itur arts.

THB ROYAL ACADEMY BXHIBITION—SECOND VISIT.

Continuing our survey of the Middle Room, we come, in the North- east corner, upon one of those miracles of delicate completeness with which Mr. Lewis has long made us familiar in water-colour, and for which ho is beginning to adopt the vehicle of oil. Both this picture, a " Street-scene in Cairo, near the Babel Luk," and one in the East Room which is a repetition of a water-colour recently exhibited, show a more assured mastery over oil than he possessed last year. The Cairo scene is perhaps rather too yellowish-brown in its general tone; but the whole is so charmingly combined—the camels, the light and shade of the houses

and the opening space, the hovering pigeons, the dark recess of the sh and its dignified occupants—and every one of the multitudinous details is so perfect, that this class of subject and of art could scarcely be carried further. Mr. Wallis's " Chattcrton," lying dead in his garret as damn_ light spreads through the narrow window, and stretches along the roofs of the mighty London which he has folind all too small to exist in, is a highminded work, thoroughly felt, thought, and executed. The poison- bottle lies on the floor; the dead hand clenches a fragment of the manu- scripts which the poet has torn up and scattered to perdition; and the last whiff of his " brief candle" fades into air. The chiselled features are calm, or even triumphant. Mr. Wallis has avoided anything Fhiustly in his subject, while he gives all the impressiveness of its reality. In details, however, he has not adhered rigidly to the narratives. Chatterton's hair was extremely dark, not golden brown ; his corpse was found with the legs hanging over the bed, not distended; and the poison-bottle was standing by the window. Another work further on by this painter, "Andrew Marvell Return- ing the Bribe," is done in the same spirit of faithful seriousness ; but nothing particular is seen to be going on in it, the subject itself being somewhat impracticable. Mr. W. Davis's landscapes " Shotwick on the Dee," and " Wallasey Mill, Cheshire," should on no account be passed unexamined ; as, although small and not elaborately worked out, they will be found full of true twilight mystery, subdued luminous tone, and acute feeling and observation. Of Mr. Poole there is less to be said this year than usual : if his shortcomings are less gross, his whole aim is lower. His picture of "The Conspirators—the Midnight Meeting" represents Arnold, Werner, attd Walter, meeting by night in a cavern to plan the liberation of Switzerland; but it suggests nothing beyond a conversation of banditti,—as such, cleverly picturesque in a dashing way. No. 413, which, from its having neither title nor author's name down in the catalogue, came to be spoken of as "the great unknown," is now universally understood to be by Mr. Burton; and those who recol- lect one or two minor works previously exhibited by this artist might recognize it even by the style. There is a clearly-told story in the work, but little of what in a romance we call "plot." A Cavalier has had a quarrel about cards with another man in a forest—not the likeliest spot for card-playing. They have fought ; his sword has broken, and he is wounded—probably to death. He has lain all night on the damp ground ; where, next day, he is discovered by a Puritan gentleman and lady—either husband and wife or minister and devotee—who appear to have come up merely by chance. The lady acts the good Samaritan ; the man looks on with a scowl bred of the hard self-righteousness of the Levite. The picture is painted with extreme cleverness, surehandedness, and diligence ; the forest-background especially, with its spruce-firs and leafless bushes, being worthy of all praise for accurate making-out and representation ; and in these qualities we see no limit to what the artist may perform. It will be hold the acme of Prteraphaelitism by persons who consider Prteraphaelitism to consist in definite details and plenty of them ; not by those who lay chief stress, after earnestness of conception, upon the feeling, the intensity, and the natural variety with which things are painted. Here—not to speak of expression-painting—there is no flesh-painting, drapery-painting, nor even grass-painting, up to the mark in quality of colour or texture : every inch of the picture is paint. The work gives no pledge of progress; for it is about as clever as it can possibly be in what the artist has pro- posed to himself. The worst of it is that we see to the end of it and of him at a glance ; so that, unless he sets about greatly enlarging the scope of his efforts, his future pictures are sure indeed to astonish, but never to touch heart or brain, never to tell new truths, or deeper harmonies and refinements of old truths. For some years, no comparatively unknown painter has done anything more excellently efficient, or less hopeful. The " Autumn Leaves " of Mr. Millais presents Prmmphaelitism in quite a different aspect, and the painter himself in a new one, It is a work en- tirely of sentiment and effect; the evident object being, as in some pic- tures of the Venetians, and eminently of Giorgione, to convey an emo- tion at once intense and undefined. Story there is none—merely four young girls feeding a heap of burning autumn-leaves ; special individual expression there is none : everything is done by colour, and by a certain passion in the artist which communicates itself to the spectator. To do this well is one of the most arduous tests of a genuine vocation ; and Mr. Millais has mastered it with a power which places tlie work among his greatest achievements. For colour, it is the gest superb thing in the gallery ; and the expression of gloving twilight is in the highest degree wonderful and beautiful : note espe '.illy the deep tone and evanescent detail of the poplar against the sunset redness in the sky. Each face has a living sweetness and loveliness of its own. The look and action of the elder of the two sisters, who is dropping the leaves upon the smoking pile, would be open to objection as being beyond the simple incident, and obviously addressed to the beholder, but that, in art of this peculiar aim, whatever assists the emotion carries out the purpose, and is legiti- mized by it. Such works are not painted to be reasoned upon, but to be felt and delighted in ; and this will rank with the very highest of its order—with those in which the appeal is most direct, and each feature of the means employed most absolutely absorbed into the essential spirit of the whole.

