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October 30, 1885 J THE PHOTOGRAPHIC NEWS. Inhesitating fashion ? Was there not even the faintest touch of timidity and tremulousness about the delicate affir—a bashful looking down and away from, rather than a bending forward and looking up into the face of the young man? I confess this is not my conception of the poet’s heroine or her story. The photography is particu larly good. Fig. 8 is a pen-and-ink jotting from another of Mr. R. Slingsby’s picturesque and admirably photographed sea side subjects. The figures are posed in a simple and j natural, yet thoroughly artistic, way, without any apparent I effort, the subjects appearing to have been caught unconsciously by the lens, rather than deliberately pre- I pared for it, which is just the idea they should convey. I have, by the bye, only sketched two figuret from the picture. Fig. 9, another thumb-nail jotting, is from Mr. J. Byrne’s collection of ladies in drawing-room costumes, for which he has been awarded a medal. The posing is varied, i and, on the whole, fairly good; but some of the figures have the arms terribly and awkwardly ill-placed. With this sketch J give one of my skeleton maps, A, to show the ungraceful angularity of one arm, and in fig 10 similar black lines emphasize the same fault in another portrait (see A and B). A similar defect, in a slight degree, mars the delightful portraits of Mrs. Scroop Bernard and child, one of the most admired and beautiful photographs in the collection, as I have shown in the leading lines of the partially foreshortened arm and hand. But the greatest defect in this picture is the thoroughly inartistic character of the background. It is so flat, so little indicative of surrounding space and air, so weak and ineffective in its light and shade, giving a poor, common place effect to what might well have been one of the most forcibly attractive and charming pictures in the Exhibition. In the hands of Mr. H. I’. Robinson, I can easily imagine that such happily secured and sympathetic models would N * i % Il have produced a very superior production—a picture richer in colour, bolder in relief, rounder and more forcible in modelling, &c., &c.—without losing any of those tender and delicate effects of feeling and expression which now constitute the photograph’s best features. The plant in