e sun than any other
picture in the room, and its draperies having been, in great part,
painted in blue, are now mere patches of the color of starch; the
scene is also very imperfectly conceived. The twenty-one figures,
including Christ and his Disciples, very ill represent a crowd of
seven thousand; still less is the marvel of the miracle expressed by
perfect ease and rest of the reclining figures in the foreground, who
do not so much as look surprised; considered merely as reclining
figures, and as pieces of effect in half light, they have once been
fine. The landscape, which represents the slope of a woody hill, has a
very grand and far-away look. Behind it is a great space of streaky
sky, almost prismatic in color, rosy and golden clouds covering up its
blue, and some fine vigorous trees thrown against it; painted in about
ten minutes each, however, by curly touches of the brush, and looking
rather more like seaweed than foliage.

17. _Resurrection of Lazarus._ Very strangely, and not impressively
conceived. Christ is half reclining, half sitting, at the bottom of
the picture, while Lazarus is disencumbered of his grave-clothes at
the top of it; the scene being the side of a rocky hill, and the mouth
of the tomb probably once visible in the shadow on the left; but all
that is now discernible is a man having his limbs unbound, as if
Christ were merely ordering a prisoner to be loosed. There appears
neither awe nor agitation, nor even much astonishment, in any of the
figures of the group; but the picture is more vigorous than any of the
three last mentioned, and the upper part of it is quite worthy of the
master, especially its noble fig-tree and laurel, which he has
painted, in one of his usual fits of caprice, as carefully as that in
the "Resurrection of Christ," opposite. Perhaps he has some meaning in
this; he may have been thinking of the verse, "Behold the fig-tree,
and all the trees; when they now shoot forth," &c. In the present
instance, the leaves are dark only, and have no golden veins. The
uppermost figures also come dark against the sky, and would form a
precipitous mass, like a piece of the rock itself, but that they are
broken in upon by one of the limbs of Lazarus, bandaged and in full
light, which, to my feeling, sadly injures the picture, both as a
disagreeable object, and a light in the wrong plac