The Exhibition of Miniatures at South Kensington. 179 



visitors will remember the picture's appearance in. the Academy 

 exhibition of some seven or eight years ago. It is a regular 

 portrait-picture subject, with three figures — the painter, his 

 wife seated on a donkey, and the Italian donkey-boy — and a 

 landscape background. We have already assigned some 

 reasons for thinking that the simple conception of miniature art 

 in its earlier years was the truer one ; but this picture by Mr. 

 Wells may fairly be cited by opponents as an argument to the 

 contrary. It makes us hope, at any rate, that the condition of 

 the art will, within Mr. Wells's lifetime, again become such as 

 to permit of his devoting to it a considerable share of his time 

 and abilities. The miniature here before us is in every way 

 interesting ; as, besides being a leading specimen of the art in 

 its latest range, it contains true and valuable portraiture, not 

 only of the artist himself, but of his wife, a painter of quite 

 singular genius among women, snatched away, by early death, 

 from a career which could not but have been distinguished, and 

 eminently encouraging to her sister-practitioners in the art. 



MISCELLANEOUS PORTRAITS, CONTEMPORARY OR QUASI CON- 

 TEMPORARY. 



The Princess Royal, as a child, 1845, byRoss; offers an elegant 

 example of this excellent miniaturist. 



Lady Banks, by the same, is also a fine specimen of the 

 painter, who has here had as subject the extreme of healthy, 

 almost rustic, comeliness in a lady. 



The Countess of Shaftesbury (then Lady Ashley), about 

 1884, by the same, is a very good specimen, pure and un- 

 laboured, with a tinge, in point of expression, of the then still 

 partly dominant style of Lawrence. 



Two Children of Mrs. Pollen, by the same, is the well-known 

 and admired miniature in which a girl clasps her little brother 

 round the neck. While delicate in flesh-painting, there is rather 

 too decided a touch of Lawrence in the feeling of the group. 



The Artist's Children, by Linnell, sen., 1 824. The present 

 generation of exhibition-visitors has almost forgotten that 

 Linnell, one of their most cherished artists as a landscapist, 

 was originally a portrait-painter. This miniature, in which 

 the children are revelling in the society of a kitten, is re- 

 markable for its rounded relief, the extreme reverse of the old 

 school of miniature art. It has conspicuous merit notwith- 

 standing. 



The Countess of Chesterfield and Lady Evelyn Stanhope, by 

 Thorburn. We all remember the impression which Thorburn's 

 large miniatures, highly wrought in execution and in their 

 feeling for beauty and elegance, used to produce year after 