Before passing into the West Room, we return for a brief while to the Eastern, to look at the space above the line which we previously disre- garded. And here, in Mr. Windus's " Burd Helen," we find one of the most remarkable and noble works upon the walls—one too by' a painter scarcely known, and of late years wholly unrepresented, in the London exhibitions. The subject is from the touching old ballad of the same name, in which " Helen, fearing her lover's desertion, runs by the side of his horse as his foot-page," " A live-lang simmer's day, Until they cam to Clyde water, Was filled frae bank to brae."

Helen, heart-sick, pauses at the brink with trembling recoil, and presses her hand to her side ; but the cruel lord passes on, and she has to wade across, or lose him and remain abandoned to her shame. The road be- hind has been stony to her feet, and he scans her with the cold hard glance of one who thinks this trial must baffle her persistence at last. The moment of dreadful crisis is realized with admirable depth of feel- ing, and with art of the rarest kind. There is profound study, not only in the expressions and actions, but in every point of the landscape-back- ground, which is chosen and worked out with exquisite appropriateness and truth. All is equally well done—all thorough, without wearisome labour or obtrusiveness. A certain air of eccentricity may be felt at fast sight, and the colour has something of the subdued tone and sheeny light which belonged to the earlier style of Mr. Poole ; but the reality and dramatic pathos of the work, and its disciplined artistic refinement, rank it among the highest developments of the new school. Another work of very superior character, without coming into competition with such as Mr. Windns's, is Mr. Chapman's " Lollard Discovered "; whore, during the persecutions of 1408, an informer is denouncing to a monk a woman whose nightly privacy is devoted to the perusal of the English Scriptures. The spirit of this work is grave, its story told ingeniously and with effect ; the light and shade excellent, and the colour, though somewhat neutral, substantially right. On the upper walls of this room are also most of the principal portraits of the exhibition : " Sir Anthony de Rothschild," and " The Right Honourable David Salomons, Lord Mayor," by Mr. Hart, both simply and straightforwardly rendered, the latter with an air of high respecta- bility amounting to dilvity; " Professor Owen," the best of Mr. Pickers- gill's; the subscription portrait of "Mr. David Cox," by Sir Watson Gordon,—a fine likeness, massive and manly; "Sir Watson Gordon" himself, by Mr. J. Graham Gilbert,—a full-length figure, unfortunately in court-dress, but very like the original, well done, and wholly without affectation; "Sir Colin Campbell," by Mr. Phillips.—a most characteris- tic head, firmly and naturally portrayed; and " The Countess of Ports- mouth," by Mr. Grant, quietly aristocratic, and painted with that eminent ease and savoir faire which make this artist's portraits almost always agreeable and often of a high class. In the West Room, an original subject, treated with originality and marked talent, is Mr. G. H. Thomas's " Ball at the Camp, Boulogne." A large canvass is filled with the fourth figure of quadrilles in all varieties of humour, military costume, poissarde costume, fun, bustle, flirtation, excitement, extravagance, and Gallicism. Every figure is doing something, and something which he or she would really be doing in the ball-room. At the entrance appear two Englishmen,--one in for enjoying himself, broad, jolly, and grinning; the other awfully respectable, boring and bored. The picture is curiously and capitally French; and though its invention and style tend towards caricature, it never quite falls into the snare, and it compensates for the tendency by its exuberance of life and character. " The Triumph of Music," by Mr. Leighton, is a work altogether unlike the Cimabue which gained him so rapid a reputation last year. It is as destitute as it could well be of executive beauty or charm, and of everything which made that picture valuable,—the colour coarse and hard, the composition null, the draperies thoroughly