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 the conception. Yet here I would dwell rather on two pictures
which show the splendid simplicity and directness of his strength, the
one a portrait of himself, the other that of a little child called
Dorothy, who has all that sweet gravity and look of candour which we like
to associate with that old-fashioned name: a child with bright rippling
hair, tangled like floss silk, open brown eyes and flower-like mouth;
dressed in faded claret, with little lace about the neck and throat,
toned down to a delicate grey--the hands simply clasped before her. This
is the picture; as truthful and lovely as any of those Brignoli children
which Vandyke has painted in Genoa. Nor is his own picture of
himself--styled in the catalogue merely A Portrait--less wonderful,
especially the luminous treatment of the various shades of black as shown