We have kept back, almost to the last, one of our chief favourites in the Exhibition of the Royal Academy. Mr Sidney Cooper is in great force this year. He has six pictures; four of them all his own, two painted in conjunction with Mr F. R. Lee, R.A. With all respect for this artist, to whose landscapes we shall refer in their place, we prefer Cooper alone to Cooper in partnership. The two styles do not blend well, nor does Lee put his best landscapes into Cooper's cattle-pieces. Take the first of their pictures--No. 23--_Cattle crossing a Ford_. As a whole it is agreeable--and the cattle, we need hardly say, are worthy of the best English cattle-painter of the day; but the landscape is feeble. In No. 298, _The Watering-place_, the rather heavy paint of the foliage gives a thin washy look to the foreground. We advise Messrs Lee and Cooper to hang their pictures side by side, if they will, as excellent specimens of their respective walks of art, but not to associate themselves on the same canvass. People find fault with the landscape part of Cooper's pictures; but it is in good keeping with the rest, and moreover he improves in that respect, as in others. We will instance No. 278, _A Mountain Group--Evening_, some charming goats, where the background, bathed in soft light, harmonises admirably with the more prominent parts of the picture. No. 454, _A Group on the Welsh Mountains_, is most delicately finished, quite a gem; and _Fordwick Meadows--Sunset_, in a somewhat broader style, is equally excellent. Mr Cooper's is a class of art which strongly appeals to the domestic and rural tastes of Englishmen. He excels in it, and need fear no competitors, although several artists this year exhibit cattle-landscapes of some merit. And here we should perhaps say a word about Mr Ansdell, who has put some Brobdignagian sheep into a landscape by Mr Creswick, (British Institution, No. 123, _Southdowns_,) and who has rather a pretty thing in the same exhibition--No. 40, _The Regretted Companion_--an old hawker perplexed and mournful beside the body of his dead ass. We would gladly see this artist cease to imitate Landseer. He sacrifices his originality without succeeding in catching the best points of his model.