Page:Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868 (IA gri 33125011175656).pdf/13

 of azaleas, which, in the left-hand corner of the picture, seem to change from crimson-pink to vermilion-pink; but the latter colour is scrubbed about with no appreciable traces of form.

10. —La Famille Pallavicini de Génes réclamant le droit de Bourgeoisie des Bourgmestres et Echevins de la Ville d'Anvers, 1542.—When our Royal Academy is honoured by a contribution from one of the first magnates of European art, it becomes us to accept his work in a spirit of gratitude, with much desire to study, and very little to cavil. It is by way of study that I venture to note some of the leading characteristics of that mediæval style which has made Baron Leys famous throughout the civilized world. 1st. He identifies himself with the period he paints—not only in a general way, as a good scholar might do, but especially in respect of its concerted outer demonstrations, and its social aspects, and this with all the more zest when a spice of patriotism is involved. 2nd. Working from this solid basis of mediævalism, he is never afraid of individualizing his personages to the very uttermost: they are actual men and women whom he might—and for anything I know does—pick up in the streets of modern Belgium. An extreme instance appears in the present picture, in the furthest right-hand figure, whose portrait-like aspect is unmistakeable. This, however, being an obviously modern head, differs from the generality—which, with their personal actuality, are somehow projected back, by the imagination and skill of the painter, into the mediæval period, and thus come to be even more like what one conceives of the sixteenth than what one knows of the nineteenth century. Hence an air of startling realism: the personages are as real as if they were painted in coats and trowsers; and the mediævalism is as real as any modern man can make it. The very uncouthness and hard-featuredness of the figures is a powerful element in this realism: it looks as if the painter had seen them actually there, and depicted them as in duty bound—had he been selecting, one would expect