Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 | Page 5

for--all on the line, or near it; all in
the best lights; and all titivated and polished up and varnished on the
walls, and adapted, as it were, to the situation. You may know an R. A.
on the private view-day by the broad, expanding jollity of his visage, if
he be a man of that stamp, or by a certain quiet, self-satisfied smile of
self-complacence, if he be a man of another.
But he looks and bears himself as a host. He cicerones delighted parties

of lady-friends with his face all one smile of courtesy, or he does the
honours with dignity and a lofty sense of--we do not speak
disrespectfully--of being on his own dunghill, in respect to the more
important exigeant connoisseurs, whom he thinks it right to patronise.
He always praises his brethren's works, and discovers in them hidden
virtues. For the Associates, he has minor smiles and milder words. The
ordinary mob of exhibiters he looks down upon with a calm and
complacent gaze, as though from the summit of a Mont Blanc of
superiority. At any bold defier of the conventions and traditions of the
Academy drawing-school, he shakes his head. The pre-Raphaelite
heresy was a sore affliction to him. He looked upon Millais and Hunt as
a Low-church bishop would regard Newman and Pusey. He prophesied
that they would come to no good. He called them 'silly boys;' and he
looks uneasily at the crowds who throng before this year's picture of the
Huguenot Couple--not recovering his self-complacency until his eye
catches his own favourite work, when he feels himself gradually
mollified, and smiles anew upon the world.
Not so the nameless artist, whose work of many toiling days, and many
sleepless nights, has been sent in unprotected to take its chance. He
knows nothing of its fate until he can get a catalogue. It may be on the
line in the east room; it may be above the octagon-room door; it may
not be hung at all. Only the great artistic guns are invited to the private
view, the rest must wait till Monday. Possibly a stray catalogue puts
him so far out of his pain on Sunday. If not, he passes a feverish and
unhappy time till the afternoon of Monday; and then, first among the
crowd, rushes franticly up stairs. We had an opportunity the other day
of seeing the result of a case of the kind. The picture--a work of great
fancy and high feeling, but deficient in manipulative skill--the artist, a
poet in the true sense of the word, had spent months in dreaming and in
joying over. He found it in the dingiest corner of the octagon-room. His
lip quivered and his chest heaved. He pulled his hat further down on his
face, and walked quickly and quietly out.
We would gladly, indeed, see the octagon-room abolished. A picture is
degraded, and an artist is insulted, by a painting being hung in this
darksome and 'condemned cell.' The canvas gets a 'jail-bird' stamp, and

its character is gone. In France, at the Palais-Royal, the young artists
have a far better chance. After a stated time, the pictures, which, as the
best have primarily had the best places, change stations with their
inferiors; so that everybody in turn enjoys the advantages of the
brightest lights and the most favourable points of view.
No need, of course, of attempting even the most summary sketch of the
styles and ordinary subjects of the great painters who bear aloft the
banner of the British school of art--of Landseer's glimpses of the
Highlands; or Stanfield's skyey, breezy landscapes; of the quiet pieces
of English rural scenery--meadows, and woodland glades, and river bits,
fresh and rich, and green and natural--of our Lees, our Creswicks, our
Coopers, our Witheringtons, our Redgraves, our Ausdills; of the classic
elegance and elevated sentiment of groups by our Dyces and our
Eastlakes; of the abundance of clever genre subjects--scenes from
history or romance--poured in by our Wards, our Friths, our Pooles, our
Elmores, our Eggs; or of--last, not least--the strange but clever vagaries
of that new school, the pre-Raphaelites, who are startling both
Academy and public by the quaintness of their art-theories, and the
vehement intensity of their style of execution. All the summer long, the
world is free to go and gaze upon them. All the summer long, the
salons are crowded from morning till night--in the earlier hours, by
artists and conscientious amateurs, the humbler sort of folks, who have
daily work to do; in the later, by our old friends, the staring, insouciant,
lounging, fashionable mob, whose carriages and Broughams go
creeping lazily round and round Trafalgar Square. And at parties and
balls, and all such reunions, the exhibition forms a main topic of
discourse. Bashful gentlemen