23 MARCH 1872, Page 21

The Portfolio. March. (Seeley.)—The frontispiece to this num- ber is

a very fine etching, an "Aged Spaniard," by M. Alphonse Legros. The mechanical execution is excellent, and the expression very noble. It would scarcely be possible to draw a face more significant of a devotion that " waiteth patiently for the Lord." Mr. Hamerton, the editor, very rightly directs attention to the remark- able " modelting " which M. Legros has contrived to put into his study. The deep lines and hollows of a face wasted with age could not be better given by any mode of art. The other illustrations in the num- ber are an autotype of a "Sketch for a Cupid," by Francois Boucher, a .French artist whose life about coincided with the worst period of French art, the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century ; and a very pretty photograph, "The Journey to Emmaus," executed by the Woodbury process, after John LinnelL No one who has seen on the walls of the Academy Mr. Linnell's glorious cornfields—to mention one of the sub- jects in which he notably excels—will hesitate to put the artist high among landscape painters. The specimen of his figure-painting here given is characteristically full of grace and poetical expression. It is a singular discredit to the Academy, though rather, it should be said, to the Academy of the past than to that of the present, that Mr. Linnell never received even the lower of the titles which it has to bestow.-- Art, Pictorial and industrial. March. (Sampson Low and Co.)— " Art " contains, besides a variety of articles, more than one of them of considerable interest, on various artistic topics, six illustrations, all executed by the heliotype process. A "Holy Family," after Titian, is a very pleasing reproduction of a great picture, which the engraver, Pietro Andertoni, had very worthily rendered. The "Portrait of Hogarth," where the artist has represented himself as busy in his painting of "Comedy," is another reproduction which many will be glad to possess. "The Little Devil's Bridge at Altdorf," from Turner's Lther Studioruni, is a fine weird-looking landscape, the effect of which is given with great force by the means employed. The other illustrations are "Titania Asleep," after a bas-relief by Mr. Miller; "Deeply Interested," after a painting by Mr. E. C. Barnes ; and "The New Law Courts : a Portion of the West Front."