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ROYAL ACADEMY EXHIBITION: GENERAL SUBJECTS.
There may be two opinions as to the right of such a subject as "Sir Plume demands the restoration of the lock," from Pope's Rape of the lock, to pictorial treatment on a considerable scale ; there can be but one as to its good fortune in falling to the hand of Mr. Leslie. No other painter would bring to its management such elegant relish and tasteful appro- priateness. Everything is in right keeping ; the nice clear daylight effect, too true to be either striking or common, the individuality of each face, at once portrait-like and in character with the poem and the personage, the simpering fashionable startle and condolence. Sir Plume,
" With earnest eyes and round unthinking face,"
is what he should be, a gentleman and a nullity. To the " well-bred lord" who triumphs in his prize belongs the auxiliary interest of his being a likeness—and a fair one—of Mr. Millais. The colour is a little hard and dry ; and in the matter of hair attention is called less to that of the bereaved Belinda than of the standing lady whose back is turned towards the spectator. Hers is useful, however, as suggesting what the heroine's had been ; which her position does not allow of her doing com- pletely for herself. You can scarcely call the picture interesting; but it is a very pleasant one, which you like more the more familiar you grow with it. We rank it among Mr. Leslie's very decided successes. No. 100, "A Present," is a nice lady's head ; the arms elbow-propped on the table giving it that tinge of uncommonness which marks the work of a true artist. "Mrs. W. C. Sole" has less of notice- able, being somewhat in the "theatrical portrait" vein. Sir Charles Eastlake, the President, does once more exactly what he has done times out of number. " Irene " is the old young lady, more silly than heretofore in her preternatural blandness, with the old pasty, single- hued flesh, and the old warm golden green and brown red. The colour is not at all new, and not very true; but beautiful it is for harmony, breadth, and rich softness of tone. Sir Charles has caught it from Titian and the Venetians; and it is much what Titian might have done had his power of hand and head been of the Presidential standard. From Mr. Poole we have the most adequate example exhibited since 1851—" The Song of the Troubadours : Bertrand de Born, lord of the castle of Haute-fort in Provence, the warrior-poet of the 12th century,"—that same poor Bertrand whom inexorable Dante saw in hell among the stirrers-up of sedition, carrying his own head. There is a certain poetic furor in Mr. Poole, which, however much marred in its expression by weaknesses and perversities, always raises his handi- work into the first class in a picture-gallery. This painting is largely im- bued with it. Its sickly yellow greens are neither true nor beautiful ; but there is some of the touching soul of twilight in it, with the star stealin' g into the sky, and the moon-glory burnishing the water into a long halo for the minstrel's head. The backward-leaning knight is feeble ; the child plucking wild-flowers, no child, but a woman dwarfed, meagre and unsatisfactory : yet, even in these figures, and far more in the untamed French face of the listening archer to the left, and in the chanting Ber- trand himself, breathes an enthusiasm, a longing, strange and remote, such as in those great old days made battling a chivalry and love a wor- ship. We feel that each heart there, on the windy ramparts, is full of a brimming passion, which can thrill through the eyes in lightning flash or the sting of tears, according as the poet's strain shall will it. The fact is that Mr. Poole is one of the very few men capable of really conceiving such a Subject; and, whether with a good picture or with a bad picture, he forces you to feel it. Far different from the earnestness of Mr. Poole is that of Mr. Collins ; the one devouring the means in the end, the other gradually, religiously, elaborating the end through the means; the one immediate, the other visibly growing. Yet the earnestness is true in both. Mr. Collins selects an incident in the life of Madame de Chantal : "A poor strange woman was taken with the pains of la- bour in the course of her wanderings : she sought and found refuge in a stable, where she gave birth to her child. Madame de Chantal walked a considerable distance in order to visit her. All the time she was engaged in her pious office, Madame de Chantal confessed that she thought of the Infant Jesus in the stable of Bethlehem." This is by many degrees the most important and the best work which the painter has exhibited ; quiet, simple, rather deficient in vividness, but atoning for that by the seriousness of conscientious intention, and thoroughly well studied. The colours and disposition of the mother's drapery are made to suggest the Madonna, not too obviously, but sufficiently. The back- ground of chesnut trees discerned through the dilapidations in the stable, and of an ordinary but diversified country-view, is perfectly suitable to a homely incident of civilized life, yet full of captivating detail, and painted beautifully. Most faithful, also, and glowingly finished, is much of the in-doors accessory—the marigolds which the new-born infant's sister is sorting, and the smouldering wood-embers. The hands are all excellent in working ; a great point, second in importance only to the heads. Ma- dame de Chantal, who stands patching a poor little jacket into shape, has a face somewhat flat and thinly painted, but kind, and totally void of pretence. Indeed, the whole picture is a lesson of how much may be made of a rather poor subject, without the application of mental in- genuity or peculiar beauty of pictorial material, by sincere sympathy and the utter abhorrence of trick.
