326 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

of its feathers falling on the arm of the figure which holds it, and another to the ground, where, by-the-bye, the hay is painted not only elaborately, but with the most perfect ease of touch and mastery of effect, especially to be observed because this freedom of execution is a modern excellence, which it has been inaccurately stated that these painters despise, but which, in reality, is one of the remarkable distinctions between their painting and that of Van Eyck or Hemling,¹ which caused me to say in my first letter that “those knew little of ancient painting who supposed the works of these men to resemble it.”

Next to this false choice of feature, and in connection with it, is to be noted the defect in the colouring of the flesh. The hands, at least in the pictures in Millais, are almost always ill painted, and the flesh tint in general is wrought out of crude purples and dusky yellows. It appears just possible that much of this evil may arise from the attempt to obtain too much transparency-an attempt which has injured also not a few of the best works of Mulready. I believe it will be generally found that close study of minor details is unfavourable to flesh painting; it was noticed of the drawing by John Lewis, in the old water-colour exhibition of 1850,² (a work which, as regards its treatment of detail, may be ranged in the same class with the pre-Raphaelite pictures,) that the faces were the worst painted portions of the whole.

The apparent want of shade is, however, perhaps the fault which most hurts the general eye. The fact is, nevertheless, that the fault is far more in the other pictures of the Academy than in the pre-Raphaelite ones. It is the former that are false, not the latter, except so far as every picture must be false which endeavours to represent living sunlight with dead pigments. I think Mr. Hunt has a

¹ [See above, Review of Eastlake, § 34, p. 295.]

² [“The Hhareem” (No. 147), noticed, partly to the above effect, by the critic of the Times, May 1, 1850. It will be remembered that John Lewis is, with Turner, Millais, Prout, Mulready, and Edwin Landseer, one of the artists particularly mentioned in Ruskin’s pamphlet on “Pre-Raphaelitism” (1851): see below, p. 363; and see also Academy Notes, 1857, Nos. 39, 302.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]