..D. Hardy.