A Wonderful Picture.

Evening Star, Issue 7432, 30 January 1888, Page 3

A Wonderful Picture.

The London correspondent of the ‘Sydney Morning Herald’ writes Mr Edwin Long, who cannot be said to have been much in evidence in what is called sensational art since his ‘Marriage Market,’ is painting a tremendous subject for the next Academy Exhibition, It is to represent the arraignment of a dead potentate before a certain body of Egyptian priests, who are to judge his life before his mummy can be allowed to be ferried across the sacred lake. The object of the trial, prepared for its long home, is set up before the judges, in presence of the woman who was its wife, and its accuser, another woman, who charges the original of the mummy with having wronged her. The wife clings about the grim figure under trial. The accuser points at it the finger of scorn. Mr Long may be expected to be at his best with a powerful dramatic incident such as this, though one can hardly think that the picture will bo one of those which admirers of his ‘ Marriage Market ’ professed they would like to live with. A popular phrase this about fine works of art —“ It is a picture one would like to live with.” ‘Punch* has burlesqued the works of art which ajsthetes were wont to say “people should strive to live up to.” Do you remember the famous blue teapot which two china maniacs, a wizened old couple, were jealous of? The old lady was nursing it. “ Let me nurse it a little now,” the old man is saying.