Mr. West’s picture of _Lot and his Family_ is one of those highly finished specimens of _metallurgy_ which too often proceed from the President’s hardware manufactory. As to the subject, we conceive it has been often enough treated in a country famed for ‘pure religion breathing household laws.’ We do not mean to lay it down as a rule, that the sublimity of the execution may not redeem the deformity of the subject of a composition, as there is a great and acknowledged difference between Shakspeare and the Newgate Calendar; but this of Mr. West’s is a mere furniture picture, and offers no palliation from the genius displayed by the artist. Having touched unawares on this very delicate subject of the ethics of painting, we shall just notice, that the picture of ‘Venus weeping over the dead body of Adonis,’ seems to have been painted _tout expres_, for the purpose of being bought up by some member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Mr. Turner’s grand landscape of _Apullius_ and _Apullia_ has one recommendation, which must always enhance the value of this most able artist’s productions, that the composition is taken _verbatim_ from Lord Egremont’s picture of ‘Jacob and Laban.’ The beautiful arrangement is Claude’s; the powerful execution is his own. From this specimen of parody, and from his never-enough-to-be-admired picture of ‘Mercury and Herse,’ we could almost wish that this gentleman would always work in the trammels of Claude or N. Poussin. All the taste and all the imagination being borrowed, his powers of eye, hand, and memory, are equal to any thing. In general, his pictures are a waste of morbid strength. They give pleasure only by the excess of power triumphing over the barrenness of the subject. The artist delights to go back to the first chaos of the world, or to that state when the waters were merely separated from the dry land, and no creeping thing nor herb bearing fruit was seen upon the face of the land. The figures in the present picture are execrable. Claude’s are flimsy enough; but these are impudent and obtrusive vulgarity. The utter want of a capacity to draw a distinct outline with the force, the depth, the fulness, and precision of this artist’s eye for colour, is truly astonishing. There is only one part of the colouring of Mr. Turner’s landscape which did not please us: it is the blue of the water nearest the foreground, immediately after the dark brown shadow of the trees. The picture of the _Favourite Lamb_, by Collins, has exquisite feeling. The groupe of children surrounding the little victim, and arresting him in his progress to the butcher’s cart, has a degree of natural pathos and touching simplicity, which we have never seen surpassed in any picture of the kind. It may easily draw tears from eyes, at all used to the melting mood. THE STAGE. _The Morning Chronicle_] [_February 24, 1814._