The two largest contributors to this gallery are Mr. Ferdinand Heilbuth
and Mr. James Tissot. The first of these two artists sends some
delightful pictures from Rome, two of which are particularly pleasing.
One is of an old Cardinal in the Imperial scarlet of the Caesars meeting
a body of young Italian boys in purple soutanes, students evidently in
some religious college, near the Church of St. John Lateran. One of the
boys is being presented to the Cardinal, and looks very nervous under the
operation; the rest gaze in wonder at the old man in his beautiful dress.
The other picture is a view in the gardens of the Villa Borghese; a
Cardinal has sat down on a marble seat in the shade of the trees, and is
suspending his meditation for a moment to smile at a pretty child to whom
a French bonne is pointing out the gorgeously dressed old gentleman; a
flunkey in attendance on the Cardinal looks superciliously on.
Nearly all of Mr. Tissot's pictures are deficient in feeling and depth;
his young ladies are too fashionably over-dressed to interest the
artistic eye, and he has a hard unscrupulousness in painting
uninteresting objects in an uninteresting way. There is some good colour
and drawing, however, in his painting of a withered chestnut tree, with
the autumn sun glowing through the yellow leaves, in a picnic scene, No.
23; the remainder of the picture being something in the photographic
style of Frith.
What a gap in art there is between such a picture as the Banquet of the
Civic Guard in Holland, with its beautiful grouping of noble-looking men,
its exquisite Venetian glass aglow with light and wine, and Mr. Tissot's
over-dressed, common-looking people, and ugly, painfully accurate
representation of modern soda-water bottles!
Mr. Tissot's Widower, however, shines in qualities which his other
pictures lack; it is full of depth and suggestiveness; the grasses and
wild, luxuriant growth of the foreground are a revel of natural life.
We must notice besides in this gallery Mr. Watts's two powerful portraits
of Mr. Burne-Jones and Lady Lindsay.
To get to the Water-Colour Room we pass through a small sculpture
gallery, which contains some busts of interest, and a pretty terra-cotta
figure of a young sailor, by Count Gleichen, entitled Cheeky, but it is
not remarkable in any way, and contrasts very unfavourably with the
Exhibition of Sculpture at the Royal Academy, in which are three really
fine works of art--Mr. Leighton's Man Struggling with a Snake, which may
be thought worthy of being looked on side by side with the Laocoon of the
Vatican, and Lord Ronald Gower's two statues, one of a dying French
Guardsman at the Battle of Waterloo, the other of Marie Antoinette being
led to execution with bound hands, Queenlike and noble to the last.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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