Page:Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868 (IA gri 33125011175656).pdf/21

 carving—strong and accurate modelling bestowed upon a substance which, after the utmost has been done for it, retains an aboriginal crudity. In the present picture, the artist has planned out all forcibly and distinctly—he has left nothing vague to his own mind or the spectator's eye. Yet no corresponding impression of reality is produced; the work wants imaginative reality, and therefore its other elements of reality do not tell as they were intended to do. To attenuate the form of the risen Christ, and to make his drapery transparent to the evening light, is not the way to remove him from the regions of fleshliness.

302. .—Rent-day at Haddon Hall.—Considerably the best picture Mr. Horsley has exhibited of late, or perhaps at any time. A very moderate proportion of adult good sense may have sufficed to discriminate it from his staple commodity.

311. .—Mrs. Brereton.—While Mr. Richmond can put into a face so much feminine candour and amiability as we see in this likeness, no one need be surprised at his eminent standing among portrait painters. To look at the face seems to be like making Mrs, Brereton's acquaintance—or like wishing to make it.

316. .—The Young Lord Hamlet.—Yorick is on all-fours on the pleasance of the Danish palace, with little Hamlet riding on his back; Queen Gertrude and some of her ladies looking on; and an infant, presumably Ophelia, not yet "taking notice,". This is strictly a sketch; no doubt a very able one, and only to be done by a man of long training and solid acquirement in art. Not only is the thing full of sparkling animal spirits as a whole, but each point, when one attends to it, is pertinent and telling: except indeed the face of the lady who holds Ophelia, and who exhibits a smile as hard as her teeth. This is not the only time that Mr. Calderon has made considerable play with teeth, and not, I think, successfully; nothing is more difficult to manage in a picture.

323. .—The wife of Pygmalion, a Translation from