Page:Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868 (IA gri 33125011175656).pdf/12

 dexterity could only strive for with labour. Rapid gains and the tumult of competition conduce towards the same result. The upshot, to some critics, is, in the present Academy exhibition, a sense of no little dissatisfaction, mingled with unstinted recognition of telling and well-diffused ability. One perceives that many artists can now do a good deal, if they choose; but the more sound one sees the attainments of the painter himself to be, the less one is disposed to accept with implicit faith the rather cheap outcome of those attainments. Sketches may be excellent things, and they testify to the ready availability of the artist's gifts: but sketches magnified into pictures cloy upon one. They betray in especial a self-complacent unconcern for higher efforts. In general character the present Academy exhibition, the hundredth of the series, is very like that of 1867: that was a particularly clever display, according to its own standard, and this perhaps is nearly on a par with it.

With these few remarks, I turn at once to the walls, and begin with—

6. —Sisters.—It is a great satisfaction to find Mr. 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. All the three girls are dressed in white muslin, with azure ribbons, and hair combed out. The background is composed