Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/162

 Heilbuth; he recalls so many of those delightful things that compose our Roman memories—the benignant monsignori with their purple petticoats and stockings, and their servants in ancient liveries made to fit the household in general; the little crop-headed seminarists, marshalled into a crooked file like a long, innocuous serpent, and petticoated, too, beyond their years; the stately nurses of well-born babies, with their embroidered head cloths, their crimson bodices, the silver daggers in their coarse back hair, and the gold beads on their ample brown bosoms.

Putting aside the remarkable productions of Mr. Burne Jones, of which I will presently speak, the most interesting work at the Grosvenor is that of Mr. G. F. Watts, the first portrait painter in England. Mr. Watts is serious and manly, gravely and profoundly harmonious in color, and full of style in drawing. Though he has made his reputation by his portraits, which constitute his usual work, I believe he has a great longing to deal with "subjects." He has indulged it in one of the pictures at the Grosvenor, and the result certainly justifies him. "Love and Death" is an allegory, an uncomfortable thing in painting; but Mr. Watts's allegory is eminently pictorial. On a large canvas a white draped figure, with its back to the spectator, and with a sinister sweep of garment and gesture, prepares to pass across a threshold where, beside a rosebush that has shed its flowers, a boy figure of love staggers forth, and, with head and body reverted in entreaty tries in vain to bar its entrance. The picture has a certain graceful impressiveness, and the painter has rendered with peculiar success the air of majestic fatality in the pale image which shows no features.

Next this work hangs the portrait of an admirable model, Mrs. Percy Wyndham. It is what they call a 'sumptuous' picture," said my companion. "That is, the lady looks as if she had thirty thousand a year." It is true that she does; and yet the picture has a style which is distinctly removed from the "stylishness" of M. Tissot's yellow-ribboned heroine. The very handsome person whom the painter has depicted is dressed in a fashion which will never be wearisome; a simple yet splendid robe, in the taste of no particular period—of all periods. There is something admirably large and generous in the whole design of the work, of which the coloring is proportionately rich and sober. For the art of combining the imagination and ideal element in portraiture with an extreme solidity, and separating great elegance from small elegance, Mr. Watts is highly remarkable.

I will not speak of Mr. Whistler's "Nocturnes in Black and Gold" and in "Blue and Silver," of his "Arrangements," "Harmonies," and "Impressions," because I frankly confess they do not amuse me. The mildest judgment I have heard pronounced upon them is that they are like "ghosts of Velasquezes"; with the harshest I will not darken my pages. It may be a narrow point of view, but to be interesting it seems to me that a picture should have some relation to life as well as to painting. Mr. Whistler's experiments have no relation whatever to life; they have only a relation to painting. Nor will I speak of Mr. Millais's three heads of youthful specimens of aristocratic loveliness, because I am certain that his beautiful models (daughters of the Duke of Westminster) must have measured out to him whatever ire may flow from celestial minds. That Mr. Millais's brush has at its worst a certain indefeasible manliness there is no need of affirming; this the artist has been proving to us any time these ten years. Neither will I stop longer before Mr. Holman Hunt's "After-Glow in Egypt " than to pay my respects to its beauty of workmanship, and to wonder whence it is, amid all this exquisitely patient labor, that comes the spectator's sense of a singular want of inspiration. Do what he will, Mr.