Page:Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868 (IA gri 33125011175656).pdf/14

 more of positive beauty or semi-idealism, 3rd. Baron Leys paints with a remarkable mixture of force and slightness, detail and unfinish. He gives an extraordinary number of items, and with singular strength of definition, yet with little that can, on close inspection, be called elaboration. Everything is done so as to solicit the eye at a little distance, and up to a certain point to satisfy, never to satiate it. The style of execution has even a good deal that might be termed rough and ready; and (what is of great importance) it is quite unlike any handiwork of the Middle Ages themselves. Moreover, the painter (in the present phase of his style) very seldom gives any mere accidents of light and shade—direct or flickering sunshine, contrasts of natural and artificial light, or the like. It may seem fanciful to say that this also subserves the historical impression; and yet I think it does so powerfully—the scenes and the actors in them tell upon the mind, through the eye, as having passed out of the momentary into the permanent—out of the region of chance and change into that dim lumour and remote subsistency of the past. Having said thus much, by way of study, of Baron Leys's pictures in general, I shall not endeavour to analyse the particular work before us. It is a replica of one of his frescoes in the Townhall of Antwerp, and illustrates the value which distinguished foreigners were wont to set upon the right of citizenship in that great commercial and privileged city. It is to be regarded as an important and excellent specimen of the master, though some others might deserve the preference in point of executive completeness.

17. —English Woodlands.—A very characteristic and fine example of the painter's style: one might use it as a text-book wherefrom to develope his specialties in the English school of landscape.

30. —Landscape, Evening.—A small work, but conspicuous by its broad, strong colour, very warm and mellow: it has power both of hand and of sentiment. The sky is especially luminous.

44. —Téte de Flandre, near Antwerp.—There is a great deal of space in this picture: and the tone of green-grey colour is finely felt and solidly sustained. A sense of the ripple in