International Exhibition, 1862.
No. 4 Sculpture: – Foreign Schools
by J. Beaverinton Atkinson
Let us hope that the earnest pursuit after truth may not stop here. The time will come, we feel persuaded, when the warp and the woof of the finest gossamer shall be transcribed, thread by thread, in Carrara stone! Yet must it be admitted that a loving trust in simple nature has obtained, in the present Exhibition, signal victory. Magni's ‘Reading Girl,’ truthful not only to the hem of a garment, to the turned leaf of the book, and the torn rushes from the bottom of cottage chair, but earnest as if the whole soul drank of the poetry and was filled, moves with a heartfelt pathos. Reality calls to its illusive aid the testimony of minutest circumstance, which steals little by little upon eye and mind, till attention is riveted beyond escape. The girl reads, and among the crowd of spectators every voice is hushed. Tread softly, break not rudely on her reverie. Listen! perchance she speaks. It were hypercritical to object that life here is humble, that the types are of the commonest. ‘The Dying Gladiator’ was a Gallic slave, yet is the work among the most noble even of classic times. ‘The Reading Girl’ is a peasant or cottager, doubtless far beneath, in scale of being, a Venus, a Juno, or a Diana; the treatment, moreover, as we have shown, is in no way ideal or exalted, and thus let us admit that the work is genre, and little more —a class, doubtless, subordinate to the highest. Yet, after its own kind, is this Reading Girl first-rate, as the judgment of the multitude both in Florence and in London has, in no measured or stinted terms, already pronounced.
No. 4 Sculpture: – Foreign Schools, International Exhibition, 1862, The Art-journal. v.24 1862.