Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/160

 very "fine men," as they say in England—to the compartment in the rear. This was a charming little place, draped in maroon-colored stuff, which was elaborately fluted and festooned, and lighted by concealed gas burners, which projected a mellow glow upon a single picture disposed at the end of the apartment.

The title of the picture was "Christ the Great Shepherd"—a title whose latent significance, together with the beauties of the work, was set forth on a large card, which was placed in our hands by the attendants. We were instructed by this document that, the Christ being clad, like most Christs, in garments of red and blue, the former color represented love and the latter wisdom, and that both of these qualities are necessary to the character of a perfect man. Sir Noel Paton's Christ is walking through a rocky country, with a radiance round his head, and a little lamb in his arms, toward whom he gently bends his face. The little lamb is very good; it occurs to me that, the painter being a Scottish Academician, the picture was perhaps painted in the Highlands, where there are great opportunities for making ovine studies. As regards the subject, my companion took occasion to remark that he accepted all representations of Jesus on easy terms; his admiration of the type depicted was so great, his sentiment about it so vivacious, that his critical sense was suspended. If the painter was at all clever, the battle meanwhile was won. I called his attention shortly after this to the interest of looking at a picture by a Doctor of Laws; I think I even remarked upon the beauty of the frame. At all events, I talked about everything being so comfortably arranged. By this time his good humor of a few minutes before appeared to have evaporated. "Yes," he said, in his incorrigible French; "il n'y a que la peinture qui manque."

This has been a very good year, from the sight-seer's point of view, inasmuch as it has witnessed the inception (I believe that is the proper word in such cases) of an artistic enterprise of an unusually brilliant sort. I suppose it is correct to speak of the Grosvenor gallery as primarily an artistic enterprise; for it has had its origin, on the part of its distinguished proprietor (Sir Coutts Lindsay), rather in the love of pictures than in the love of money. Sir Coutts Lindsay is himself a very clever painter, and I see no warrant for the ill-natured intimation which I heard put forth somewhere, that he built the Grosvenor gallery in order to have a place to exhibit his own productions. These works would make a very honorable figure at the Royal Academy. In so far as his beautiful rooms in Bond street are a commercial speculation, this side of their character has been gilded over, and dissimulated in the most graceful manner. They are the product of a theory that there is a demand for a place of exhibition exempted both from the exclusiveness and the promiscuity of Burlington House, in which painters may communicate with the public more directly than under the academic dispensation, and in which the more "peculiar" ones in especial may have a chance to get popular. Sir Coutts Lindsay is his own counsel, his own jury, and his ambition, I believe, is to make of the Grosvenor gallery a sort of "Fortnightly Review," or more correctly, "Nineteenth Century," among exhibitions. He plays the same part as the thoroughly "catholic" editor of the latter periodical, who invites the lion and the lamb to lie down together, allows an equal space in his pages to Cardinal Manning and Mr. Huxley. There are people who expect the Grosvenor gallery to be simply, for a year or two, a success of curiosity, and then to go the way of all those other brilliant failures in the attempts to entertain this mighty metropolis, whose more or less mouldering relics are scattered over its thankless bosom—the Crystal Palace, the Alexandra Palace, the Westminster Aquarium, the Albert