Читать книгу The Life of Sir William Quiller Orchardson - Hilda Orchardson Gray - Страница 5

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The first time Sir David saw Orchardson was at a banquet in Edinburgh, given by the Royal Scottish Academy.

When Orchardson was announced, he entered slowly and deliberately, two stairs at a time. Some years after Sir David remarked to Orchardson that he had thought then he looked more like an Austrian officer than an artist.

“How strange you should say that,” replied Orchardson. “My mother was an Austrian.”

Sir David was invited frequently to Orchardson’s studio. On one occasion Orchardson was engaged on his picture “Mme Récamier” and on “Napoleon at St. Helena.” Sir David visited the studio the day before pictures had to be sent in to the Academy. Orchardson was in an exhausted condition and stopped for a few minutes to rest during tea. Sir David was struck by his overgrown hair, which spread across his forehead like a wreath. On each occasion also he found parts of the canvas untouched—an important head as a white egg,^[1] whilst the draperies belonging to the figure were completed and the picture otherwise finished.

Sometimes his methods puzzled his sitters. He painted Howard Colls, the celebrated litigant, regarding the rights of Ancient Lights. This portrait was a presentation one. But the sitter, who was a great admirer of Orchardson, came in agitation to Sir David, telling him that the portrait was not getting on. All that the artist had done the first day was to draw on a piece of paper with a pointed pencil, looking from time to time at the results with a hand-mirror. The next sitting was for work on the canvas proper. At the end of the sitting Colls expressed his surprise that it had only resulted in one eye being painted. On being told that the other eye would be painted the following day he got accustomed to view the progress of the portrait as reaching completion by such stages. This was a method usually adopted by the painter and also by the Pre-Raphaelites.

Orchardson’s painting was very thin, so much so that sometimes his canvases were barely covered. But it was direct painting, luminous, and all in beautiful harmony of colour, which was very much associated with Orchardson’s own feeling for colour. In spite of this thin painting, his pictures have stood the test of time without deterioration in colour or cracking, whilst pictures painted in a much more robust pigment display have met a different fate.

Edwin Abbey, R.A., was one of his last sitters. He painted the portrait when he was practically dying and so weak that he left out one of the letters of his own signature. The picture itself is one of great beauty.

Sir David tells of an interesting episode in the painting of Orchardson’s picture, “Mrs Siddons in the Studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds.” All the different celebrities—Dr Johnson, Goldsmith, Garrick, etc., had been painted, and the picture was complete in all respects with the exception of Sir Joshua, for whom the artist had failed to get a sitter to satisfy him with regard to a likeness. Orchardson said in despair to his wife that he did not know how to get a model for Sir Joshua. She, always quick and helpful, answered, “Why not David Murray?”

This was on a Sunday, and Orchardson just crossed over from his own house to Sir David’s studio to ask when he could sit. Sir David answered, “Now.” Orchardson immediately set to work on Sir Joshua, and in two sittings the figure was complete. Sir David’s likeness to the portrait of Sir Joshua by himself had often been remarked upon by his friends.

[1] The heads being left to the last was very unusual and was owing to his being unable to find suitable models for historical personages.—H.O.G.

Devonshire House,

Mayfair,

8 August, 1928.

Dear Miss Orchardson,

I am delighted to hear you are writing your Father’s biography. He was a remarkable man, and I cherish his memory as one of the pleasant things of life. I knew him when I was very young, for, as you know, my name was Harley, and I was born in Harley Street, and “Orchardson’s” studio was only round the corner, so that I often popped in as the years rolled on, and found him busily painting, while your Mother was reading to him.

Not only was he a great artist, but he had a peculiarly fine temperament. He was very sensitive. This is manifest in all his work. A strange care and minuteness of detail. A desire to have everything exact. A very thoughtful worker. He was not in the least inclined to dash things off, and I have often seen most careful chalk drawings made (in fact, I have one or two) while planning his pictures.

More than that. I have the original little Empire dress, that he painted so often, particularly in “The First Cloud” and “A Social Eddy.” I have also the wonderful white gown worn, I think, in “The Mariage de Convenance,” besides several more robes and adornments given to me by your Mother after his death.

Delightful were the parties they used to give. Not very many, but quiet little dinners of six or eight, and, strange to say, it was your Father who, when I was writing very hard to educate two sons, once said to me:

“My dear friend, you are an artist!”

“Nonsense,” I replied.

“You are,” he said. “For it is nothing for me to draw that girl’s head on your table-cloth, because with a pencil it is easy. But for you to work in that girl’s head and all the other things on this table-cloth with red cotton means that you must be an artist, or you could not possibly do it. The red cotton is always the same thickness, and yet you manage to get the eyes and the details not only correctly, but in the actual style of work of each person who has drawn on the cloth.”

Years rolled by, and after the War—after years, in fact, of war work, and the loss of one son, followed by the loss of the second son later, also for the country—I bought a few paints and brushes and went to Spain for a little change. It was my Mother who sent me, herself an intimate friend of your Father’s. She was then an old lady of eighty, and implored me to go away and try and paint, or do something new as a relaxation from those strenuous war years with two sons at the front from early days.

I started to paint, and three weeks later, with my little sketches tied and sealed in a paper parcel, was on the way to the post office to send them to her in England when a telegram was put into my hand to say she was dead.

I have worked hard since then, and your Father’s prophecy was fulfilled, when eight years later I showed over a hundred sketches at the famous Gallerie Georges Petits in Paris. That exhibition was opened by the great Marshal Foch. It was the first time he had ever done anything of the kind, and he did it gladly, as he said, for the Mother of two sons who had fallen for their country.

Sincerely yours,

E. Alec Tweedie.