Page:Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868 (IA gri 33125011175656).pdf/45

 their cunning; it is a master whom we find too often at work fit only for a craftsman. Surely a painter who has done things so noble will not always be content to take for his battle-cry, "Philistia, be thou glad of me."

I return now to the works of Mr. Watts. His little landscape is full of that beauty which lives a dim brief life between sunset and dusk. The faint flames and mobile colours of the sky, the dim warm woods, the flight of doves about the dovecote, have all their part in the grave charm of evening, are all given back to the eye with the grace and strength of a master's touch; the stacks that catch the glare and glow of low sunlight seem crude and violent in their intense yellow colour and hard angles of form: natural it may be, but a natural discord that jars upon the eye, "The Meeting of Jacob and Esau," though something too academic, has in part the especial, the personal grandeur of Mr. Watts's larger manner of work. In the pale smooth worn face of Jacob there is a shy sly shame which befits the supplanter: his well-nigh passive action, as of one half reassured and half abashed, bares to view the very heart and root of his nature; and the rough strenuous figure of Esau, in its frank grandeur of brave sunbrown limbs, speaks aloud on the other side of the story, by the fervid freedom of his impetuous embrace. Fur off, between the meeting figures, midmost of the remote cavalcade, the fair clear face of a woman looks out, pale under folds of white, patient and ill at ease; her one would take to be Leah. It is noticeable that one year, not over rich in excellent work, should give us two admirable pictures drawn from the Hebrew chronicles, What they call scriptural art in England does not often bear such acceptable fruit. I know not if even Mr. Watts has ever painted a nobler portrait than this of Mr. Panizzi; it recalls the majestic strength and depth of Morone's work; there is the same dominant power of hand and keenness of eye, the same breadth and subtlety of touch, the same noble reticence of colour.

Before I pass on to speak of any other painter, I will here interpolate what I have to say of Mr. Watts's bust of Clytie. Not imitative, not even assimilative of Michel Angelo's