favoured and sullen, with sinewy neck and cruel eye, with snub nose and thick thrust-out lips-a portrait it clearly is, and whose it would be worth while to know, so careful has the artist been to reproduce the native stamp of aspect; a naked youth, with arms doubled up round the neck, leaning aslant on a staff, with ruffled hair and a set face; a noble head, like Nero's, in red chalk, with hair blown loose and rough by the wind; a boy's figure on a step of some entrance, drawing the curtain of a tent, with loose ribbons at the shoulder, and with a curling plume of hair; a slender figure, thin and graceful, the face smiling, but drawn and fixed; the fierce aquiline head of a prophet or apostle, with upper lip thinner than the under. These complete my roll, and conclude these notes. They might have been fuller and more orderly, but could never have had any value other than that of a clear and genuine impression. Transcribed at stray times from the roughest memorial jottings, they may claim to give this at least. I close as I began them with a hope that they may perhaps, in default of a better handbook, afford some chance help to a casual student of such unclassed relics of the old great schools, and with a glad affectionate memory of these and of all things in Florence.

358

NOTES ON SOME PICTURES OF 1868.

[PREFATORY NOTE.-I reprint these loose and cursory notes almost exactly as they were first issued, with the excision of two passages which I see now no reason to reproduce. It is not that in either case I find anything to unsay; that I have any palinode to sing, any retractation to offer. But in the one instance I think it no longer worth while to prolong the recollection of what I found feeble and futile in the work of a painter who will give us no more of bad work or good; and in the other instance I should feel it somewhat more than presumptuous, I should feel it indeed thankless and indecorous, to make mention but once of one of the greatest among modern artists, and then in a tone of blame or at least of complaint rather than of praise and thanksgiving. My opinion of his pictures exhibited in 1868 remains what it was then; but however slight may be the worth of that opinion, it would be unseemly to insist on it within the limits of these notes; limits which preclude all possibility of touching on the many and marvellous gifts of his regal and masterful genius. competent critic who should undertake the task of reviewing his work as a whole might permissibly note in passing the less excellent parts of it, and set down the

A

years in which, as he might think, the master's hand had wrought more or less happily than its wont; but he would not desire to reissue by itself any detached notice of such work as he might consider unworthy of the workman at his best.]

I have been asked to note down at random my impressions of some few among this year's pictures. These I am aware will have no weight or value but that which a sincere and studious love of the art can give; so much I claim for them, and so much only. To pass judgment or tender counsel is beyond my aim or my desire.

Returning from the Academy I find two pictures impressed on my memory more deeply and distinctly than the rest. First of these-first of all, it seems to me, for depth and nobility of feeling and meaning-is Mr. Watts's "Wife of Pygmalion." The soft severity of perfect beauty might serve alike for woman or statue, flesh or marble; but the eyes have opened already upon love, with a tender and grave wonder; her curving ripples of hair seem just warm from the touch and the breath of the goddess, moulded and quickened by lips and hands diviner than her sculptor's. So it seems a Greek painter must have painted women, when Greece had mortal pictures fit to match her imperishable statues. Her shapeliness and state, her sweet majesty and amorous chastity, recall the supreme Venus of Melos. In this "translation" of a Greek statue into an English

picture, no less than in the bust of Clytie, we see how in the hands of a great artist painting and sculpture may become as sister arts indeed, yet without invasion or confusion; how, without any forced alliance of form and colour, a picture may share the gracious grandeur of a statue, a statue may catch something of the subtle bloom of beauty proper to a picture.

His

The other picture of which I would speak, unlike enough to this in sentiment or in tone, has in common with it the loftiest quality of beauty pure and simple. Indeed, of all the few great or the many good painters now at work among us, no one has so keen and clear a sense of this absolute beauty as Mr. Albert Moore. painting is to artists what the verse of Théophile Gautier is to poets; the faultless and secure expression of an exclusive worship of things formally beautiful. That contents them; they leave to others the labours and the joys of thought or passion. The outlines of their work are pure, decisive, distinct; its colour is of the full sunlight. This picture of "Azaleas" is as good a type as need be of their manner of work. A woman delicately draped, but showing well the gentle mould of her fine limbs through the thin soft raiment; pale small leaves and bright white blossoms about her and above, a few rose-red petals fallen on the pale marble and faintcoloured woven mat before her feet; a strange and splendid vessel, inlaid with designs of Eastern colour; another-clasped by one long slender hand and filled from it with flowers-of soft white, touched here and there into blossom of blue: this is enough. The melody of colour, the symphony of form is complete: one more

beautiful thing is achieved, one more delight is born into the world; and its meaning is beauty; and its reason or being is to be.

We all owe so much to Mr. Leighton for the selection and intention of his subjects—always noble or beautiful as these are, always worthy of a great and grave art; a thing how inexpressibly laudable and admirable in a time so largely given over to the school of slashed breeches and the school of blowsy babyhood !-we owe him, I say, so much for this that it seems ungracious to say a word of his work except in the way of thanks and praise. And yet I must say that I find no true touch of Greek beauty in the watery Hellenism of his Ariadne she is a nobly moulded model of wax, such a figure as a medieval sorceress might set to waste before a charmed fire and burn out the life of the living woman. The "Actæa " has the charm that a well-trained draughtsman can give to a naked fair figure; this charm it has, and no other; it has also a painful trimness suggestive of vapour-baths, of "strigil" and " rusma," of the toilet labours of a Juvenalian lady; not the fresh sweet strength of limbs native to the sea, but the lower loveliness of limbs that have been steamed and scraped. The picture of Acme and Septimius is excellently illustrative of Mr. Theodore Martin's verse; it is in no wise illustrative of Catullus. I doubt if Love would have sneezed approval of these lovers either to left or to right. In his two other pictures Mr. Leighton has, I think, reached his highest mark for this year. The majestic figure and noble head of Jonathan are worthy of the warrior whose love was wonderful, passing the love of woman; the features resolute,