a very different
painter, which was considered a masterpiece by some critics, we find him
speaking in terms of monition: "Is it altogether too late to warn him
that he is fast becoming nothing more than an Academician?" The one
picture of the year, according to Mr. Ruskin, was the _Rescue_, by
Millais. "It is the only great picture exhibited this year," he writes,
"but this is very great." For the rest, _A Scene from As You Like It_,
by Maclise; another Shakespearean subject, the inevitable _Lear and
Cordelia_, by Herbert; and a _Beatrice_ by the then President, and we
have recalled everything that served to give the Academy of that year
its distinction in the eyes of contemporary critics. Sir Edwin Landseer,
who to the outer world was the one great fact in the art of the time,
does not appear to have exhibited in 1855.

Looking back now to that date, what one discerns chiefly is the
emergence of the Pre-Raphaelites from the more conventional multitude
that were taking up the artistic traditions of the first half of the
century. Millais, Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and their associates, count to
us, to-day, as the representatives of an earlier generation; in 1855
they still stood for all that was daring, unprecedented, and adventurous
in their art.

This newcomer, with his _Cimabue's Madonna_ in a new style, puzzled the
critics considerably. They did not know quite how to allot him in their
casual division of contemporary schools. "Landseer and Maclise we know;
and Millais and Holman Hunt; but who is Leighton?" was the tenor of
their commentary.

Meanwhile an event of great significance to English Art in this year was
happening--an exhibition of English pictures in Paris, the first of its
kind. This beginning of such international exchanges was important; it
has led up to many striking modifications of both English and French
schools since that date. It is curious that it should coincide with the
awakening to certain other foreign influences: that of the early Italian
school upon the Pre-Raphaelites, and that of the later Italian,
popularly known as "the classic school," upon Leighton and Mr. G. F.
Watts.

Of this exhibition of English pictures, which was held in the Avenue
Montaigne, M. Ernest Chesneau, a critic very sympathetic to English art,
tells us, in his admirable book on the "English School of Painting,"
that "for the French it was a revelation of a style and a school of the
very existence of which they had hi