orange boughs, was falling
ignominiously without having time to open his wings. The latter was a
curious example of what I have described as abstraction of color.
Strictly true or possible it was not; a vintage is usually a dusty and
dim-looking procedure; but there were poetry and feeling in Mr. Uwins's
idealization of the sombre black of the veritable grape into a luscious
ultramarine purple, glowing among the green leaves like so much painted
glass. The figures were bright and graceful in the extreme and most
happily grouped. Little else that could be called color was to be seen
upon the walls of the Exhibition, with the exception of the smaller
works of Mr. Etty. Of these, the single head, "Morning Prayer," (No.
25.), and the "Still Life" (No. 73.), deserved, allowing for their
peculiar aim, the highest praise. The larger subjects, more especially
the St. John, were wanting in the merits peculiar to the painter; and in
other respects it is alike painful and useless to allude to them. A very
important and valuable work of Mr. Harding was placed, as usual, where
its merits could be but ill seen, and where its chief fault, a
feebleness of color in the principal light on the distant hills, was
apparent. It was one of the very few views of the year which were
transcripts, nearly without exaggeration, of the features of the
localities.

Among the less conspicuous landscapes, Mr. W. E. Dighton's "Hay Meadow
Corner" deserved especial notice; it was at once vigorous, fresh,
faithful, and unpretending, the management of the distance most
ingenious, and the painting of the foreground, with the single exception
of Mr. Mulready's above noticed, unquestionably the best in the room. I
have before had occasion to notice a picture by this artist, "A Hayfield
in a Shower," exhibited in the British Institution in 1847, and this
year (1848) in the Scottish Academy, whose sky, in qualities of rainy,
shattered, transparent grey, I have seldom seen equalled; nor the mist
of its distance, expressive alike of previous heat and present heat of
rain. I look with much interest for other works by this painter.

A hurried visit to Scotland in the spring of this year, while it
enables the writer to acknowledge the ardor and genius manifested in
very many of the works exhibited in the Scottish Academy, cannot be
considered as furnishing him with sufficient grounds for specific
criticism. He cannot, however, err in testifying his concurrence in t