William Michael Rossetti

“ The artist has a certain streaky or gauzy touch which amounts to mannerism: here the handling and colour have almost a soupçon of Gainsborough. The bright face, the quiet lighting of the dusky-boarded room, and the untumbled white muslin dress, make up a picture in which elegant and artist-like taste verges upon quaintness. ”

“ Hence an air of startling realism: the personages are as real as if they were painted in coats and trowsers; and the mediævalism is as real as any modern man can make it. The very uncouthness and hard-featuredness of the figures is a powerful element in this realism: it looks as if the painter had seen them actually there, and depicted them as in duty bound—had he been selecting, one would expect more of positive beauty or semi-idealism, 3rd. Baron Leys paints with a remarkable mixture of force and slightness, detail and unfinish. ”

“ In the present picture, the artist has planned out all forcibly and distinctly—he has left nothing vague to his own mind or the spectator's eye. Yet no corresponding impression of reality is produced; the work wants imaginative reality, and therefore its other elements of reality do not tell as they were intended to do. To attenuate the form of the risen Christ, and to make his drapery transparent to the evening light, is not the way to remove him from the regions of fleshliness. ”

“ Everything is done so as to solicit the eye at a little distance, and up to a certain point to satisfy, never to satiate it. The style of execution has even a good deal that might be termed rough and ready; and (what is of great importance) it is quite unlike any handiwork of the Middle Ages themselves. Moreover, the painter (in the present phase of his style) very seldom gives any mere accidents of light and shade—direct or flickering sunshine, contrasts of natural and artificial light, or the like. ”

“ Millais in force this year—in very superior force, for instance, to what he displayed last year. This group of three girlish sisters—the painter's daughters—shows him in pure, unforced, untrammelled possession of his mastery throughout. The arrangement of the group is so far artificial that one clearly perceives the sisters are posing for their portraits: no effort is made to disguise this fact, and it cannot, I think, be counted as a blemish—rather as one legitimate method of portrait-painting, though not so popular now as the contrary scheme. ”

“ Moreover, the painter's decorative taste is anything but chastened; witness the horrible pattern which she has begun in her broidery frame. A graver objection is the want of any real luminosity in the moonlight which Keats has made so resplendent; the painted window itself is the very maximum of opacity, and the light (if light it can be called) seems to fall upon it, not to be transmitted through its panes. Whatever his failings in execution, Mr. Maclise can depict light vastly better than this when he chooses. ”

“ The painter, a man now of reputation equally confirmed and well deserved both in his own country and in ours, knows perfectly well what he is about; we may safely accept his point of view, and find in the result that, if he has not done precisely what we might have bespoken, there is nevertheless a definite value to be got out of his method of treatment, not to be slighted because a different method would have given some other and countervailing value. ”

“ Woolner—Thomas Carlyle.—The strong, emphatic, penetrating style of Mr. Woolner, who searches under the surface of his sitter's face, and records on its surface what he has found beneath, gave him the best of rights to deal with such a magnificent head as Carlyle's—marked as that is by a most powerful dominating expression, with abundant points of subordinate detail and individuality. Mr. Woolner had, indeed, done a medallion of the great writer many years ago; now we get a bust worthily recording so memorable a man. ”

“ For a sense of beauty in disposition of form, and double-distilled refinement in colour, this work may allow a wide margin to any competitors in the gallery, and still be the winner. On the other hand, it is proper to remember that such a painting as this presupposes certain data in art, which data some people not wholly unworthy of a hearing demur to: chiefly, it presupposes once for all that that innermost artistic problem of how to reconcile realization with abstraction deserves to be given up. ”

“ Wells—Letters and News at the Loch-side.—A landscape with portraits and incident. I pick it out from among the contributions of its able painter, for the sake of noting the great amount of space, light, and air, which he has got into this picture, although there is no single glimpse of sky: the ground rises all round from the lake-side. ”

“ The lady is so tender, uncomplaining, and beautiful, that one takes her part on the instant. Happily, she seems, after an interval of disconsolate dejection, to be dimly awaking once more to the interests of life ”

“ It has dropped out of the Exhibition when the pictures came to be actually hung; leaving some food for pondering to those who care for the higher and completer forms of pictorial work. They may feel—and the feeling would be only enhanced by some other things they may have heard, and a great deal of what they see on the Academy walls—that an off-hand style of painting, now predominant, has interests of its own clashing with those of some graver phases of art ”

“ Marble Bust, unfinished.—This is an experiment in sculpture by our distinguished painter. I find it a very interesting one, and (pace the professional sculptors) a remarkable success. The head reverts over the right shoulder with a graceful and energetic turn; and these qualities, especially that of energy, are preserved in all points of view. The modelling of the bust and arms is pulpy and creased—more comparable in tendency to that of the Elgin Marbles than of later Greek sculpture. ”

“ Anybody, who has experienced, written, read, heard, or seen, even a little of this ever-recurrent hanging controversy, loathes its very atmosphere, and gladly retreats from it, seldom without a sense of protest, and a chafing at injustice. ”

“ This is a very singular piece of colour. White or whiteish tints occupy a considerable space; the extremely blue hills are the second important constituent; and the pea-green mantle of Œnone is the third. The pea-green appears to me a discord, though some other hue of green, along with a texture more like drapery, might have proved much the reverse. On the whole, I should say that, in its colour as in other respects, the painting has much boldness, with no corresponding proportion of felicity. ”

“ But the picture of Ariadne is sufficiently noble to keep these considerations in the background, as soon as we have once for all fairly stated or implied them. The face is wrung with sorrow, yet is free from what we mean to condemn in a work of art when we term it "painful." ”

