nglish Art to
the American public,--partly, it was to be expected, with the view of
opening this El Dorado to the English painter, but still more with the
desire to extend the knowledge of what was to them a new and important
revelation of Art. In its inception the plan was almost exclusively
Pre-Raphaelite, but extended itself, on after-consideration, so far as
to admit the worthiest artists of the conventional stamp. We have the
first fruits of the undertaking in an exhibition which has achieved a
success in New York, and which will probably visit the principal cities
of the Union before its return home in the spring to make way for a
second which will open in the autumn.

It is not as a collection of pictures merely that we purpose to notice
this exhibition. Out of nearly four hundred pictures, the great
proportion are mere conventionalisms,--many of them choice, but most of
them in no wise to be compared with the pictures of the same class by
French and German painters, since neither just drawing nor impressive
color redeems their inanity of conception. There are some curious
water-color drawings by Lance, remarkable mainly as forcibly painted,
some exquisite color-pieces by William Hunt, and a number of fine
examples of the matter-of-fact common-place which forms the great mass
of pictures in the London exhibitions. Two drawings deserve especial,
though brief, notice; one a coast bit by Copley Fielding,--a sultry,
hazy afternoon on the seashore, where sea and sky, distance and
foreground, are fused into one golden, slumberous silence, in which
neither wave laps nor breeze fans, and only the blinding sun moves,
sinking slowly down to where heaven and ocean mingle again in a happy
dream of their old unity before the waters under the firmament were
divided from the waters above the firmament, and the stranded ships lie
with sails drooping and listless on a beach from which the last tide
seems to have ebbed, leaving the ooze glistening and gleaming in the
sunlight,--a picture of rare sentiment and artistic refinement;--the
other is a waterfall by Nesfield,--a dreamy, careless, wayward plunge
of waters over ledge after ledge of massive rock, the merry cascade
enveloping itself in a robe of spray and mist, on the skirt of which
flashes the faintest vision of a rainbow, which wavers and flits,
almost, as you look at it, while the jets of foam plash up from the pool
at the foot of the fall, a tranquil pause of the waters i