Page:Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868 (IA gri 33125011175656).pdf/35

 735. —Study of a Head.—We have now got out of the oil-pictures, and have come to the drawings. This is an excellent study of a wilful, tameless-spirited beauty, who bites her hair in her gathering mood. Farther on (816) is an equally well-done head of George Critchett, Esq., a head that seems to teem with defined calculation. It will be known to many besides myself that Mr. Sandys sent to the Academy an oil-picture of Medea in an act of incantation, not only worthy, but more than worthy, of his highly disciplined powers and determined accomplishment. It has dropped out of the Exhibition when the pictures came to be actually hung; leaving some food for pondering to those who care for the higher and completer forms of pictorial work. They may feel—and the feeling would be only enhanced by some other things they may have heard, and a great deal of what they see on the Academy walls—that an off-hand style of painting, now predominant, has interests of its own clashing with those of some graver phases of art; and that judicial equity in adjusting these interests may sometimes be in default. Sir Francis Grant, detailing after-dinner statistics, may fancy that the whole question is settled by saying that there is space for so many pictures only, and that so many more were sent in; but this is far from being the dernier mot, Efficiency No. 1 and semi-efficiency No. 2 may be contending for a residue of space, and the admission of either is obviously the exclusion of the other; but he would be a very innocent President, non-academician artist, or private and unprofessional person, who should thence conclude that the Pompey and the Cæsar have coequal claims, especially the Pompey. Anybody, who has experienced, written, read, heard, or seen, even a little of this ever-recurrent hanging controversy, loathes its very atmosphere, and gladly retreats from it, seldom without a sense of protest, and a chafing at injustice.

753. —Bedouin Arabs.—One of the very finest studies of the kind produced by a hand unrivalled in its own way.

943. —The Sisters—We are now in the Sculpture Room. Mr. Munro has earned great popularity and a defined position by works of this class, in which groups of children are