131. "MANY HAPPY RETURNS OF THE DAY." (W. P. Frith. R. A)

The Royal Academy Exhibition 1856

A taking picture, much, it seems to me, above Mr. Frith's former standard. Note the advancing Pre-Raphaelitism in the wreath of leaves round the child's head. One is only sorry to see any fair little child having too many and too kind friends, and in so great danger of being toasted, toyed, and wreathed into selfishness and misery.

[Frith does not seem to have been duly grateful for Ruskin's qualified praise. "Ruskin's works” he writes," bristle with errors ; one of his notable ones was his saying, on the discovery of a bit of what he took for Pre-Raphaelite work in one of the worst pictures I ever painted, that I was 'at last in the right way,' or words to that effect." My Autobiography, vol. iii. p. 6.]