Punch: Punch (22.1852)

216

PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.

TEMPTIS ED1X RE RUM.

"Good Gracious! Is it Possible?—No! Yes! No!—Yes! Yes \
By Jupiter, it's a Grey Hair in my favourite Whisker ! "

" OUR CRITIC " AMONG THE PICTURES.

That saddening period of the year has again arrived, when the Con-
certs, and the May Meetings, and the British Artists, and the National
Institute, and the Old Water Colours, and the New Water Colours,
and the Royal Academy, all open their doors to the Public.

The Spring may be as slow of coming as she will; the lilacs may
obstinately refuse to flower,; the wretched peach-buds may expand,
only to be nipped and perished to death ; the East wind may persist in
drying up our blood, and souring our tempers; but one Spring
blossoming we are certain of—that painted growth which yearly comes
out on canvas, and is trained, espalier fashion, against the walls of
the Picture Exhibitions in this merry month of May.

The worst of this crop is, that one always knows beforehand what it
will be. Year after year, the old stocks bear the familiar fruits. Now
and then, it is true, a new slip may be planted, or a fresh idea grafted
on to an old trunk. But what is one among so many ?

Walk into the Old Water Colours, and what does one see there but
the old hardy annuals ?—Hunt's bird's-nests, and rose-buds, and plums,
and primroses, and chubby country boys, and apple-cheeked rustic
maidens; David Cox's glooming Welsh hills, and breezy hay-fields,
and solemn reaehes of purple heath; George Fripp's rippling river-
reaches, with eel-pots and locks, gray willows and wind-bowed poplars,
or Dorsetshire sea-side rocks, and green Yorkshire wolds; Copley
Fielding's lake prettinesses and steaming Sussex Downs; Topham's
slatternly but sweet Irish lasses; Cattermole's masteries of effect;
Frederick Tayler's horses and dogs, French horns, and laced coats ;
Oakley's gipsies and Italian organ-grinders; Callow's sea-beaches
and stranded hulls; Richardson's North Country moorlands, or
sun-lighted Italian lakes; Branwhite's frozen meres and broads;
Jenkins's Boulogne Shrimpers; Alfred Fripp's coppery beauties of
the Claddagh, or the Campagna; Dodgson's avenues and water-gates ;
Carl Haag's sun-steeped Contadine and purple horizons ; Duncan's
boats and seas; Turner's water-lilied pools; Mrs. Bartholomew's
dewy flowers; Mrs. Sharpe's round-faced inanities; and Mr. Evans's
Highland deer-stalkings—how one knows them all! How ingenuously
they reappear, year after year—the same subjects, the same names, the
same placeSj the same prices, the same pretty faces at the private view,
the same criticisms in the morning papers, the same little blue tickets
in the same frames !

And as it is with the Old Water Colours, so it is with the New.
There are the usual Warren's Egyptians, and Haghe's wondrous
Netherlandish interiors, and Bennet's oaks and ferns, and Davidson's
hedgerow elms and Surrey commons, and Corbould's clean-washed,
cross-hutched, ice-creamed ladies, and Vacher's azure Sicilian
panoramas, and Weigall's cocks and hens, and Wehnert's Germanized
academics, and Miss Egerton's thoughtful faces, and Lee's Portel

Maielottes, and Fahey's Irish blottings—all old friends; not a new
man, nor a new subject, nor a new rendering of an old one.

As it is with water, so it is with oil. What is the use of catalogues ?
I know all your hands, gentlemen, from Zeitter's slap-dash in Suffolk-
street to Maclise's gigantic missal-painting in the Academy. Why
should I pay a shilling extra for superfluous information ?
_ There is one comfort, however, this year. I have not detected a
single Discovery of the Body of Harold; Vicars of Wakefield are by no
means so abundant a crop as usual; and there is not a single Gil Bias
in the field ! I regret, however, to see that the walls are beginning to
be overrun with cuttings from that prolific nursery-ground, Pepys's
Diary; and Goldsmith's Life promises to become as dangerously
fruitful a stock as his perennial Vicar has been hitherto.

