Themes
The House Beautiful
Wilde writes as a disciple of a movement. Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt and Watts differ in aim but share 'faith, and love, and reverence, the three golden keys to the gate of the House Beautiful.' He borrows Pater's phrase that colour is 'a spirit upon them by which they become expressive to the spirit', and applies it to the Merlin. His last paragraph names the leaders of the 'revival of culture and love of beauty': Ruskin, Swinburne, Pater, Symonds and Morris.
Getting Greece right
The young classicist checks the pictures against his reading and travels. Alma Tadema's Parthenon frieze is 'un-Greek' in its sombre red and blue, since the original was 'brilliant and light' and had burnished metal reins. Richmond's Electra lacks 'that passionate Asiatic mourning' which Aeschylus describes in the Choëphori, and the women's dresses are too bright. Yet Richmond's opal-blue sky is exact, and his orchids and narcissi are 'flowers which I have myself seen at Argos.'
Imagination against realism
Wilde's highest praise goes to imaginative and symbolic work, to Watts's Love and Death and Burne-Jones's Merlin, 'full of magic'. Accuracy without feeling bores him. Tissot paints 'uninteresting objects in an uninteresting way', his picnic is 'in the photographic style of Frith', and his 'ugly, painfully accurate representation of modern soda-water bottles' is set against the grouping and Venetian glass of the Banquet of the Civic Guard. Even Hunt's Afterglow in Egypt is superb colour without human interest.
Whistler mocked and admitted
Whistler is the joke of the review. His Nocturnes are 'worth looking at for about as long as one looks at a real rocket', his portrait of Henry Irving is 'so ridiculously like the original' that one nearly laughs, and his two ladies seem 'caught in a black London fog'. Wilde calls him 'the Great Dark Master', compared with the obscure Heraclitus. But the notice turns: the portrait of Carlyle shows 'an artist of very great power when he likes.'
Beauty from a dull land
Wilde closes on a paradox about England. With 'its short summer, its dreary rains and fogs, its mining districts and factories, and vile deification of machinery', the country has 'yet produced very great masters of art'. He adds that the exhibition does not exhaust the country's art: Hunt, Millais, Leighton and Poynter have not sent their best, Rossetti is absent, and many great pictures lie 'hidden away in different places'. So he hopes Sir Coutts Lindsay will go on showing them, aiding the revival that owes 'its birth to Mr. Ruskin'.