[Blackwood for July which has]
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BLACKWOOD,1 for July which has been received from the publishers, Leonard Scott and Co.2 79 Fulton street, is a good number and has its usual quote of interesting reading matter. The titles of the articles are as follows: “The Soldier and the Surgeon,” the “Poorbeah Mutiny,” “What will he do with it?” “A plea for the Principalities,” “My First and Last novel,” “The Great Imposture,” “Mr. Duskey’s Opinion on Art.” The articles are, however, too exclusively English in their character this week to admit of our extracting, at any length. From Mr. Duskey’s Opinion on Art, however, we clip a bit of quiet satire on the puritanism of some painters of the modern school:
No. 520. "Venus and Adonis" (D. Corum, R. A.)—The great charm for me in this picture is the total absence of all sensual imagination in its treatment. The goddess, purified from all taint of earth-born passion, with the immortal light of divine friendship beaming in her lustrous eyes, invites the relunctant youth to seat himself beside her on the glowing couch of amaranths and asphodels (with some gentianella and one or two ragged robins skillfully introduced), which have sprung responsively to the pressure of her roseate feet; while, in the distance, the fatal boar is seen whetting against the trunk of a blackthorn in full blossom the remorseless tusks which are shortly to be imbued in the stream of the boy's young life. A similar purity of thought distinguishes "Sussannah and the Elders," by the same artist, and quite marks a new epoch in art. The Elders, grave men of most reverend appearance, approached the beautiful women in her bath, evidently for the purpose of studying the flowing outline of her form and the delicate articulations of her joints (the ankles are especially well drawn.) Lovers of exalted art, they came with words of courteous greeting on their lips, to study in leisure and privacy the combinations of lines and gradations of flesh color with which Nature in her most perfect efforts delights to exercise the reasoning powers of man; while the matron, "clothed in chastity," calmly awaits their coming. The "Satyrs and Nymphs Dancing," by the same band, is equally removed from the gross impurity which the subject would have derived from the licentious Poussin, aud the hideous immorality of a modern quadrille. "Potiphar's Wife" is another illustrious instance of the power of Mr. D. Corum to give new life to old subjects. The wife of the great Egyptian noble holds in her hand a roll of papyrus covered with specimens of early Egyptian art, to which she seeks to direct Joseph's attention (by the by, the style of these drawings, especially the man in profile with two eyes, belongs to the time of the later Pharaohs, and not to the pre-Mosaic period); but without success, for the youth, in whose countenance the struggle between the curiousity and bashfulness is exhibited in a very remarkable manner, turns resolutely away from his kind instructress. Altogether the treatment of the whole of these works reminds me strongly of the manner of Fra Puritano.
Notes:
1. Blackwood's Magazine, or Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, was a monthly magazine created by William Blackwood in 1817. Though it was published in Scotland it quickly attracted a wide readership in Great Britain and the U.S., especially for its fiction offerings. For more information, see David Finkelstein, The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Age? (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). [back]
2. Leonard Scott & Co. was a New York publishing company created by Leonard Scott (1810–1895) that focused on reprinting British magazines. [back]