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TUB BOYAL ACADEMY EXHIBITION: DOMESTIC PICTURES.
The confidence up to a certain point with which one may generally, in an English exhibition, turn from more ambitious matter to the domestic subjects, does not play us false on the present occasion; this section being filled with fully its wonted amplitude and worthiness. One picture alone would suffice to rank it among the departments best represented,—we mean Mr. Stirling's "Scottish Presbyterians in a Country Parish Church —the Sermon." The eminent quality of this work is its character : Mr. Stirling, like the higher order of dramatists and novelists, is capable of giving us, not merely human automatons, whose springs are moved by the particular emotion of the moment, but men and women with a variable substratum of character in them which develops itself from within ac- cording to the circumstances. Each figure has its own distinct person- ality, and this brought out with the simple lineaments of truth, free from clever "points" or comic grimace. The quiet domesticity and attention of the young woman who stands outside the pew ; the decent countrified man elated yet out of his element in his Sunday clothes ; the old " gude- wife," who nods forward, whether in compunctious tribute to the sermon's force, or in the weariness of age which even reverence cannot withstand ; the boy beside her musing on toys; the pharisaic demureness of the more well-to-do woman behind ; the heavy prosaic man gone off in a doze, whom his plodding neighbour would rouse with the tender of his snuff- roull,—all these are admirable; and above all, the intelligent artisan in his bright-buttoned coat, with his careworn, hard-worked, everyday face, made noble by the religious soul within, and intent upon the preacher's every word—to him "glad tidings of good things," be the subject matter the promise of salvation or but the "seventeenthly and lastly" of some dogmatic exposition. The whole is excellently drawn, painted, and lighted; and the sense of silence in the hearers is at once unforced and complete. A memorial tablet in the wall, to the "Reverend John Stir- ling, Minister of this Parish," has doubtless a personal interest for the painter. The treatment does not aspire to anything beyond literality ; but it is the literality of a strong earnest man, intolerant of aught save the naked truth. To Mr. Stirling a conventionalism is a sham, and a sham a lie.
Mr. Webster sends two pictures—" Spring," and "A Race." The second is a fair ordinary specimen of his boyish delineations ; the first better than ordinary. The little girl bridling back with a bunch of prim- roses in her hand, though not specially pretty in the strict sense, is child- like and nice in feeling. Mr. G. B. O'Neilrs "Hearty Welcome "—be- stowed by a young household upon the benignant old farmer who comes to visit them—probably the children's grandfather—has an air of sponta- neous alacrity which characterizes the incident well, and is free from the leaning to ugliness which marred former successes of the artist. "The Good Harvest of '54," embodied by Mr. Collins in a young girl carrying a bundle of corn, is too well executed to allow of our being content with the indifference it indicates to beauty ; a semi-representative subject of this kind being peculiarly in need of that element, if only to mark its aim at something beyond the mere casual fact. Moreover, the quality of the face is rather that of a mature woman than a child. Mr. Hayllar has a pot- house group named "Wiseacres," with the motto "They smoke, they parley, and their parley ends in smoke." He displays thorough know- ledge of his materials, lifelike undiluted character and arrangement, and
certain whim, which may be noted in the organ-grinder whose person is half hidden by the baize-covered inatrument which he shoulders, and in the gaunt central vagrant. We should not call the picture vulgar, though the artist has evidently taken no pains to escape such an imputa- tion from the suffrages of the polite. A portrait by this gentleman, of "John Cavell, Esq.," is also extremely characteristic. Mr. Collinson, after an interval of two or three years, reappears with a brace of pictures. Temptation" is trivial in subject, and even mean in its general impres- sion; but "The Writing-Lesson," where a small charity-girl is teaching her father to write "J. Smith" upon a board with a piece of chalk, has sense and life in it. The sedate gravity of the little maid as she calls father's attention to the neglected dot over the 1, and the serious aspect with which he scans its conformation are quite in the spirit of the theme. The painting is accurate and truthful, somewhat wooden. Mr. Feed's Mitherleas Bairn," perhaps the most popular picture in the exhibition, has the merit of telling its story distinctly in a moment ; but the flimsy conventionality of its treatment destroys its effect to our eyes. Mrs. Ward's "Morning Lesson" is crude and glaring at first sight, and on in- spection wants refinement ; yet the painting talent in it is very considerable. Mr. Solomon exerts himself to do the pretty, the sentimental, and thd natural, at the same time and produces the commonplace. Mr. H. O'Neil labours for the pathetic and moral, and " giveth us a stone,"—we
don't refer to the tomb-stone of his picture but the hardness of his indi- viduality. Mr. Rankley also tries the pathetic in his Old Schoolfel-
lows," and with a certain limited conscientiousness which should not pass altogether unacknowledged, meagre as we find the upshot. The stale trick of hitching in some petty allusive incident appears here in its most obvious form; the friendship of the rich young man for his straitened school-chum cannot be impressed upon the British mind even by the hand that fingers a pocket-book full of bank-notes, but Cicero's `De
Ansieitid" must lie open at a staringly-printed 'titlepage upon the floor.