A singular production is "The Protest," by Mr. W. Cave Thomas; to whose title the following lines—original, we fancy—are appended in the catalogue. "Of what avail is all this costly art, Whilst souls are dark and ruinous within ? Where restoration should commence its work, To raise up men proportionate with truth, It halts abrupt."
Putting the picture and the motto together, we understand its essence to be the vanity of ceremonial religion when powerless over the heart. The point is not very clearly raised, however. The scene is an Italian street of the medireval time. A lady, doubtless the representative of the vitally religious temper, passes unheeding the shops where vendors of ecclesiastical paraphernalia—images, altar-furniture, and the like—are hawking their wares. A young man on whom a rosary is being pressed ponders doubtingly ; a company of nuns deifies in the background ; and, to the left, are two young savages of society, one crouched in sleep, one looking intently down a well,—an action which may have been selected in order to recall the proverbial dwelling-place of truth. We suppose these boys stand for the humanity which is allowed to grow wild and run to waste alongside of the religion of bell, book, and candle. Such is the picture ; moral in thought, cramped in invention, painted with science and mastery, but some hardness, eminent for fine design in the individual figures. We may notice particularly both the half- naked boys, the quiet but thorough expression and ease in the whole at- titude of the young cavalier, and the face of one of the traders with its crafty lines. The work is in all respects characteristic of Mr. Thomas. The "Letter-writer, Seville," by Mr. Phillip, is a picture of national character and costume ; a clever one, though without any very peculiar traits about it. The Sevillana who dictates her thoughts is an agree- able young creature ; and there is a very nice passage of colour to the left in the greyish blue striped curtain at whose hem a cat dozes. More remarkable-and truly remarkable for brilliant colour and mani- pulation after the best manner of Mr. Frith-is the same artist's half figure of "Lady Como Russell "-habited in the Spanish fashion, and with something of a foreign hardness of expression. The blue and gold screen and the green velvet chair attest the hand of a true co- lourist; and these are only points in a general effect every item of which tells. Both Mr. Egg's contributions are small and slight, and may be called sketches. In the "Scene from the Fortunes of Nigel," the pettish weariness of Margaret is well given, and she is capitally turned in her chair. We are glad to meet Mr. Wallis in a subject of some importance, "Johnson, too ragged to appear at Cave's table, has a plate of victuals sent to him behind the screen" ; and glad to find him treating it, in its main essentials, well. There is nothing caricaturist* in it. If you look into the Doctor's coat, you see that it is ragged ; if behind the screen, you discover that some one is at dinner there ; if at the servant-maid's head, that it has a saucy toss as well as an air of pity half-way between scorn and interest. But none of this is made obtrusive ; Mr. Wallis renders an incident in life, and not a smart scene in a comedy. John- son's massive face, though of too advanced an age, is decidedly good in the same sensible spirit : he looks off from his work to the plate with a mingling of surly disdain, fortitude, and abstraction, which you perceive to be indicative of fixed character rather than belonging to the moment. The picture is cleverly lighted : and the same, in even a higher degree, should be stated of the two excellent interiors by this artist from Shak- spere's house; No. 267, especially, could not be better. Like Mr. Egg, Mr. Armitage makes little show. His "Death of Marmion, a finished design for the fresco executed in the Poet's Hall, New Palace at West- minster," promises nothing for the completed work ; and his "Lotos- eater" is not the "mild-eyed melancholy" dreamer whom Tennyson has embodied from Homer, but more expressive of passion in the face and the somewhat tortuous pose. " The Wounded Knight," by Mr. Gale, displays the small style and multitudinous outlines of furze and fern, which he may fondly imagine to be the essence of Pr-sraphaelitism. Industrious detail, even thus understood, is not without its value ; but it goes a very short way towards rendering meaningless figures and lifeless colour tolerable. " Guiderius and Arviragus repeating the dirge over Imogen " has some careful flesh-painting, but no notion of the subject ; moreover, Imogen is what she is disguised as, a boy. "Christopher Sly" and " Bardolph " are two talented studies by Mr. Marks,-the first the better in character, the second in colour : we would suggest to this gentleman, however, that the appetite which he has for brutal drunkards is a degraded one. A violent but effective firelight distinguishes "Mazeppa relating his ad- ventures," by Mr. Barker ; on the whole, the best picture we have seen from his hand. Mr. Deane manages with the competence of practised dexterity an anecdote of " Vandyck and Frank Hals," where the latter divines the former from his handiwork ; the faces are lively in expres- sion. In the head of "A Greek Girl," by Mr. Fox, one can discern accu- racy of character.
Four veteran offenders shall form the tail to our list of the painters of general subjects. The starved insignificance of Mr. Charles Landseer is exemplified in "Bnigela "; the tumbledown-colossus style of Mr. Hart in his "Columbus, when a boy, being instructed in geography, conceives the idea of a new world" ; in "Chastity," the utter prostration of hu- man faculty which constitutes Mr. Frost's patent among painters. Mr. O'Neil is guilty of effrontery in quoting Goethe's Faust to his libel on the garden-scene ; it would be a bad illustration even of the Faust and Marguerite of the Princess's.
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