I have been highly gratified in visiting the studio of Mr. G.L.  Brown, who, as a landscape painter, is destined to take a stand second to few, since the days of Claude Lorraine.  He is now without a rival in Florence, or perhaps in Italy, and has youth, genius and a plentiful stock of the true poetic enthusiasm for his art, to work for him far greater triumphs.  His Italian landscapes have that golden mellowness and transparency of atmosphere which give such a charm to the real scenes, and one would think he used on his pallette, in addition to the more substantial colors, condensed air and sunlight and the liquid crystal of streams.  He has wooed Nature like a lover, and she has not withheld her sympathy.  She has taught him how to raise and curve her trees, load their boughs with foliage, and spread underneath them the broad, cool shadows—­to pile up the shattered crag, and steep the long mountain range in the haze of alluring distance.

He has now nearly finished, a large painting of “Christ Preaching in the Wilderness,” which is of surprising beauty.  You look upon one of the fairest scenes of Judea.  In front, the rude multitude are grouped on one side, in the edge of a magnificent forest; on the other side, towers up a rough wall of rock and foliage that stretches back into the distance, where some grand blue mountains are piled against the sky, and a beautiful stream, winding through the middle of the picture, slides away out of the foreground.  Just emerging from the shade of one of the cliffs, is the benign figure of the Saviour, with the warm light which breaks from behind the trees, falling around him as he advances.  There is a smaller picture of the “Shipwreck of St. Paul,” in which he shows equal skill in painting a troubled sea and breaking storm.  He is one of the young artists from whom we have most to hope.

I have been extremely interested in looking over a great number of sketches made by Mr. Kellogg, of Cincinnati, during a tour through Egypt, Arabia Petraea and Palestine.  He visited many places out of the general route of travelers, and beside the great number of landscape views, brought away many sketches of the characters and costumes of the Orient.  From some of these he has commenced paintings, which, as his genius is equal to his practice, will be of no ordinary value.  Indeed, some of these must give him at once an established reputation in America.  In Constantinople, where he resided several months, he enjoyed peculiar advantges for the exercise of his art, through the favor and influence of Mr. Carr, the American, and Sir Stratford Canning, the British Minister.  I saw a splendid diamond cup, presented to him by Riza Pacha, the late Grand Vizier.  The sketches he brought from thence and from the valleys of Phrygia and the mountain solitudes of old Olympus, are of great interest and value.  Among his later paintings, I might mention an angel, whose countenance beams with a rapt and glorious beauty.  A divine light shines through all the features and heightens the glow of adoration to an expression all spiritual and immortal.  If Mr. Kellogg will give us a few more of these heavenly conceptions, we will place him on a pedestal, little lower than that of Guido.