Summary
Wilde opens by contrasting the Royal Academy, where English art is at its most commonplace, with the Grosvenor, where the modern spirit shows its highest development. First come Burne-Jones's Annunciation, with a pale Virgin by a marble fountain and a sombre Gabriel descending through an olive tree, and his four Pygmalion pictures, mediaeval in spirit, where the sculptor looks like a St. Francis and Aphrodite wakes the statue amid a fall of doves. Evelyn Pickering's Night and Sleep shows twin brothers floating over the world. Strudwich's pictures are delicate but weak in colour beside Fairfax Murray's Giorgione-like work, which is weak in drawing but noble in colour.
Wilde calls G. F. Watts the most powerful of English artists. His Paolo and Francesca and Orpheus and Eurydice are imaginative visions of the highest order, but Wilde dwells on two plainer works: a self-portrait, with its luminous blacks, and the child Dorothy in faded claret, as lovely as the children Vandyke painted in Genoa. He passes briefly over Richmond's Sarpedon and bronze athlete, and praises Whistler, better valued in France than in England, for The Golden Girl, his dry point etching The Little Forge and a Harmony in Green and Gold, undeterred by the Fors Clavigera.
Among other works he notes Eugene Benson's Theocritean Narcissus, Forbes-Robertson's portrait of Hermann Vezin, Miss Stuart-Wortley's view of the Cherwell from Magdalen and Mrs. Valentine Bromley's Misty Day. He names the Marchioness of Waterford and Richard Doyle, then Mr. Wills, dramatist and painter, as the adequate exponent of Irish genius, with a Nymph and Satyr and a Parting of Ophelia and Laertes rich in subdued colour. He closes by reserving Cecil Lawson's Turner-like landscapes, and Herkomer, Tissot and Legros, for another notice.