a sincere desire to turn the attention of those whom we may criticise back on themselves, that so they may attain to that distinction of which all must be ambitious.

Although the Directors have stated that the several contributors consider the pictures which they have respectively selected for exhibition here, as among the most successful efforts of their pencils, we cannot be of opinion that this is true respecting the portrait of His Majesty by Lawrence, nor that of Lady Louisa Lambton by the same able artist. We think that we should have found no difficulty ourselves in choosing better from his works; but whatever scope they may afford for detailed observations, it is unnecessary to enter on these.

Mr. Shee's picture, which he has thought fit to call Lavinia, deserves all the commendation that we could give it, and yet, perhaps, it is somewhat too strict an imitation of Gainsborough. It at least provokes comparison, and makes us imagine that he must have painted the portrait, which it evidently is, with a picture of that master in his eye. We do not, we confess, consider the name as peculiarly appropriate, as it does not convey to us the character of Lavinia as we apprehend it from Thomson. A more general name would have escaped this criticism.

Of Stothard's Pilgrims so much has been said, for so many years, and the engraving has been so long before the public, that criticism is nearly exhausted. All that has been praised in it meets our hearty concurrence; but we shall probably be considered as hypercritical, or rather as trifling, when we say that we wish it had been executed with more care and finish. We do think that a picture on so small a scale ought to be that jewel, (to use a cant phrase) in execution, which it is in design, and purpose. It is impossible to see it without a close inspection; and we are not only offended by the roughness and carelessness of the workmanship, but this neglect injures the drawing and expression, by interfering with those minute touches which are essential to these qualities. It is idle to say that the character of such a picture would be lost by a more finished execution, when we see what has been done by the Dutch painters. Nor can we see any reason why the landscape should be thus neglected, nor why two lumps of white rocks on a dark blue ground should be substituted for atmosphere.

We formerly took occasion to notice Mr. Howard's Venetian portrait of his daughter, and have nothing left but to praise it, however we may have objected to this fashion of translating ancient pictures. But that we may balance this censure, such as it is, we must take leave to notice his picture at the Royal Academy of Mrs. Henderson and her family, which, to our seeming, is the only family picture in modern times that has ever gained all its ends-that of being a collection of portraits, and of being also a picture that will be valued, and more valued, when it is forgotten who Mrs. Henderson was. If this is not

one of the most admirable pictures of that exhibition, or of modern days, we have yet much to learn.

We shall beg leave to pass over Beechey's works altogether. We suppose it was necessary that he should have been there; but that is his own affair, and that of the Directors. It is amusing, nevertheless, to see how a man can communicate the insipidity of his own mind to the character of his portraits. The expression of the Dutchess of Kent is that of benevolence, good-nature, not without reflection and firmness: he has made her mawkish and silly. That of her daughter is lovely and intelligent in the portrait, she is a staring fool, such as, in our old family pictures, carry an orange in their hand-a Miss Primrose portrait from the Vicar of Wakefield.

We shall not particularize the pictures of Starke which are exhibited, but may speak generally in terms of commendation respecting his landscapes. But we must object to his iteration of subject; a practice which shows that he is more conversant with Hobbima and Ruysdael than with nature, and that he fears being lost should he attempt what the former, his chief teacher, has not painted. Hobbima was condemned to the Hague, and its beech forests; all the stores of British landscape are open to Starke. He will become a mechanic, as he is now another man's mannerist; and, in no long time, the public will cease to care for him, or will ask whether the picture of this year is not that of the last also. If there is but one subject, there is also but one system of colour and of management; and it is not thus that an artist will become a painterany other painter than Wynants, or the endless other mechanics of that school. What he has done is good; but he has as yet painted but one' picture.

We do not know what Mr. Chalon expects from studying French caricature and affectation. Count Almaviva need not have been jealous of such a Countess, nor of such a page. But as we cannot fathom the mind of a man who paints pictures thus, we may pass on. We doubt

if Beaumarchais would have been better satisfied with him than ourselves; and he also ought to know that if this is not grace and truth, neither is it really French.

