MESSRS. DICKINSON ' S EXHIBITION.
The gallery of photographic-artistic portraits opened by Messrs. Dickinson of Bond Street last year is again before the public ; com- prising many of the former examples, with extensive additions. It is a pleasant place to drop in at. Few visitors indeed could fail to find there some of their acquaintances' faces, caught by skilful photographers, and raised into more popular attractiveness by the hand of the colourist. We referred last year to the extensive and systematic scale on which Messrs. Dickinson are allying photography and art, not even stopping short of full-length life-sized portraits, but always with the photograph as the basis to start from, and so secure the faithfulness of the likeness, and the ease of the sitter. In returning to the subject, though we can- not dwell upon, we may again suggest to the reader's reflection, the very large questions of art involved in the discovery and application of pho- tography, the altered place which mere representation of objects will occupy in art as a consequence • and the possible contingency, in a not very remote future, of the definite transfer of that whole branch of work to photography, with more or less of supplementing by art.
The chief novelty and feature of this year's exhibition is the large picture of the Officers of the First Life Guards in their Mess-room ; a very extensive canvass comprising thirty-seven portraits, in which those to whom the method is new will be slow to surmise the agency of pho- tography as possible. But so it is ; the work having been brought to its present (still incomplete) stage by an elaborate succession and inter- change of photographic and artistic processes. The result is a picture of unusual ease and merit; judiciously and naturally arranged, and painted with the care and skill of a hand as familiar with the means of art as it is visibly superior to trick.
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