Page:Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868 (IA gri 33125011175656).pdf/33

 granulated texture that it hardly proclaims itself to be oil-painting.

613. —Escape of the Countess of Morton to Paris, with Henrietta, infant Daughter of Charles I.—The most important and best production of Mr. Hicks. Like Mr, Burchett's picture, its incidents require to be analysed one by one: when that process has been gone through, one finds a great deal of ingenious skill standing to the painter's credit.

614. —A Study of a Girl Reading.—Mr. Prinsep deserves real thanks for this painting. The girl is an exquisite person, and the picture also may without flattery be called exquisite. It has a most charming sense of the womanly in the maidenly. The fair one is about to sit down to luncheon, but holds and reads her book up to the moment of drawing in her chair. Perhaps she will violate etiquette by persisting in "reading at meals;" and who will not forgive her?

621. —Azaleas.—This will be remembered as one of the illustrations (as the French phrase it) of the Exhibition of 1868. It presents, in life size, a Grecian lady (or at any rate Grecian-robed), at a pot of azaleas, some of which she plucks and drops into a basin. Whether or not azaleas were known to Grecian ladies, whether or not they came from America, are questions not difficult of solution, but of sublime indifference to Mr. Moore. (The flowers in Mr. Watts's Grecian picture, No. 323, are also, I apprehend, azaleas.) The study of the blossom-loaded plant is most delicate and lovely; and the lady has elevated classic grace, though her face hardly sustains comparison with the rest of the picture. For a sense of beauty in disposition of form, and double-distilled refinement in colour, this work may allow a wide margin to any competitors in the gallery, and still be the winner. On the other hand, it is proper to remember that such a painting as this presupposes certain data in art, which data some people not wholly unworthy of a hearing demur to: chiefly, it presupposes once for all that that innermost artistic problem of how to reconcile realization with abstraction deserves to be given up. How much could be said on this question from differing points of view, I need not here indicate. You linger long to look at Mr. Moore's picture, and