We shall have occasion again to speak of Mr. Ward for praise, and we can but praise his pictures that are exhibited here. Blackthorn and Jack are rather the animals themselves than their portraits. The sand pit, and the white poney in particular, is almost an incredible effort of art, whether we regard the truth or the execution. If it is the life itself, nothing is neglected that can conduce to make it such; and as we know that this could not have been produced without uncommon labour, it holds out an useful lesson to those young artists who expect to carry their ends by a dash, negligent alike of drawing and of execution.

We must balance the Sun-rise of Howard against his Fairies, lest in saying too much of the latter, we should say what is unpleasant to our

selves. The former is a successful effort of an imagination which has painted rather more in this line than it has succeeded in. But even in this, and in spite of the brilliancy of a difficult landscape, in spite of much grace and much lightness, the artist himself ought to see that he has indulged too much in his favourite contortions, and that his picture is injured by a departure from simplicity and ease. Nor is he master of contortion; as is testified by the difficulty which we have in finding the places of his figures, in appropriating their legs and arms, and in explaining the anatomy of the lengthened and horizontal female. Assuredly, he is not a master of drawing, and it would be prudent to abstain from any thing which betrays that defect. These faults are ten times more conspicuous in his Fairies, which are absolutely twisted about and entangled so that we cannot disengage them, or even conjecture where they are. Cannot he see that grace is incompatible with such grimace as this, even were it in his power to make those grimaces true, to draw his figures correctly, to make them really perform what he chuses them to do. And, surely, in the character of a fairy, if we look for ease, grace, aerial lightness, so we look for personal beauty, and above all, for beauty of countenance; for beauty of countenance united to that mixture of joyousness, insouciance, and arch, petty malevolence, or fun, which constitutes the fairy character. Instead of this, we have figures of which the half at least are disgusting and trollopy; and faces so perfectly hideous, that we wonder from what portion of St. Giles's they have been selected. Much better painting could not have rescued this picture; for where the essentials are wanting, it is in vain that all else is right.

Mr. Calcott has long held a considerable rank among our landscape painters; and if he has not made any great progress since his first appearance, neither, like many, has he fallen off. Making Cuyp his model, dealing chiefly in a certain line of sea-shores and shipping, he has gone soberly on, and held the ground which he first gained. In the picture before us, his evident attempt is to paint a troubled sea; and whatever general merit we may allow to the picture as a whole, in this part, it must be owned, he has not been successful. The sky is admirable for its disposition, its philosophy, its colour, and its freedom; and the land is almost equally well painted. If there is somewhat ponderous, and perhaps occasionally fine, in the method in which he has treated his nearer shipping, the whole of this may nevertheless pass without censure, while the general composition and aspect of the picture is good. But he is not at home with the sea; and it is very evident that he has not studied it, and that instead of going where he ought, he has attempted to make it up from other pictures, and, worst of all, has borrowed from that most wooden of sea makers, Backhuysen. The colour is not true; and if it were even a fact, it is not the colour of the sea under such a sky. As water, it is not clear, and it is not muddy; and it wants, as water in motion, all that ease, and lightness, and indeterminateness, of

which Fielding has given so admirable an example, in a drawing at the Water Colour exhibition, which we are pleased to make an opportunity of quoting. The distance is crowded with waves, where waves can never be seen; and, as if this was not enough, each separate sea is picked out, and the whole marshalled in straight lines, as if they had been drawn on a ruler, or copied from the canals of Canaletti. Every nearer sea is tormented with white lines and heads; which, if they could thus exist, ought not to have been thus shown, since they produce that hardness and stiffness which render the whole a carving in wood. And, in spite of Backhuysen's authority, we must assure Mr. Calcott that such a sea cannot reflect objects or colours; and to have adopted such reflections, is a sufficient proof that he has not here looked at nature. He knows that it was by this that he rose, and it is from our regard and respect for him that we have shown him how he will fall.

