Page:Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868 (IA gri 33125011175656).pdf/18

 in the water of the foreground; and the entire absence of red from the picture—which relies for colour upon iridescent tints of grey-blue, green, yellow, and so on—is observable.

209. —H. Bassett, Esg., in his Laboratory—A capital piece of peculiarity. Great pains and intelligence have gone to the depicting of the scientific plethora of the laboratory; and the sense of the shut-in, moderately-lit room, not lightly to be intruded upon, is vivid. Mr. Bassett is represented smoking a pipe. This may seem a trivial or purposeless incident. Yet it may have been introduced to indicate some enforced pause in his work while an experiment is maturing; and, if so, it is certainly not unsuggestive.

223. —Mrs. Birket Foster.—This seems to me about the best work Mr. Orchardson has yet exhibited: it is a small full-length—more a subject than a mere portrait. The artist has a certain streaky or gauzy touch which amounts to mannerism: here the handling and colour have almost a soupçon of Gainsborough. The bright face, the quiet lighting of the dusky-boarded room, and the untumbled white muslin dress, make up a picture in which elegant and artist-like taste verges upon quaintness.

235. —Ishmael—An accomplished study, perhaps (within its limits) unsurpassed by any work of its author.

236. —Home News.—An English lady in her remote Asiatic home is reading a letter from the old country. The half-hovering smile, and the long-drawn regard of the eye as though she were in contemplation back across the measureless ocean, are delicately caught; also the coolness of the matted interior, jealously excluding the sun itself, but not the sense of how it is blazing outside.

242. —Stella.—A single figure, three-quarter length, and perhaps the very best Mr. Millais has done of its class. The name Stella naturally suggests Swift's Stella; and Swift's Stella holding a letter, with a countenance of subdued long-suffering, suggests her receipt of the letter from Vanessa inquiring whether she and Swift were in fact married. If this is the incident really intended, the sympathizing spectator may be startled at being reminded that Stella was at that time