Читать книгу The Life of Sir William Quiller Orchardson - Hilda Orchardson Gray - Страница 28
Well Borders, Boy, how are you living? Dear Sir, how do you do? I’m writing here and can’t help giving My compliments to you. The blocks come tumbling in apace Good Lord how you must suffer! The same old drawings still to face Perhaps from some new duffer. And Mr. Graves, I hope, is well And still can take his coffee, From any Turk he’d take the bell And wear it as a trophy. How is that small pecker Smith Who dotes on dots mysterious? Round ones or square that prove with pith [He feels] they’re rather serious. But in your ear how is my dear? Dear Emily, I mean? Whene’er I see her far or near I wish that I had never been. Now, my dear boy, do tie up Cupid I’m certain else to get entangled ...
ОглавлениеAnd what of work during all these years? There is no mention of it in his letters—or is there once?—nor any record that I can find. Yet, that he worked, and worked hard, is evident, for from 1848 to 1863 he was well represented at the R.S.A., except in 1850 and 1857. Whether he did not send in those years or whether his work was rejected I am unable to say; 1857 was probably the year he travelled in Germany and Holland, so that he may have forgotten to paint a picture for a definite date, and in 1850 he was still only a boy of nineteen.
I do not intend to offer any criticism of my Father’s work; I love it all as I love the man; neither of them quite perfect, but both very nearly so. I should like, however, to point out that as the boy is father to the man, so is the early tentative work but the forerunner of the later unhesitating work; that, though the style increased in breadth, in force, in beauty, yet that his last work is painted “in the same style” as his first. The illustrations will, I hope, show something of this.
Mr McKay, the landscape painter and for long Secretary and Librarian at the Royal Scottish Academy, kindly sent me a list of the pictures W. Q. O. exhibited at the R.S.A. Curiously enough, the “Portrait of the Misses Callander, Wards of the Duke of Atholl,” is not on the list, but Mr McKay writes:
“His portraits on one canvas of two sisters, wards of some ducal personage, had a success in the R.S.A. at this time. Many years later Sir George Reid scarcely believed in its existence, and one day asked Orchardson about it. ‘Oh, that picture!’ said he, laughing. ‘Well, some little time after the close of the exhibition I had a sharp note from the Secretary asking me to have it removed from the galleries where it had been left derelict in the hope, perhaps, that the ladies or their ducal guardian might claim it. As, however, neither had done so, there was nothing left for the artist to do but to ask his agent to remove the picture. Some little time afterwards my agent wrote informing me that there had been a fire in his premises in which the picture had perished.’ ”
[1] McKay, R.S.A.
[2] Probably MacWhirter.
[3] To greet: Anglicé, to weep.