“ It seems almost churlish to object to a leading point of treatment in so delightful a picture; but I confess to some suspicion that the men who are shown listening might with advantage have been missed out of the subject altogether—and more especially the youth who comes close behind a girl in white, holding a rose in her hand. Mr. Mason is a painter who never loses sight of facts in his pursuit of the beautiful ”

“ All that the writer professes is to say straightforwardly whatever he does say: he by no means implies that nothing else remains to be noted concerning the works of art commented upon, nor that the works wholly omitted are undeserving of mention. ”

“ Another set will turn with æsthetic distaste from so much of ball-costume and regimentals, and such a cross between the leaden and the garish in colour. An intermediate set ought also to find a voice, and to aver that the scheme of arrangement in the picture is very ingenious, and successful in turning a serious difficulty—that the story is told with great emphasis and much well-considered variety of detail—and that, when one faces the picture with deliberation, one can hardly refuse it the praise of being interesting. ”

“ The very skill of our current generation of painters is one of their chief perils; for it enables them to indicate with ease, and often indeed with mastery, what less dexterity could only strive for with labour. ”

“ Not only is the thing full of sparkling animal spirits as a whole, but each point, when one attends to it, is pertinent and telling: except indeed the face of the lady who holds Ophelia, and who exhibits a smile as hard as her teeth. This is not the only time that Mr. Calderon has made considerable play with teeth, and not, I think, successfully; nothing is more difficult to manage in a picture. ”

“ Frith can strike the key he wants, just as loud as he wishes it, and no louder. Sterne (as Goldsmith and Reynolds before) appears to me anything but a good likeness: the young woman is more French in feature than in the ensemble of the face.
172. T. Faed—Worn Out.—This ranks with Mr. Faed's best pictures: it is very skilful, and has more equality of painting than usual—somewhat less of obtruded knack and flourish. The various small accessories are well related to the main incident of the hard-working father who has fallen asleep while watching his invalid boy. ”

“ A PERSON who undertakes to express to the public his opinion of any such Exhibition as that of the Royal Academy is not unreasonably liable to the imputation of presumption. For that imputation I am prepared ”

“ Maclise's productions. Duncan and the two guards are all three fine figures. The lighting of the picture is not obvious: it would appear to be the union of soft moonshine and pale diffused grey dawn-light which comes through the loop-hole at the back; but this does not seem to account for all the light in front, as on the figures of the guards; while neither can one discern, on the other hand, that much (if any) influence of artificial light has been intended by the painter. Real the picture would, of course, never be made to look ”

“ An Englishwoman looking at a Chinese "six-marker," or at a Japanese masterpiece of woodcut design or colouring, is not more tickled. Perhaps the best head of all is that of the elderly woman to the right. ”

“ Cope's successes.
64. Grant—The Duke of Cambridge at the Battle of the Alma, leading the Guards up the Hill in support of the Light Division.—The weak point of this picture is the isolated figure of the Duke himself, which has more the character of a likeness by a portrait-painter than of a leading agent in the event. The Guards in the foreground are happily treated; with sufficient individuality in the several figures, not made singly over-prominent, The general execution is not unlike that of Sir Edwin Landseer; which is as much as to say that it has uncommon ability. ”

“ Working from this solid basis of mediævalism, he is never afraid of individualizing his personages to the very uttermost: they are actual men and women whom he might—and for anything I know does—pick up in the streets of modern Belgium. ”

“ Prinsep—A Study of a Girl Reading.—Mr. Prinsep deserves real thanks for this painting. The girl is an exquisite person, and the picture also may without flattery be called exquisite. It has a most charming sense of the womanly in the maidenly. The fair one is about to sit down to luncheon, but holds and reads her book up to the moment of drawing in her chair. Perhaps she will violate etiquette by persisting in "reading at meals;" and who will not forgive her?
621. A. Moore—Azaleas.—This will be remembered as one of the illustrations (as the French phrase it) of the Exhibition of 1868. ”

“ Legros—Sir Thomas More showing some of Holbein's Pictures to Henry VIII.—Without tampering with his own style, Mr. Legros comes more than hitherto, in this picture, within the same general lines as English art. The work, in essentials, is extremely good; and simplicity of execution does not interfere with its keeping its place well and solidly amid those which surround it. Sir Thomas More does not strike me as much of a likeness. ”

“ At any rate, after making some abatement for this, and for a too easily contented choice of subject, one is fairly surprised at a sureness of hand which seems to have at its finger-ends the power of realization without labour, and at a sturdiness of work which yet picks up (as it were) at every stroke refinements of drawing and colour. The evidences of ability are so profuse that a non-practical critic like myself may well, in modesty and self-knowledge, feel his mouth shut to objections. I should doubt whether there are in Europe many artists more accomplished than Mr. ”

“ Watts, as he worked, were mostly shared between Phidias and Michael Angelo. The spectator who finds some parts lumpy or rude should bear in mind that the work is avowedly "unfinished"—even if he does not deem the general conditions under which the experiment has been made sufficient to abate the picking of holes.
Possibly some readers of this pamphlet may use it to be referred to as they range through the Academy rooms, examining their contents. ”

“ On the stage one pardons the paraded sex of the actress—it is partly unavoidable, and partly a device of her profession: but in a picture one fairly expects a greater conformity to the common sense of the situation. Mr. Millais, however, never will pay any attention to his costume. With all the signal merits of the execution, the texture is not free from woolliness.
87. Frith—Before dinner at Boswell's Lodgings in Bond Street, 1769: present, Johnson, Garrick, Goldsmith, Reynolds, Murphy, Bickerstaff, Davies, and Boswell—We have heard only too often about Goldsmith's "bloom-coloured coat." ”