There is another comfort for me. I have this year experienced a new
sensation at the Exhibition of the Royal Academy. And I hasten to
record my sense of the obligation to Mr. Millais. I offer my hand to
that Pre-Raphaelite brother. I bow down to him, and kiss the edge
of his palette. I have rapped him over the knuckles, in former years,
with my pen. He is at liberty to return the compliment, this year,
with his maul-stick.

Before two pictures of Mr. Millais I have spent the happiest hour
that I have ever spent in the Royal Academy Exhibition. In those
two pictures I find more loving observation of Nature, more mastery
in the reproduction of her forms and colours, more insight into the
sentiment of our greatest poet, a deeper feeling of human emotion, a
happier choice of a point of interest, and a more truthful rendering of
its appropriate expression, than in all the rest of those eight hundred
squares of canvas put together.

I owe the painter this acknowledgment of a great and enduring
pleasure, and I rejoice to make it—not for myself only, but for the
.thousands who have felt as I felt before these pictures. I may be
'heretical. I cannot help it. R.A.s and A.R.A.s, I admire you—I
respect you—I appreciate your skill; and I would gladly purchase your
works, if I could afford it. But for this year give me Mr. Millais. He
has painted Ophelia, singing, as she floats to her death, with wide
open unconscious eyes, gazing up to heaven. The woven flowers have
escaped from her relaxing fingers, and are borne idly with the long
mosses of the stream, past the lush July vegetation of the river bank.
The red-breast pipes on the willow spray, the wild roses give their
sweetness to the summer air, the long purples peer from the crowding
leaves, the forget-me-nots lift their blue eyes from the margin as she
floats by, her brown hair drinking in the weight of water, and slowly
dragging down the innocent face, with its insane eyes, till the water
shall choke those sweet lips, now parted for her own death-dirge.

Talk as you like, M'Gilp, eminent painter, to your friend Mr
Squench, eminent critic, about the needless elaboration of those water-
mosses, and the over making-out of the rose-leaves, and the abomi-
nable finish of those river-side weeds matted with gossamer, which the
field botanist may identify leaf by leaf. I tell you, I am aware of none
of these. I see only that face of poor drowning Ophelia. My eye
goes to that, and rests on that, and sees nothing else, till—buffoon as I
am, mocker, joker, scurril-knave, street-jester, by trade and nature—
the tears blind me, and I am fain to turn from the face of the mad girl
to the natural loveliness that makes her dying beautiful.

If a painter were ever pardonable for painting after a poet—and such
a poet—Mr. Millias may be forgiven for this picture of Ophelia.

There is another work by the same hand—"A Huguenot, on St.
Bartholomew's day, refusing to shield himself from danger, by wearing
the Roman Catholic badge."

The Roman Catholic lady and her Huguenot lover are standing under
a garden wall. She has stolen out to meet him, and warn him of the
danger. It has not been without doubt and hesitation that she has
nerved herself to do so. The petals of the flower she has plucked to
pieces in her tremor, are lying at his feet. Her passionate, earnest
face, is turned up to his with the gaze of one that pleads for life,
while her eager fingers try to fasten the white scarf round his
arm. He will not have it, and with a gentle force impedes her
tremulous effort. What do you read in bis face ? Love and pride, and
fearlessness, and a shade, perhaps, of incredulity. Some may find one
of these sentiments, some another, some all of them together, some
aone of them. This is the rare quality of the picture. It has many
meanings—admits of various interpretations—may be read in divers
ways. The moment is rightly chosen, when nothing is decided—when
two fates hang trembling in the balance, and the spectator finds himself
assisting in a struggle, of which he may prophesy the issue, as his
sympathy with th^ love of woman or the strength of man happens to be
strongest.

Of this picture, also, I boldly say, as I said of the other, there is not
a whit too much of nicety, or precision, or finish in the details and
accessories. Here, again, what I first see, in spite of myself, is the
subtle human emotion of those two faces. All the rest I may find out
when I have satisfied myself with that. But it is not without an effort
that I can turn from those faces to tbe flowers that grow at the lovers'
feet, or the creeper that mats the wall above their heads.

There is all that accuracy of eye and power of hand can do in these