common in arrangement and design. Nor are the higher requisites of the subject realized with any approximate degree of completeness. The only way to keep patience with it is to consider the temper of mind in which the work is conceived; and in this point of view Mr. Leighton stands higher than he did with the Cimabue, and fully as high as with the Paris picture from Romeo and Juliet. Pluto is imagined as a dreadful image of deathliness,—worn-out, emaciated, and with no power save that of blight and corruption. Orpheus plays his viol with bated breath, averted eyes, twitching fingers, and starting veins,—scarcely daring so much as to think till the supreme effort be over ; and Eurydice yearns and strains towards him out of the awful Hades, as though she could sigh herself up into the world of life. The background, half-undistinguishable, looks dreamy and oppressive. The whole spirit of the picture is rather mediaeval than classic, with a curious something about it besides, which belongs to Mr. Leighton individually. However, as we have intimated, its merits are matter of feeling, by no means of realization. As a con- crete work of art, it is almost an utter failure, and the overweening reck- lessness of self-improvement which it implies must, if persisted in, prove rapidly fatal. In this room, Mr. Millais appears again, with two pictures. "L'Enfant du Regiment," though neither so powerful nor so elaborate as others, is one of his choice pieces of execution,—all but the back- ground figures, which are sketched in with a flimsiness less worthy of Mr. Millais than of Mr. GoodaiL The tale is a pretty one, intelligibly told in the briefest compass. A party of French soldiers, perhaps in the troubles of the first Revolution, are defending a church. A little girl has got wounded in the arm during the scuffle, and has been laid, tenderly co- vered over by a soldier's coat, upon the Gothic effigy of an old knight, where, spite of artillery and turmoil, she falls into a gentle slumber. The interest entirely centres in this point, and all here is delicate and suggestive. " The Blind Girl" is a deeper and higher effort; a most pathetic thought, treated in a spirit which may be called religious. A poor girl, sub- sisting on charity—her bosom labelled with the inscription " Pity the blind"—is seated on a wayside bank, after a shower. The glory of a double rainbow is in the dark-grey sky ; the waving luxuriant meadow- grass is laughing again in bright cool sunshine; crows, sheep, and cattle, rejoice in its return, and a butterfly settles upon her worn dress. Of all this she knows only what she can feel ; the mild warmth of the sun, but not its splendour; she only knows the presence of her sister, who is turning round to gaze upon the rainbow, by holding her hand, and the harebells which cluster the bank only by fingering them. Her sweet innocent face, with the large lids drooping over the veiled eyes, inclines forward, with that look of craving sadness so peculiar to the blind, but always patient and content. The exquisite truth of the English land- scape, and the faithfiti purpose which makes every detail of homeliness in the figures touching and valuable, should not pass unpraised. If minor faults are to be specified, we should object to the unnecessary clumsiness of the blind girl's hand upon the bank, the cutting off of her feet just at the edge of the frame, and the excessive size of the sister's boots, which almost deceives the eye into supposing that her lower limbs are either out of perspective or out of proportion.

Of the following, which we have passed on our route, the first three are pointed out as good examples of well-known artists ; the latter eight, from less familiar hands, as either excellent in themselves, or promising for the future.

514. Robert Cowen, Esq 526. A Harvest Sunset 546. Ger Falcons Striking a Kite 64. The Port of London 66. A Woody Bank

Tr. Borah.

J. Linnell.

J. Wolf.

J.

Miss N. Wilcomb.

330. The Intruders Kra. E. M. Ward. 338. View of a Portion of the Undereliff, Isle of 1 Wight IV. I. Welibe. 372. Near Borne J. Leslie.

931. The Lesson R. B. Martineau.

472. The Widow's Cares R. Carrick.

503. Summer Crops W. Linnet).