Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432: Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 — John Shaqi
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432: Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852Various
General
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432: Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852
Various
Periodicals
The other picture, No. 93, in the same room, is larger and more
ambitious. It represents a carpenter's workshop, with a mechanic at
each end of the long bench; one of these, a half-starved, hideous
wretch, with hardly a trace of the human anatomy in his composition;
and the other, a respectable and rather sagacious-looking person, with
immeasurable legs. Behind the bench is a frightful old woman, of the
lowest class; and before it another, younger, but repulsively ugly and
vulgar, examining, in conjunction with the respectable workman--and
with her brow knotted in an awful congeries of wrinkles up to her
fiery hair--the hand of a little boy. This little boy, though plebeian
and red-haired, is not unpleasing: he has apparently cut his hand
while playing with some of the edge-tools lying about the shop; while
his brother, a better-figured as well as better-behaved boy, with a
hairy apron round him, is making himself useful in carrying a basin of
some dark-coloured stuff--probably carpenter's glue. But let us see
what the legend attached to the number says: 'And one shall say unto
him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those
with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.'--Zechariah,
xiii. 6. What does this mean? It means, innocent reader, that the
piece we have described in its principal features is the Holy Family
of the Pre-Raphaelites! This is their mode of going to nature,
selecting nothing but the mean and repulsive, and rejecting nothing
but poetical and religious feeling and common decency.
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