1899] Watts Paints My Portrait 315 



was going out, a rather good looking fellow in a pot hat, whom at my 

 first sight I took to be a superior mechanic. 



" lotJi March. — By early train to Guildford to sit to Watts. (It had 

 been arranged for me by Madeline Wyndham that Watts should do 

 my portrait, a special favour he accorded her in deference to their 

 long friendship.) The sittings were to be at his house, about three 

 miles off by the Hogsback, an ornamental, not too ornamented cottage 

 of the usual Victorian kind, which he has christened ' Limnerslease,' 

 much to his friends' amusement, Cockerel tells me. Burne-Jones used 

 to call it ' Dauber's Den,' ' Painter's Palette,' and other nicknames. The 

 old man, well and alert, went to work at once on me, talking without 

 interruption the whole time, and sometimes, finding me a good listener, 

 with eloquence, though he complained of having been unable all his life 

 to hit the right word in conversation, or even in writing. He is by 

 nature, he says, a poet, but without the gift of expressing himself 

 in any form of words. That is why he has worked all his life to 

 express himself in colour, which after all he can only do imperfectly. 

 He cares for his art, and desires to do it well, but principally as a 

 means to his end of giving form to his ideas. He also wished to make 

 these ideas intelligible to the widest circle of disciples, and for this 

 reason he has refused to connect his art with any special epoch or any 

 special creed. His figures are ideal figures, which will suit all ages 

 and all beliefs. He once received a letter from a woman in Australia, 

 who wrote to tell him that as a girl in Manchester she had found life 

 so hard, she had intended to die, but by accident had seen a photograph 

 of his ' Love and Death,' which had consoled her, and now she was 

 married, and prosperous, and happy. She kept the photograph always 

 hanging in front of her bed. This he said was a greater satisfaction 

 to him than any success he had had merely as a painter. 



" To some extent he blames Burne-Jones for being too much a man 

 of one age. He (Burne-Jones) had locked himself up in the four- 

 teenth century and had stayed there. Except for this he spoke warmly 

 of him and of his charming qualities. He told how he had set Burne- 

 Jones once on horseback at Little Holland House, starting him to canter 

 round a ride he had made there, but he forgot some hurdles which 

 had been put up and poor Burne-Jones fell off, nor would he ever be 

 persuaded to mount again. Of Morris, he spoke with less enthusiasm, 

 and I fancy there was a coolness between them in later years, though 

 formerly he had seen much of them both. His heroes are Ruskin, 

 Carlyle, and Rossetti, and he quoted ' The lost days of my Life ' as the 

 finest of all Sonnets, an opinion which has long been mine. He does 

 not think very highly of Rossetti as a painter, rather as a poet. Millais 

 and Leighton were his two special friends among artists, and how 

 many charming and beautiful women! He spoke more than once of 