We must rank Jacob's Dream, and Mr. Stothard's Peace, however different, with allegorical pictures; and having elsewhere expressed our dislike to this class of subjects, are little willing to say more respecting them. If even the former were considered a piece of scriptural history, it is not precisely a subject for painting. If it is too imaginative to be thus particularized, it is also dangerously lofty; and, really, a flight of stone steps, with a man tumbled down at their feet, and a crowd of winged figures, are too tangible for our notions of what every man will form some wild conceptions of for himself, which he knows would disappear in the attempt to express them. We admit great sweetness and beauty in Stothard's picture, while we can scarcely pardon the subject; but here also we might repeat the remarks we made before on the execution, were it not now unnecessary.

While we admit that Lady Long is pre-eminent among the dilettanti exhibitors here, and grant considerable merit to at least her Rotterdam and her Boulevards, we do not well see the propriety of exhibiting works which must always possess great defects when viewed in association with those of practised artists. And they are rather intrusions, also, into what is meant for a school of British art. It is impossible that any one can paint without more labour and time than it is in the power of any one but a professional man to bestow on the art; and though we have been treated with epigrams on the remark that "it was finely painted for a gentleman," we shall still side with the artists, and at least say, that though gentlemen and ladies may paint if they please, they ought not thus to exhibit. Perhaps, however, the artists are obliged to them for the contrast, as it will serve to prove that painting is not quite so easy of attainment as is often imagined.

And since we have noticed one dilettante, whom we must really mention with considerable praise, we may as well dispose of the whole, though not in the order of the catalogue which we are following. We cannot, we confess, see the merit of painting landscapes of water, trees, and plants, and sky, in bistre, unless they are decidedly bistre works.

Sir George Beaumont has been so long and so highly lauded, that it seems more than bold to doubt; and yet we shall doubt his powers in landscape, and perhaps also his judgment respecting art in general. If he looks at nature, it is through Wilson; yet not through Wilson fresh and new, but blackened by varnish, and yellow lake, and smoke. Surely, the colour of a landscape is an essential portion of it-we almost think it is the most essential. Docks, and grass, and the leaves of trees, are not made of tar, nor water of milk and bitumen, nor skies of lampblack and indigo, for such is the Jacques before us. This might have been a picture painted two centuries ago, but it would not be the less bad now; and what will it be two centuries hence? We only hope that Sir George does not judge landscape as he paints it. As to Mr. Fitzhugh, and Sir Abraham Hume, we shall pass them both over, as we have nothing good to say of their works, and as it is not worth while to find fault with productions that have no merit.

We are glad to relieve this censure by turning to the excellent productions of Mrs. Carpenter, who has here shown that her sex need not fear. From the washy productions of Mrs. Angelica Kauffman, from Mrs. Mee, and many more, we had begun to suspect that the fair was incapable of excellence in this art; an opinion somewhat supported by their evident inferiority to our own more vigorous minded sex, in a department which they have assuredly not a little cultivated lately, music. Thousands of young ladies labour at the pianoforte, from eight to eight-and-thirty, and yet, if but one man attempts it, he goes at once beyond the whole thousand. It is impossible to mistake the hand and mind of a man, on even this, the peculiarly female instrument, for those of a woman; and nothing, perhaps, shows more decidedly the innate superiority of man to woman. In composition, with equal leisure, and with an almost equal number of professional persons, they have produced positively nothing; while the world is filled with male productions, and with male composers, from the days of Scarlatti to those of Beethoven.

But, of Mrs. Carpenter's two portraits, we may safely say, that they stand on a level with the best pictures of our best painters, combining various excellencies which, after this general praise, we need not detail. We are naturally, however, most attracted by that of cheerfulness, as it is called, since a beautiful young woman will always carry the palm away from a pallid monk. It would not be easy to exceed the sweetness, the animation, the expression, simple, unaffected, and true, which has been thrown into this picture. We long to take it into our arms, and imprint a kiss on its fresh and rosy lips,-and we know of no greater praise that can be given. Pygmalion would have had more excuse for his fancies, if he had possessed this picture instead of a cold stony After this, all technical praise would be superfluous, and we

statue.

may proceed.

That Old Jackson is the very man himself, is praise enough to poor