Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/166

 only art that does not promptly weary us by the pettiness of its sentimental precautions and the shallowness of its intellectual vision. Whenever I have been to the Academy I have found a certain relief in looking for a while at this representation of the naked human body, the whole story of which begins and ends with the beautiful play of its muscles and limbs. It is worth noting, by the way, that this is to the best of my recollection the only study of the beautiful nude on the walls of the Academy. In the Salon last year, I remember, every fifth picture was a study of the nude; but I must add that that nude was not always beautiful.

It must be allowed that quite the most full-blown specimens of that anti-pictorial Philistinism of which I just now spoke are from the hands of the older Academicians. (I am speaking only of pictures on the "line"; above it and below it one may find things a little better and a good deal worse.) Some of these gentlemen are truly amazing representatives of the British art of thirty and forty years ago, and there is something cruel in their privilege of Academicians, admitting them into the garish light of conspicuity. There is a portrait by Sir Francis Grant, President of the Academy, of a young lady on horseback, on a manorial greensward, which surely ought to be muffled in some kind of honorable curtain. The productions of Mr. Horseley, Mr. Cope, Mr. Ward, Mr. Rodgrave, Mr. O'Neil, are an almost touching exhibition of helplessness, vulgarity, violent imbecility of color. Of the younger painters it may very often be said that they have the merits of their defects. M. Taine, in his "Notes on England," pointed out these merits with his usual vigor. "It is impossible to be more expressive, to expend more effort to address the mind through the senses, to illustrate an idea or a truth, to collect into a surface of twelve square inches a closer group of psychological observations. What patient and penetrating critics! What connoisseurs of men!" This is very true; if there is something irritating in the importunately narrative quality of the usual English picture, the presumption is generally that the story is very well told. It is told with a kind of decent good faith and naïveté which are wanting in other schools, when other schools attempt this line. I am far from thinking that this compensatory fact is the highest attribute of English art. It has no relation to the work of Gainsborough and Reynolds, Constable, Flaxman, and Turner. But in some of the things in the present Academy it is very happily illustrated.

I found it illustrated, indeed, in the spectators quite as much as in the pictures. Standing near the latter with other observers, I was struck with the fact that when these were in groups or couples, they either, by way of comment, said nothing at all or said something simply about the subject of the picture—projected themselves into the story. I remember a remark made as I stood looking at a very prettily painted scene by Mr. Marcus Stone, representing a young lady in a pink satin dress, solemnly burning up a letter, while an old woman sits weeping in the background. Two ladies stood near me, entranced; for a long time they were silent. At last—"Her mother was a widow!" one of them gently breathed. Then they looked a little while longer and departed. The most appreciable thing to them was the old woman's wearing a widow's cap; and the speaker's putting her verb in the past tense struck me as a proof of their accepting the picture above all things as history. To this sort of appreciation the most successful picture of the year, Mr. Long's "Egyptian Feast," appeals in a forcible and brilliant manner. A company of the subjects of the Pharaohs are collected at a banquet, in the midst of which enter certain slaves, who perform the orthodox ceremony of dragging round the hall, over the polished tessellated floor, as memento mori, the lugubrious simulacrum of a mummy.