* FREDERIC GOODALL, the son, is a painter of history and genre. Ile was born iu London in September 1822. llis studies in art have been exclusively directed by hie father; aud so early had young Goodall acquired mastery over his pencil, that when only fourteen he received commissions to make drawings of Lambeth Palace, and Willesden church, and was employed by B. Hawes, Esq., M.P., to make a series of drawings of the Thames Tunnel in its working state. His studies in the tunnel furnished him with materials for his first oil picture, 'Finding the Dead Body of a Miner by Torchlight,' which he corn mencod at the age of fifteen, and for which tho Society of Arts awarded' him the large silver medal. During the summers of 1838.42, he made sketching excursions in Normandy and Brittany, and his studies there supplied him with aubjecta of numerous pictures, representing chiefly the peasant life of those countries. The first of these, • French Soldiers Playing at Cards in a Cabaret,' appeared (as his first painting there) in the exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1839. Others of the series were—' Entering and Leaving Church ; " The Christening ; ' Veteran of the Old Guard Describing his Battles;' The Fair of Foueres ;" Tired Soldier ; " Rustic Music ; " La Rho du Manage;' ' The Wounded Soldier Returned to his Family;' ' The Conscript ; ' Going to Vespers.' In 1844 Mr. Goodall was led to vary his style by a visit to Ireland, among the results of which were his 'Fairy Struck Child;' ' Irish Courtship;' ' Irish Piper,' and The Departure of the Emigrant Ship : ' on the whole, perhaps these Irish pictures are the most charecteristio which he has painted. Four or five years later
Mr. Goodall commenced painting English subjects, and to these his practice has been since chiefly confined. One of the first and best of his English pictures was the Village Festival,' exhibited in 1847, and purchased by Mr. Vernon, for presentation, with the rest of his fine collection, to the nation. Mr. Goodall'a subsequent pictures have been —'Hunt the Slipper' (1849); 'Woodman's Home' (1850); 'Raising the May Pole' (1851); Last Load' (1852) ; 'An Episode of the Happier Days of Charles I.' (1853); 6 The Swing' (1854); The Arrest of a Peasant Royalist—Brittany, 1793' (1855); and Cranmer at the Traitors' Gate' (1856).
Mr. Goodall's success was recognised by his election as an associate of the Royal Academy in 1852, despite the growing disinclination of that always sufficiently exclusive body to admit within its ranks any painters who have not been trained in its schools. Mr. Goodall's style is pleasing and refined, and he is a careful as well as an able painter; but his progress has scarcely, it must be confessed, been as great as his early proficiency promised. His later pictures suggest the need of a somewhat more vigorous and masculine style, and a more self-reliant and independent tone of thought.