Page:Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868 (IA gri 33125011175656).pdf/34

 return to it again and again: and that justifies him in taking, individually, the benefit of one of those points of view. He unites with singular subtlety of grace a phase of the evanescent to a phase of the permanent: colour and handling which withdraw themselves from the eye with a suggestion (or, as one might say, with a whisper), to statuesque languor and repose of form.

624. —Christmas Morning, 1866.—In scale combined with subject, this is far the most important picture Mr. Brett has produced. We see a manned boat and a wrecking ship upon the immense ocean, with its swirling drift blown across like a tongue of tormented flame; and huge volumes of grey cloud over the horizon, walling out from the sea the gorgeous dawn of a new day, on fire with the blaze of sunlight. The painting of the vast sea-surface is a very great effort of knowledge and mastery, and a very successful one.

629. —The Dead Woodman.—A picture of highly remarkable effect, and poetic perception. A blue-grey bloom of sunset broods luminously over all. The work has a kind of intellectual analogy to the Dead Stonebreaker which Mr. Wallis painted years ago: but in all points of externals it is entirely different.

632. —Souvenir of Velasquez (Diploma-work deposited in the Academy on his election as an Academician).—It is not for an outsider to surmise whether or not the Academicians court the deposit of diploma-pictures which may have cost their painters, working with the quick-handedness of a Millais, perhaps a couple of days' labour. However this may be, they have here got a diploma-picture of that description, and an admirable one in its way it certainly is. The resemblance to Velasquez is hardly such as to justify the title.

685. —A. Panizzi, Esg—That this is about the finest portrait of the year need scarcely be specified, Mr. Watts being its author. It was presented to Mr. Panizzi by the Officers of the British Museum, on his retirement; and happily expresses, in the sitter, great powers of work, long in active exercise, and now in well-earned repose. A sketch-plan of the Museum reading-room forms an appropriate and not undecorative device in the right-hand upper corner.