3 JUNE 1854, Page 29

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ROYAL ACADEMY EXHIBITION: PORTRAITS ANTI

LANDSCAPES.

The chief portrait for interest combined with artistic deservings is MY: - Grant's ef " Lord John Russell,"-full-length, and perhaps indeed fuller- length than the original ; for though the smallness of mould is well con- veyed, the actual shortness is less evident. Too young his Lordship de- cidedly is; but the springy slimness and nervous but confident activity are very good. Lord John is represented holding the Reform Bill. The head of "The Right Honourable T. B. Macaulay" strikes principally by the clear steady vigour of the eyes. "Viscount Gough" looks easy in his attitude of military command; but, on the whole, there was room for something more original in the general treatment. "Mrs. Percival Hey- wood" stands with a dignified presence. If portraiture be viewed apart from its associations, and without its being required to embody something high and deep, we shall pronounce Mr. Knight's "Reverend George Lock, M.A.," the best portrait in the exhibition. In other words, it is the most skilful "study of a head" ; true, lifelike, good in colour, excellent in its expression of an urbane old age, and the hands joined with, a certain air of courteous good-nature. The other most praiseworthy work of the artist is called "My two Boys,"-broad, moist, and vivid in painting, but otherwise common, with a tinge of the senti- mental. Sir J. Watson Gordon has been a trifle too hasty with his elaborate brother-artist "John F. Lewis," but boldly characteristic withal. The mouth, neighboured by a Moslem-looking beard, has some- thing of a sneer; but the eye is penetrative and understanding. With this capital head, and with the artistically occupied "Miss Eleanor Mal- colm "-a figure which unites grandeur and piquancy-Sir John fully vin- dicates his title as the first in tone of mind among our living portrait.. painters. "The Right Honourable Duncan Macniell, Lord Justice General," is a Scot of Scots, with his robes not so well arranged as they might have been. Sir Edwin Landseer appears with a portrait- group labelled as "unfinished,"- a designation so proper as to suggest the propriety of withholding it till finished,-and entitled "Royal Sports on Hill and Loch; the Queen, the Prince Consort, the Prince of Wales,. the Viscountess Jocelyn." We hope the Queen's Majesty will receive some accession of comeliness with the final touches, and that Prince Albert will get his legs into drawing before all is over. We suspect, however, that the picture will never be peculiarly worthy of Sir Edwin ; and for the present the bright autumn background is all we can very heartily admire in it. The painter's other contribution, " Dandie-- Dinmont, the favourite old Skye Terrier of H. M. the Queen," recon- noitering a hedgehog, shows what he can do, but is not quite what he - ought to have done.

Ary Scheffer, with his whole-length of "Lord Dufferin," gives our - portrait-painters a lesson in simple fine design and artistlike complete- ness-a lesson which they are much in need of. The entire treatment points direct to the sitter's aristocracy, but all those worn-out background accessories in which our dulness revels are rigidly suppressed. The right leg is rather gracelessly obtruded from the peer's robes. Mr. BoaalPs portraits are unsatisfactory because of the careless " masterliness " of his system; but they have quickness of expression, and sometimes-especially in No. 205-a jewel-like rich surface of colour. The small figure of" Dr. Blakiston," by Mr. D. Y. Blakiston, is honourably serious in feeling an execution; "Edward Auchmuty Glover, Esq.," by Mr. Allsworth, ex- ceedingly English ; and Mr. J. Leslie's "Portraits," in good taste ab- horrent of namby-pamby, are women instead of dolls in dress. Mr. Sant's.

pretty children have the wonted dash of affectation ; and are placed in backgrounds of vegetation singularly devoid of natural hue, or of pleasure in the thing depicted. A small " Portrait " in the Octagon Itoom, by Mr. Stephens, is thoughtful and refined ; the head and hands good ; the colour sober with no lack of richness. One sees that the artist is free equally from indifference and from claptrap. It is a pity that the foot is truncated because he has just come to the end of his canvass. Another unpretentious work, truthful, but with nothing to correct the ordinariness of its materials, is the " Portraits " of two elderly ladies seated near a window, by Mr. W. Percy. The Honourable W. Graves makes amateur art speak well for itself in his "Lady George Paget,"—a beautiful and majestic head, whose treatment indicates " blood " as well as artistic gifts. In his " Lady Oglander " the same gentleman unfortunately abandons himself to the worst sloppinesses of the Buckner school—the nonsense-verses of the painter's language. The heads of a mother and child by Mr. E. Hopley, exhibited under the name of "Sitting for his Portrait," possess clever truth of expression, marred by poor handling and a dirty tone of colour.

