William Bell Scott

“ As a realization of a page of authentic history, again, no picture can surpass the Assassination of the Due de Guise at Blois. The expression of the murdered man stretched out by the side of the bed, the conspirators all massed together towards the door and far from the body, show exact study as well as insight into human nature. ”

“ His sound but hard execution allowed no mystery to intervene between him and his motif, which was always intelligible to the million, so that he escaped all the waste of energy that painters who try to be poets on canvas suffer. Thus it is that essentially the same treatment was applied by him to the characters of distant historical times, the founders of the Christian religion, and the real people of his own day, such as Napoleon at Fontainebleau, or at St Helena, or Maria Antoinette leaving the Convention after her sentence. ”

“ The Princes in the Tower must also be mentioned as a very complete creation ; and the young female Martyr floating dead on the Tiber is so pathetic that criticism feels hard-hearted and ashamed before it. ”