320 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

estimate which the writer formed of the pictures in question when rapidly compared with works of totally different style and aim: nay, when I first saw the saw the chief picture by Millais in the Exhibition of last year,¹ I had nearly come to the same conclusion myself. But I ask your permission, in justice to artists who have at least given much time and toil to their pictures, to institute some more serious inquiry into their merits and faults than your general notice of the Academy could possibly have admitted.

Let me state, in the first place, that I have no acquaintance with any of these artists, and very imperfect sympathy with them. No one who has met with any of my writings will suspect me of desiring to encourage them in their Romanist and Tractarian tendencies.² I am glad to see that Mr. Millais’ lady in blue³ is heartily tired of her painted window and idolatrous toilet table; and I have no particular respect for Mr. Collins’ lady in white, because her sympathies are limited by a dead wall, or divided between some gold fish and a tadpole-(the latter Mr. Collins may, perhaps,

¹ [A sacred picture (No. 518) upon the text, “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). Ruskin never accounted this among the happier efforts of the painter: see his Notes on the Millais Exhibition of 1886 (now reprinted in the volume containing Academy Notes). The picture had no title, but is now called “Christ in the House of His Parents” or “The Carpenter’s Shop” (the latter title being originally given to it by hostile critics in derision). Interesting particulars with regard to the production of the picture by the young artist (he was 22 at the time of its exhibition) are given in The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, by J. G. Millais, 1899, i. 76-78. The picture excited the utmost displeasure among the critics. The Times pronounced it “revolting,” “loathsome,” and “disgusting” (May 9, 1850). The Athenæum “recoiled” from it “with loathing and disgust” (June 1, 1850). Dickens, in Household Words (June 15, 1850), pronounced the female figure “so horrible in her ugliness that she would stand out from the rest of the company as a monster in the vilest cabaret in France.” Millais had two other pictures in the Academy of 1850, namely, “Portrait of a gentleman (Mr. James Wyatt, of Oxford) and his grandchild” (No. 429), and “Ferdinand lured by Ariel”-Shakspeare, Tempest, Act i. sc. 2 (No. 504). Of these pictures, “The Carpenter’s Shop” was recently in the collection of Mr. F. A. Beer; the “Portrait” is in that of Mr. James Wyatt; and “Ferdinand,” in that of Mr. H. F. Makins.]

² [See the next letter, p. 327.]

³ [The pre-Raphaelite pictures exhibited in the Academy of 1851, and discussed in this and in the following letter, were Millais’ “Mariana” (No. 561)-the “lady in blue” here referred to-“The Return of the Dove to the Ark” (No. 651), and “The Woodman’s Daughter” (No. 799); Holman Hunt’s “Valentine receiving

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