The following derive some interest from their sitters, little or none from their painters,—" II. I. M. Napoleon III," by Mr. Middleton; "The Author of Alpha," whose name artists and exhibition-haunters will not be slow to supply, and "The late Duke of Wellington," (we believe one of the last as of the worst portraits he sat for,) by Mr. Weigall junior ; "Sir Charles Napier," by Mr. Joy ; and "Lieutenant Benet," by Mr. Pearce, painted for Lady Franklin.

There is only one large-sized landscape of extraordinary merit; and it is Mr. Anthony's. "Nature's Mirror is the most highly and uniformly finished work which its author has produced. In striking effectiveness and immediate imperative appeal to the feelings it yields to some of his pictures worked out on the principle of more rapidity and breadth. The dif- ference is exaggerated by the mediocre position in which the hangers are responsible for placing the picture, so as to punish the artist for the care- ful but always large execution bestowed upon it ; still, the subject is in itself less intense, the manner less absolute, if not less mighty. We would be the last to contest the superiority of a completely finished work, over one, however powerful and intelligible, in which anything is left undone ; but nothing was left undone in Mr. Anthony's massy style. The best specimens of that style were irreproachable and unimprovable - no daring needed to be subtracted, no detail added. Whether Mr. Anthony is likely to sacrifice any of his great qualities to the new system of finish which he has adopted, we are far from prejudging : if so—if he, as an individual, should find it incompatible in the slightest degree with his giant-grasp of truth—we hope he will away with it. His present finish is only another mode of finish, the mode in use among other man; but his old method was finish too. In saying that the work before us is less intense than some of its forerunners we are only comparing Mr. Anthony with himself. There is no other landscapist alive who would throw half the same intensity and might into that light vaporous sky, slaty with the presage of diffused rains, and broken with only a single rift of lilac-tinted blue ; who would so have prolonged into the middle of the picture the smooth water—the tree-shadows of which are almost black in the brood- ing air ; whose grassy bank would be so solid and verdurous ; or whose darkened willows would so move and whisper as the clouds drift.

Contrast with this Mr. Creswick's "Passing Cloud." The aspect of nature is not exactly the same ; but both are showery English country- scenes. Mr. Creswiek is nice and true—his soaked road gleaming with puddles particularly good ; but he is not great. He identifies himself first with art and next with nature ; Anthony with art because with nature—they are one and indivisible for him. You will recognize Cres- wick to be accurate to the appearance he selects, if you have seen it ; you would divine Anthony to be true to the essence and fact of what he shows you even if that precise appearance had never come under your own observation. One takes pleasure in Nature ; the other is possessed by her. Mr. Stanfield does nothing this year to add to the range or de- gree of his reputation ; he maintains his position as skilful and well- grounded, and that is all. Mr. Cooke, albeit net a man of startling ori- ginality, is more original in sea-pieces here. His " Zuyder Zee Better— returning to Port" has greater effective arrangement and more stuff in it than anything of Mr. Stanfield's ; and his "French Lugger returning into Calais" has at least as well-painted a sea. "View on the Canal of the Giudecca," and "The Church of Santa Maria della Salute," are among the most cheerful, charming, and artistic of Mr. Roberts's Venetian scenes ; the latter, especially, so good that we cannot quarrel with the selection of even so frightful a building as that monument of the "pestilent Renaissance." The representatives of grand landscape are Mr. Linnell and Mr. Danby : but grand landscape is sometimes leas grand than familiar landscape, and Mr. Linnell's "Disobedient Prophet," as pitted against many noble things from the same hand, is an instance. The sky is violent, the colour hot ; and no point of special elevation appears in the treatment, unless the severe towering pines, fierce in their sunset hues, solemn in their rigidity, may be so considered. The conception of the subject is certainly less fine than that dis- played in Mr. J. T. Linnell's picture of 18,52. We wish this gentle- man would get rid of a smallness of handling, the sign of an executive timidity quite at variance with the poetic beauty, not unmixed with boldness, which distinguishes the design of his works. Such an effort as his "Harvest," with its swaying breeze-swept flood of corn, shows that he only wants some of his father's fervid self-con- fidence to be among the elect of landscape-art. Mr. W. Linnell's "Roadside Waste" shares the same praise in a slightly minor degree. As to Mr. Danby, his passion for an unmitigated suffusion of red trans- ports the "Departure of Ulysses from Ithaca" into the region of Vauxhall fireworks. Among the tastes to which art ministers is that for the art it- self. From that point of view we can find beauties in the work; but it would be perjury to all foregone evidence of our senses to say that it is a morning effect. "The Mid-Wood Shade" by Mr. Redgrave is a cool grateful piece of nature's forest dimness. The trees are very tall and slim —not overmuch so, maybe, but there is nothing of an opposite character in the picture to serve as the fitting standard of comparison. The fore- ground also is too uniform in tone with the rest; but the work is one of -those really nice landscapes of which the artist is capable. The like can- not by any means be said of his "Old English Homestead," whose minu- tia) are as meagre as its plan is hard. Mr. Lee, with all his slovenly form and unemphatic colour, has a feeling for the simple and modest. Wit- ness his "Fisherman's Haunt" ; the coolness of whose agreeable water would, however, be doubled if everything else were not almost equally cool.

