A CATHOLIC ARTIST'S WORK.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 176, 11 August 1876, Page 15

A CATHOLIC ARTIST'S WORK.

% — ++ — The London 'Weekly Register' says: "A Catholic artist of the highest genius, Miss Elizabeth Thompson, already famous as the painter of ' The Holl Call * and ' Quatre Bras,' has now on view in London, at 148 New Bond street, what we do not hesitate to call, at once, her masterpiece. The subject of this noble work of art is the most splendid piece of heroism in the history of modern warfare. It is that charge of the Light Brigade which has already, in our time, inspired both the poet and the annalist. Alexander Kinglake in describing it, has risen to the height of Plutarch, while Alfred Tennyson has embalmed the memory of it in the noblest war-song given to the world since Campbell penned his ' Hohenlinden. 1 Quite of a piece with the prose of Kinglake and with the poetry of Tennyson is the picture just now completed by Miss Thompson. It is as pathetic and tragical a record as ever artist's hand has rendered visible on canvas, not of the " pride, pomp and circumstance " of glorious war, but of the cruelty, horror and agony of battle. The central figure upon the canvas is nothing less than a creation. It is a representation of a dismounted trooper in the costume of Lord Cardigan's horsemen stalking across the scene like an apparition, his 6word — dripping from the tip with blood— yet grasped convulsively in his right hand, hie eyep glaring in vacancy like those of one utterly dazed and bewildered, the bloody finger marks all over his breast of the Russian foes who have grappled with him, and whom he has shaken off— dead, There is the

lust of homicide in hie every lineament — in the clenched- jaws and dilated nostrils, and contracted brows-— as he moves on, blind to all aronnd him, and deaf to the voices of the comrades who are'calling to him to stop. The scene represented it that of the return to the heights, after all is over, of the shattered remnant of the Six Hundred, vrho have come back as ' from the jaws of death/ or ' from the mouth of hell.' The picture is full of incident. The horses are as wonderfully painted as the men. It is significant of the havoc caused in this terrible feat of arms among the officers of the Light Cavalry that all the survivors here portrayed are either non-commissioned officers or troopers. The work is conspicuously a work of genius, and one that marks a distinct advance in the career so suddenly opened, only three years ago, before the great artist."