Themes
Grosvenor against Academy
The first sentence sets the frame. The Royal Academy offers 'ordinary English art at its most commonplace level'; the Grosvenor shows 'the highest development of the modern artistic spirit' and 'its specially accentuated tendencies.' Wilde's choice of pictures follows from this. He leads with Burne-Jones and the 'school of ideal and imaginative painting', calls Watts 'that most powerful of all our English artists', and leaves the 'modern realistic school' of Herkomer, Tissot and Legros for another day.
Colour against drawing
Wilde judges again and again by colour. Strudwich's pictures are delicate in design 'yet essentially weak in colour', more like German coloured drawings than paintings, while Fairfax Murray, 'weak in draughtsmanship', has 'the higher quality of noble colour.' He singles out the 'luminous treatment of the various shades of black' in Watts's self-portrait, Whistler's 'study in amber, yellow and browns', and in Wills's Ophelia 'the power of subdued and reserved colour.'
An Irish critic in London
Writing for a Dublin paper, Wilde makes a point of Irish achievement. After naming the Marchioness of Waterford and Richard Doyle, he declares that 'the qualities of the Irish genius in the field of art find an entirely adequate exponent in Mr. Wills', who has made his name 'as a dramatist and a painter'. He describes all three of Wills's pictures, from the goat-footed child of the Nymph and Satyr to the reflected light on the armour of Laertes.