Page:Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868 (IA gri 33125011175656).pdf/11



OME twenty years and more ago, the ingrained fault of the British School of Painting was that it painted flimsy pictures. They were not exactly sketchy, having little of either the merits or defects proper to the phase of art termed sketching: pictures they were, but flimsy pictures. Then came the thick-and-thin revolution of Præraphaelitism; which aimed at treating substantial subjects, thinking them out deeply, and painting them with abnormal thoroughness. That revolution scarcely exists now otherwise than in its results: certain works executed according to the principle in question, and representing it; many others parodying or maiming the principle, and traducing it; a vast number of works, still in course of active production, which owe their genesis to the principle, but have metamorphosed it beyond recognition. So that now we have come round to a condition of the school more analogous to that of twenty years ago: only that the present staple product is, instead of flimsy pictures, works executed with a valuable reserve-fund of knowledge, efficiency, and material, but in the feeling and with the aim proper to sketches. Critics have long been beseeching for "breadth." That is now supplied to them in handsome measure; but it is found that breadth, like frittering, may overlie a considerable surface of commonplace and inanity. 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