"Collecting the Offering in a Scotch Kirk," by Mr. Phillip, contains a good deal of clear, practised, strongly-defined painting, and rationally- chosen points for making out the story ; but it is hard and glaring, and from beginning to end prepense. Contrast it with Mr. Stirling's kirk scene, and you will see the difference between the man who learns of na- ture singleminded, and the man who imitates her as a necessary means to a paramount end of his own mapped out beforehand. The first simply expresses himself ; the second must be doing something "clever." Prteraphaelitism is the generic character of the following three, modi- fied according to what is distinctive in the several painters, each of whom we meet for the first time. "The London Gazette, 1854," by Mr. Bar- well, is one of what may be classed as the "Sebastopol Pictures" of the year, and (without prejudice to Mr. Cope's maturer practice be it said) certainly the best of them. The personages are two women of the work- ing class, who have broken off the getting-up of some linen to read the Gazette ; in which the younger has found the death (we may suppose) of her lover, and falls fostard, crushed in heart, across her companion's lap. There are seriousness and well-grounded study in the whole present- ment; the expression and action are reserved, yet feeling ; and, for the rest, witness the good broad style of design in the girl's arms, and the analogous qualities in the treatment of her drapery. 'The Doubt—Can these dry bones live ?" by Mr. Bowler, is a church-yard scene, every detail of which is excellently painted, with a good effect of light trans- parent through the chestnut-leaves ; but, unfortunately, the lady who leans upon the head-stone is a poor unmeaning creature, who might as well be going on a morning-call as questioning Eternity about dry bones. , Mr. Luard's Church-door," which stands open with a little girl on the threshold bearing a lapfull of holly and other foliage for the decking of the walls, in simple, true, and pretty ; the quiet chilly-shaded interior of the church contrasting very well and faithfully with the pale bright sun- shine on the hushed glimpse of the outside church-yard. A fourth Pre- raphaelite is Mr. Wallis ; but his "Fireside Reverie,' though telling out very strongly in colour, is hardly up to his calibre. He has merely shown us that he can paint ; and that we knew before. ' "The Recruit," by Mr. W. W. Nicol, is exactly the kind of thing in subject, treatment, and manner, which is understood by the phrase "do- mestic picture "; but, while a certain flatness and weakness of handling indicate the work of a young man, it is a very good example of its order. The recruit is beginning to repent of his bargain ; his gentle sweetheart falls about his neck very dissuasively his mother appeals urgently to the recruiting-sergeant,—a goodnatured fellow enough, whom we might sup- pose not to know which way to look between the conflicting claims of the Queen's service and compassion, were it not that, hard behind him, we see another soldier whispering the nervous-fingered father to draw his purse- strings, and all shall yet be well. The whole of this is told with much truth and no affectation or obtrusiveness. Another very good figure is the elderly countryman who rises from his chair, big apparently with some weighty project ; only that we do not catch exactly what he is about. Mr. Nicoll is certain to do well jibe pursues this path in the same spirit, and avoiding that bane of all genuine performance, self-repetition. Of the same class are Mr. Cassie's Scotch Interior—Old Woman at the shank "; Mr. D. C.. Gibaon's "Little Stranger," which haa the feeling of the subject, spite of wooden style ; Mr. D. Hardy's "Whiff after Din- ner,"—a comfortable old cottager, with whose snug enjoyment one really sympathizes, while his dame, hard-featured but handy, is "clearing away the things "; Mr. Emmerson's "Odd or Even," the chief merit of which is the artisilike eye for composition in the introduction of the cottage-back- ground ; and Mr. E. Davis's "Cottage Scene," marked by good design and appropriate character and incident, but wanting in colour. The goodness of the picture 'itself, and of one from the same hand last year, should have saved it from being hung in a part of the Octagon Room where one does not see it unless by looking it out, and even then one goes away uncertain of the exact amount of its value. "Anxiety," by Mr. R. Cerrick, where a mother holding her infant looks out of window late for her husband's return, is done with the freedom, vigour, and completeness of a man who knows precisely what he means to do. The opposite phase of maternity is exemplified in Mr. J. D. 'Watson's "Glimpse of Happiness,"—as buxom plump a young mother and stalwart a baby as one need wish to see looking their fill at each other. Mr. Watson shows in this group a capacity for rendering a simple emotion broadly and with- out frittering. Breadth also, and more fully in the technical sense, marks "A Beggar Boy" by Mr. E. Opie —a name of pictorial associa- tion, but whether now borne by a descendant of him who made it known to our grandmothers, we cannot say. Mr. Hicks carries delicacy of tint and figure-drawing to the extent of faintness and insipidity, yet with a spice of genuine feeling at the bottom of it ; and M. Van Meyden, in "The First Step," gives us, with superior design, more freshness and truthfulness than are the rule in such subjects from Dutch or Belgian hands.
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