Mr. Deane is a young artist who cannot fail of soon rising to eminence.

His first feeling is for the general tone and aspect of the nature he paints ; but this does not make him careless or inefficient in the de- tails. He is clear, soft, and luminous ; feels deeply what he paints, and paints truly what he feels. Nature is beautiful and in earnest to him. The eye finds true delight and repose in both his little works—" Hafod- lap, North Wales," and "Evening on the Machno, North Wales" ; both hushed in dimmer or brighter twilight, both as pure as they are unpre- tending. His third contribution, "A Mountain Stream," is hung out of sight. A more promising appearance than this gentleman has made in the present year at the Suffolk Street Gallery and the Academy could not well be. Another lovely twilight is Mr. Blacklock's " Mortham Tower." The dark neutral foliage-greens, mysteriously dusky behind the rising path up which the maid is coming, the trenchant yet never harsh lines relieved against the pale sky, and the scarce lustrous sun made only more definite by the grey cloud which bisects it, are all admirable. "The Rookery" again is excellent of its kind. Mr. Seddon sends a most conscientiously made-out view of "Leon, from Mont Par- nesse, Brittany," green and bright, with the diversities of the trees, both in colour and in character, well discriminated, and with moving lines of cloud in the azure sky. A religious procession is passing below, watched from the foreground heights by a group *of women. The view is rather too topographical : why so it would require some care to account for, yet this is felt to be its defect. Mr. T. Danby's "Summer Morning" is studied with great truth and sentiment. The brilliancy of sunrise is past, the vividness of a later period not yet come ; a steady heat hovers over the ashen reflections of the water and the dun clumps of trees. "Decline of Day" is among the very best of those sunlight effects to which Mr. A. Gilbert is so partial. Mr. Lear contributes only two sketches of historic Grecian scenes. "From Barrow Common, looking towards Borrowdale," by Mr. J. M. Carrick, partakes of the styles of Mr. Blacklook and Mr. Inchbold, (an artist whose absence is a real loss,) and shows that Mr. Carrick has powers of his own worthy of all careful nurture. Mr. Fer- guson's "Ashford Mill, on the Buxton Road, High Peak, Derbyshire," is noticeably pretty, and would deserve a higher commendation were it not somewhat too smooth and mechanical in its sun-gilded greens. From sum- mer we pass to winter in Mr. M`Callum's "Study of an Oak, Hagley Park, Worcestershire" ; a snow-piece very delicate and chaste in feeling. The deep azure of the sky strikes us as being, if not actually inappro- priate to the season, at least less characteristic of it than some other tone would have been. The merits of design are equally conspicuous in a more extended view from the same park by this artist, under a more genial aspect ; but here the colour is so cold, husky, and dreary, as to raise serious apprehensions that Mr. MtCallum will swamp his good gifts by disregarding that first duty of the painter, the management of paint. Mr. Dearmer's " Fairlight Glen, Hastings," reminds us distinctly and plea- santly of a charming spot to which its designer is but one among a legion of artist-visitors. We should not conclude a notice of the landscapes of the Academy without welcoming the best work which has for some time proceeded from Mr. Harding's fatally facile hand, a "View of Venice, taken from near the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore."