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THE ROYAL ACADEMY EXHIBITION: SACRED AND HISTORICAL SUBJECTS.
The great religious picture of the gallery—Mr. Hunt's "Light of the World "—is, as it ought to be, the great picture of the whole exhibition. It includes those excellences of elaborated thought and execution which may be noted in other works, sometimes singly, sometimes united, as in his own " Awakening Conscience," and transcends all by applying them to the loftiest of subjects. We say this without derogating from our own confirmed belief that symbolic subjects are neither the most ap- propriate to pictorial art, nor the most influential for good, especially at the present time, when both the highest intellects and the mass of men would fain stand face to face with fact, and symbol subsists in a kind of dilettante condition for the benefit mainly of Romanizing religionists, small poets, and retrograding painters. Here, however, is a thoroughly noble work of sacred art; which makes the circumstance that it is sym- bolic rather than representative sacred art sink into unimportance.
The public have already had from the pen of Mr. Ruskin the most eloquent and discerning criticism of this picture which they arc likely to get ; and when a criticism is not only right but published in the Times, it makes its way far and wide as the most sanguine could desire. Thus any wish which we might otherwise have entertained to vindicate the work against a slighting of its general claims to respect is superseded. Particular interpretation is another matter. Mr. Ruskin understands the symbolism to rest chiefly on the contrasting lights with which Christ ap- pears as He stands knocking at the door of the human soul ; that from the lantern in His band, which signifies the light of conscience, and that from the glory round the head, which signifies the hope of salvation. The interpretation is so beautiful and consistent, as to tempt one to say that if this was not intended it ought to have been ; yet we believe the painter's object to have been another. Not that we charge him with obscurity : it appears to us an attribute of the highest works, those of a symbolic character most of all, to mean something beyond the ex- press intention, and to be susceptible, in the details, of more interpreta- tions than one. We ourselves read thus the picture in which Mr. Hunt has embodied those words of the Apocalypse—" Behold, I stand at the door, and knock : if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me." The orchard through which Christ approaches is the world. The door is the human soul, barred, and cramped with rusty nails, and overgrown with weeds and thorns. As Christ knocks, night is hardly yielding to the emerald glimmer of first dawn ; symbolic, by analogy, of the last day and judg- ment, for the judgment passes, as it were, upon each soul individually, according as the door remains shut or opens. The lantern by whose light Christ walks through the orchard is the Church ; it being the Church which testifies of Christ to the world, or in other words, whose light, sus- tained by His hand, shows Him to men. This appears to be indicated by the types of ecclesiastical architecture adopted in the lantern, and also perhaps by the emission of the rays through several loopholes. The seared bat, beating blindly out of the recesses of the door, is the slug- gish lethargy of mood which the Knocker's arrival frightens ; an un- clean creature of the night of the soul. The fallen orchard-fruit suggests many things equally applicable ; that the time is already over-ripe, as immediately and aptly as any other idea. The dews of heaven with which the ground is covered scintillate starlike in the light. Christ is robed as Prophet, Priest, and King. On His head are the crown of majesty and the crown of thorns ; on His breast the priest's breastplate, with the jewels of the twelve tribes of
Israel, united by a cross to another jewelled plate,—the first square, or limited, the second circular, or limitless,—to show that the election of tho
peculiar people is extended, by the grace of the cross, to all men. The face is solemn, even awe-inspiring; sad, long-suffering, divinely pitiful ; the face of both a Mediator and a Judge. This we say, of course, rela- tively. Mad were the painter who should flatter himself that he bad conceived, much more that he bad realized, "the fulness of the Godhead bodily." The silence of the picture is also very perfect. No sound but of the pierced hand which knocks: it is a great hush and a great expecta- tion. Of minor executive points the less said the better, when, as in this case, the essentials of such a work are worthy of all praise. It sums up all to say that the power and harmony of the effect equal, if they do not excel, the precedent of anything else from Mr. Hunt's hand; that the accessories are right, complete, and subordinate ; and that we know no other exhibiting painter who would have combined so lofty a general re- sult with such mastery in each detail. " The Charity of Dorcas," by Mr. Dobson, is, among productions of its class, one of the more respectable. It is worked with care and exact- ness. If the mind has done nothing towards it, neither has the hand neglected anything of which it is capable. Decent quietism reigns throughout. Mr. Le Jeune's "Christ blessing Little Children" be- longs to the same style ; but the inanity, whose unmasqued visage is almost winning in the first, is pretentious and detestable in the second. Another inane vanity which means nothing, and which the painter knows to mean nothing, but fancies that he can pass off on the public as profoundly significant, is Mr. Redgrave's " Foreshadows of the Future," —a Madonna and Child with cherubs. The remaining "religious " pic- tures are examples of what to eschew in their respective styles ; Mr. Woodington's "Job," in much the same as Le Jeune's ; Mr. A. Roberts's " Holy Family," in the French ; Mr. Storey's " Holy Family," in the semi-Prmraphaelite, semi-traditional ; Mr. Rohden's "Adoration of the Magi," in the German ; and Mrs. Richards's " Faith," in the Raphael- istic. This lady ought to cultivate the talent which she has for por- traiture, instead of the talent which she has not for sacred art. Of all the large and crowded pictures which Mr. Mediae has exhibited, that of the present year—the chief historical work on the walls—is the largest, if we recollect aright, and the most crowded. The very title and elucidation of it in the catalogue cover some ground : " Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, surnamed Strongbow, (sometimes also called Earl of Chepstow, or of Strighul,) receives the hand of the Princess Eva, from her father, Dermot Macmurrough, King of Leinster, in fulfilment of his. compact with that lord, and with promise of succession to his throne. . . . . The picture represents the celebration of the marriage, . . . the triumph of the invading Norman knights, the submission of the Irish chieftains, the mourning over the fallen, and the burial of the dead anno 1171." In pronouncing this work a bad Maclise, we by no means lose sight of the fact that Mr. Maclise is a man of genius and a very re- markable artist. The composition is a formal pyramid; the base of the hill, whose apex is in the top centre, being encumbered with the bodies of the slain—very clean and without a wound to the lot of them—the sum- mit also occupied with the dead carried to their graves. The figures of the central marriage-group are rather short. A pretty little dumpy Irish- woman, in an elaborately patterned gown, and attended by a train of very hard and plump bridesmaids, is given away by a wry-faced father, and joined by an extremely emphatic bishop, to the knightly Strongbow ; who keeps his eye on the chieftains submitting in the right foreground,—which they do, poor fellows, in the most demonstrative manner they can. This illustrates the statement of the chronicler, that "the famous Strongbow did not celebrate his particular wedding-day, but the indissoluble knot of the Irish allegiance to the English sovereignty, with the same ring which circled his wife's finger affiancing that island to this our country." To the left, a woman is making herself exceedingly conspicuous in wailings over an athletic infant ; and a bard bows a bloodless countenance over his unstrung harp. In all this, spite of daring drawing and diversified action, we discover no startling originality ; nothing which raises the con- trast between war and bridal, corpses and maiden tenderness, out of the violent into the grand or sublime. By far the best passage is to the left of Strongbow ; where English soldiers blow their horns with martial clangour and elation, and, hard by them, a black sisterhood, mournful, and strange in their muffled robes, proceed on their ministrations to the fallen. The background groups also have more lifelike motion than those close to the eye. As regards execution, every one knows what Mr. Maclise's is : very smooth and uniform, with details more in quantity than quality, all made out to a point which surprises without satisfying,—and no breadth or predilection, or beauty of colour. The dread- ful manner in which Strongbow's costume is cut up, the repetition of the same flesh-tint, or rather leather-tint, and the lifeless precision of the foreground weeds, for instance, exemplify this, if it needs exemplifica- tion. In fine, the picture is a very extraordinary one to have done, and no small man could do it; but we could miss it from the list of Mr. Mac- Use's achievements with but moderate regret for the loss.
