Page:Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868 (IA gri 33125011175656).pdf/31

 more like drapery, might have proved much the reverse. On the whole, I should say that, in its colour as in other respects, the painting has much boldness, with no corresponding proportion of felicity.

517. —After the Sortie.—This is a very large picture, hang so high that one cannot fully estimate it in detail, It represents a wounded knight borne up the winding castle-stairs by three of his retainers; his wife, with a horrible sinking of the heart, totters and clings about for support as she follows. It seems to be a strongly designed and carefully executed work, of very superior merit; the most important production of Mr. Carrick, and about the best.

524. —A Summer Forenoon.—A landscape and sheep-piece, warm, gentle, and genial. Landscape and the allied forms of art occupy a very small space, comparatively, in the present exhibition. There are nevertheless several works of this kind which call for examination and praise: their being left unnoticed in this pamphlet does not imply any indifference to their merits.

540. —Red Roses.—Coquetry is the predominant spirit of this work. But it is not painted with the slightness which a coquettish picture from a fresh female hand might be expected to display. On the contrary, there is a good deal of careful realization, and an amount of general skill and force which places Miss Freer high among lady artists. No. 446, Margaret Wilson, by the same painter, hung too high to be scrutinized, seems to be equally good, or better.

585. —Madeline after Prayer.—The useful adage which Mr. Maclise will never lay to heart is that "Enough is as good as a feast." We find Keats's Madeline encumbered with items of furniture and ornamentation. Moreover, the painter's decorative taste is anything but chastened; witness the horrible pattern which she has begun in her broidery frame. A graver objection is the want of any real luminosity in the moonlight which Keats has made so resplendent; the painted window itself is the very maximum of opacity, and the light (if light it can be called) seems to fall upon it, not to be transmitted through its panes. Whatever his failings in