Page:Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868 (IA gri 33125011175656).pdf/30

 Mr. Hughes's pictures are always full of refined sentiment; and this is eminently so, and in all respects one of his best successes. The lady is so tender, uncomplaining, and beautiful, that one takes her part on the instant. Happily, she seems, after an interval of disconsolate dejection, to be dimly awaking once more to the interests of life; and soon she will be taking the advice of the song, and tempting fate with another affair of the heart. She is at once sentimental to the romantic point, and domestically feminine. It was a happy thought to introduce the thrush at her window, trilling a cheerful ditty, which one can imagine that her heart translates into the spoken language of the song, This picture has in it a gentle but real poetry which places it on a very different footing from most of the work in the exhibition.

511. —Saying Grace.—The small denizens of a nursery have seated themselves with impeccable propriety for their early dinner, regulated by (as one might infer from her physiognomy) a foreign nursery-governess. The baby has joined his hands with dispread fingers, and enacts (he is too young to pronounce) the grace with a solemnity which would do credit to a parish-clerk. No doubt the children are all portraits, with inordinate heads of hair; but the baby's irregularity of contour seems to exceed infantine bounds. Let us trust that his mamma will insist upon his growing up with a modified profile, and that tis his nature to." The picture has a genuine distinction of quaintness and zest.

513. —Œnone.—Mr. Tennyson, with the magic fetters of genius, has enslaved all Englishmen to the conviction that Œnone can only be contemplated as in a state of heartbroken dereliction; and I suppose that Mr. Calderon intends his nymph to be so understood. I cannot, however, perceive that sentiment in her face or action; she appears to the eye rather in a mood of rampant laziness and florid self-display. This is a very singular piece of colour. White or whiteish tints occupy a considerable space; the extremely blue hills are the second important constituent; and the pea-green mantle of Œnone is the third. The pea-green appears to me a discord, though some other hue of green, along with a