" The Last Sleep of Argyll before his Execution "—painted by Mr. Ward, like the " Montrose " of last year, for the Commons' corridor in Parliament—is an interesting incident in itself, but not a very pictorial one. A noble political martyr may sleep "the placid sleep of infancy" on the morning of his death, and so may Greenacre. The work is ca- pably executed, in a powerful tone of colour, somewhat too black. Better than either Argyll or the Lord of Council who comes to awake him, conscience-stricken and haggard—though each of these is duly character- ized—is the gaoler, who is a thorough Scotchman of the right type. By the nature and management of his subject, Mr. Ward challenges, and would stand, a comparison with the historical painters of the French school, the few foremost men excepted. " The Death of Francesco Foscsui" is treated by Mr. F. R. Pickersgill in the known Pickersgill fashion. The lady who rocks herself to and fro resting her unhappy head in her hand, the other lady to the left with her face concealed, and something in the colour of the background, are the exceptional points of a picture which, on the whole, is as feebly done as it is stupidly conceived. Another, and in some degree a sounder pillar of the same pseudo-Venetian edifice, is Mr. Hook. He illustrates the "Time of the Persecution of the Christian Reformers in Paris, 1559," when "the Papists assembled in the streets, and sang canticles before the images of the Virgin that were then ex- posed at the corners of the houses. Those who passed were invited to join in the chorus ; and, if any refused to do so, they were insulted and beaten." This historical attempt, however, is even worse than Mr. Pickersgill's,—utterly characterless and barren ; the only shadow of in- cident worthy of the name being the summary mode in which a trooper doffs the Huguenot's cap by sticking his halberd through it. Contrary to the painter's wont, the production has scarcely a vestige of pri- mary colour in it. On the other hand, Mr. Hook exhibits two nice do- mestic subjects,—" A Rest by the Way-side," and " A few minutes to wait before twelve o'clock" ; the latter especially pleasant and tasteful, with touches of true perception and simple nature. Mr. Selous's murder of Rizzio is a poor affair — in which his recent misguided plunge at " P.R.Bism" is exchanged for a common French manner. Mr. Hannah paints details of character and details of accessory well ; but his " Coun- tess of Nithsdale petitioning George I. on behalf of her Husband " is not a picture, far less an historical picture. Its colour has no scheme, no breadth or continuity, whatever ; but merely a lot of bright points. The King shows pitifully enough in the story ; in the painting he is an ab- surd bourgeois gentilhomme. His action with the sword which he seems to be forcing back into its sheath is not very intelligible,—and, if it is implied that he had been about to draw it on a woman, surely untrue. The best incident is that of the handsome lady to the right, who sheers aside out of George's neighbourhood, and whose indignation is well com- pounded of terrors for the derangement of her coiffure and high-blooded shame at so unkingly a king. The hangers have defrauded the visitors of the merit which they may surmise, but cannot see, in Mr. Glass's "Richard Coeur de Lion on his way to Jerusalem." One distinguishes the desert sands and desert sky, pale, bright, and shelterless, and the long line of mingled nationalities and persons, but can only guess at the character with which the artist was likely to endow his individuals. Still less visible is Mr. Whaite's "Ancient Britons surprised by the Romans" ; which appears to be lurid in colour, but well designed. That it is above commonplace is evident ; and we could infer as much confidently from the recol- lection of this painter's very superior landscape exhibited at the British Institution of last year. "Garibaldi at Rome, 1849, from a sketch made during the siege," by Mr. G. H. Thomas, is animated, picturesque, and in all senses clever. Mr. Thomas has a capital notion of how such a sub- ject should be treated ; but, whether from defect of military knowledge or otherwise, we fancy that Garibaldi is in a much more ticklish position than his dashing strategy could have tolerated, appearing as he does with- in full volley of the French cannonade. Mr. Lucy's " Nelson meditating in the cabin of the Victory previously to the battle of Trafalgar" we had seen before, and awarded it the tribute of praise which its merit claims,—a merit to whose sense the hangers seem to have been imper- vious.
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