who wrote the Vision of
Love revealed in Sleep, and the names of Dante Rossetti and of the
Marchioness of Waterford, cannot be found in the catalogue. And so it is
to be hoped that this is not the only exhibition of paintings that we
shall see in the Grosvenor Gallery; and Sir Coutts Lindsay, in showing us
great works of art, will be most materially aiding that revival of
culture and love of beauty which in great part owes its birth to Mr.
Ruskin, and which Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Pater, and Mr. Symonds, and Mr.
Morris, and many others, are fostering and keeping alive, each in his own
peculiar fashion.

THE GROSVENOR GALLERY 1879

(Saunders' Irish Daily News, May 5, 1879.)

While the yearly exhibition of the Royal Academy may be said to present
us with the general characteristics of ordinary English art at its most
commonplace level, it is at the Grosvenor Gallery that we are enabled to
see the highest development of the modern artistic spirit as well as what
one might call its specially accentuated tendencies.

Foremost among the great works now exhibited at this gallery are Mr.
Burne-Jones's Annunciation and his four pictures illustrating the Greek
legend of Pygmalion--works of the very highest importance in our aesthetic
development as illustrative of some of the more exquisite qualities of
modern culture. In the first the Virgin Mary, a passionless, pale woman,
with that mysterious sorrow whose meaning she was so soon to learn
mirrored in her wan face, is standing, in grey drapery, by a marble
fountain, in what seems the open courtyard of an empty and silent house,
while through the branches of a tall olive tree, unseen by the Virgin's
tear-dimmed eyes, is descending the angel Gabriel with his joyful and
terrible message, not painted as Angelico loved to do, in the varied
splendour of peacock-like wings and garments of gold and crimson, but
somewhat sombre in colour, set with all the fine grace of nobly-fashioned
drapery and exquisitely ordered design. In presence of what may be
called the mediaeval spirit may be discerned both the idea and the
technique of the work, and even still more so in the four pictures of the
story of Pygmalion, where the sculptor is represented in dress and in
looks rather as a Christian St. Francis, than as a pure Greek artist in
the first morning tide of art, creating his own ideal, and worshipping
it. For delicacy and melody of colour these pictures are beyond praise,
nor