can anything exceed the idyllic loveliness of Aphrodite waking the
statue into sensuous life: the world above her head like a brittle globe
of glass, her feet resting on a drift of the blue sky, and a choir of
doves fluttering around her like a fall of white snow. Following in the
same school of ideal and imaginative painting is Miss Evelyn Pickering,
whose picture of St. Catherine, in the Dudley of some years ago,
attracted such great attention. To the present gallery she has
contributed a large picture of Night and Sleep, twin brothers floating
over the world in indissoluble embrace, the one spreading the cloak of
darkness, while from the other's listless hands the Leathean poppies fall
in a scarlet shower. Mr. Strudwich sends a picture of Isabella, which
realises in some measure the pathos of Keats's poem, and another of the
lover in the lily garden from the Song of Solomon, both works full of
delicacy of design and refinement of detail, yet essentially weak in
colour, and in comparison with the splendid Giorgione-like work of Mr.
Fairfax Murray, are more like the coloured drawings of the modern German
school than what we properly call a painting. The last-named artist,
while essentially weak in draughtsmanship, yet possesses the higher
quality of noble colour in the fullest degree.

The draped figures of men and women in his Garland Makers, and Pastoral,
some wrought in that single note of colour which the earlier Florentines
loved, others with all the varied richness and glow of the Venetian
school, show what great results may be brought about by a youth spent in
Italian cities. And finally I must notice the works contributed to this
Gallery by that most powerful of all our English artists, Mr. G. F.
Watts, the extraordinary width and reach of whose genius were never more
illustrated than by the various pictures bearing his name which are here
exhibited. His Paolo and Francesca, and his Orpheus and Eurydice, are
creative visions of the very highest order of imaginative painting;
marked as it is with all the splendid vigour of nobly ordered design, the
last-named picture possesses qualities of colour no less great. The
white body of the dying girl, drooping like a pale lily, and the clinging
arms of her lover, whose strong brown limbs seem filled with all the
sensuous splendour of passionate life, form a melancholy and wonderful
note of colour to which the eye continually returns as indicating the
motive of th