Page:Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868 (IA gri 33125011175656).pdf/16

 This is the scene of its exhibition before Boswell's guests. The picture may be termed a self-respecting one: the humours of the personages and the incident are indicated without being made to stare one out of countenance. Per contra, it must be said that strength is deficient throughout; common weakish mouths prevail in this distinguished company. Goldsmith and Reynolds are indifferent likenesses; and Johnson's clothes fit almost as accurately as Goldsmith's.

123. —Rent-Day in the Wilderness.—"After the defeat of the Stuart army in 1715, at Sheriff Muir, Colonel Donald Murchison, to whom the Earl of Seaforth confided his confiscated estates in Ross-shire, defended them for ten years, and regularly transmitted the rents to his attainted and exiled chief." The picture shows the rent being thus collected under difficulties. A bearded clansman, attended by his daughter, is in the act of paying; a friar kneels close beside Colonel Murchison; and a number of other Highlanders have assembled for the occasion. This large and crowded picture has a peculiar look, in consequence of the stealthy and crouching action of most of the figures: they are keeping close amid the brushwood on one side of Loch Affric, while some of the Government soldiers are patrolling the opposite bank. The work has thus—besides the generic merits which any large painting by Sir Edwin Landseer is sure to possess—plenty that is both peculiar and interesting, not unmingled with a certain impression of discomfort.

138. —The Valley of Moses in the Desert of Sinai.—This picture (as Mr. Herbert is stated never to have been in the East) is somewhat noticeable in point of eclectic, and at the same time diluted, study. The light and tone are agreeable, and free from that hardness which besets many Eastern pictures; but, on observing the comparative faintness of the shadows upon the blazing sands, one sees at once that the avoidance of hardness has involved some sacrifice of truth.

150. —Royal Marriage, 1477.—The detestable humbug of a sham contemporary "MS." is resorted to for the purpose of informing the reader of the Academy catalogue that this painting represents the marriage of the Duke of York,