QUEEN VICTORIA
It must have been at Villa de’ Franchi that my father related to me a
tragedy which had profoundly moved England in the year 1842, and he
laughingly encouraged me to paint it when I should be grown up. The
Diary says: “We are now at war with poor Shere Ali, and this new Afghan
War revived for me the idea of the tragedy of ‘42, namely, Dr. Brydon
reaching Jellalabad, weary and fainting, on his dying horse, the sole
survivor, as was then thought, from our disaster in the Cabul passes....
Here I am, on 1st March, 1879, not doing badly with the picture. I think
it is well painted, and I hope poetical. But I have had the darkest
winter I can remember, and lost nearly all January by the succession of
fogs which have accompanied this long frost. Will sailed under orders
for the Cape last Friday, February 28th. Our terrible defeat at Isandula
has caused the greatest commotion here, and regiments are being poured
out of England to Zululand in a fleet of transports; and now staff
officers are being selected for posts of great responsibility out there,
and amongst these is Colonel Butler, A.A.G. to General Clifford.
“_March 16th, 1879._--I am beginning to show my picture. Scarcely
anything is talked of still but the fighting in Zululand and the
incapacity of that poor unfortunate Lord Chelmsford, whom Government
keeps telling they will continue to trust in his supreme post of
Commander-in-Chief, though he would evidently be thankful to be relieved
of an anxiety which his nervous temperament and susceptible nature must
make unbearable. What magnificent subjects for pictures the ‘Defence of
Rorke’s Drift’ will furnish. When we get full details I shall be much
tempted to paint some episode of that courageous achievement which has
shed balm on the aching wound of Isandula. But the temptation will have
to be very strong to make me break my rule of not painting contemporary
subjects. I like to mature my themes.
“Studio Sunday. At last, at last! After three years of disappointment
another Academy Studio Show has come, and that very brightly and
successfully. I have called the Afghan picture ‘The Remnants of an
Army.’ I had the Irish picture to show also, by permission of Whitehead,
‘’Listed for the Connaught Rangers.’ From one till six to-day people
poured in. My studio was got up quite charmingly with curtains and
screens, and with wild beast skins disposed on the floor, and my arms
and armour furbished up. The two pictures came out well, and both
appeared to ‘take.’ However, not much value can be attached to to-day’s
praises to my face. But I must not let Elmore’s (R.A.) tribute to the
‘Remnants of an Army’ go unrecorded. ‘It is impossible to look at that
man’s face unmoved,’ and his eyes were positively dimmed! I have heard
it said that no one was ever known to shed tears before a picture. On
reading a book, on hearing music, yes, but not on seeing a painting.
Well! that is not true, as I have proved more than once. I can’t resist
telling here of a pathetic man who came to me to say, ‘I had a wet eye
when I saw your picture!’ He had one eye brown and the other blue, and
I almost asked, ‘Which, the brown or the blue?’ It is often so difficult
to know what to answer appreciatively to enthusiastic and unexpected
praise!
“Varnishing Day. A long and cheery day in those rooms of happy memory at
Burlington House. Both my pictures are well hung and look well, and
congratulations flowed in.” A few days later: “Alice and I to the
Private View at that fascinating Burlington House, so fascinating when
one’s works are well placed! The Press is treating me very well. No
subsidised puffs _here_, so I enjoy these critiques. The Academy has
received me back with open arms, and the members are very nice to me,
some of them expressing their hope that I am pleased with the positions
of my pictures, and several of them speaking quite openly about their
determination to vote for me at the next election.”
The Fine Art Society bought the Afghan subject of which they published a
very faithful engraving, and it is now at the Tate Gallery. It is a
comfort to me to know that nearly all my principal works are either in
the keeping of my Sovereign or in public galleries, and not changing
hands among private collectors.
I spent much of a cool, if rainy, summer at Edenbridge, in Kent, taking
a rose bower of a cottage there, my parents with me. There we heard in
the papers the dreadful news of the Prince Imperial’s death. Then
followed a hasty line from my husband, written in a fury of indignation
from Natal, at the sacrifice of “the last of the Napoleons.” When he
returned at long last from the deplorable Zulu War, followed by the
Sekukuni Campaign, the poor Empress Eugénie sent for him to Camden
Place, and during a long and most painful interview she asked for all
details, her tears flowing all the time, and in her open way letting all
her sorrow loose in paroxysms of grief. He had managed the funeral and
embarkation at Durban. The pall was covered with artificial violets
which he had asked the nuns there to make, at high pressure, and he
subsequently described to me the impressive sight of the _cortège_ as it
wound down the hill to the port off Durban, in the afternoon sunshine.
At little Edenbridge I was busy making studies of any grey horses I
could find, as I had already begun my charge of the Scots Greys at
Waterloo at my studio. That charge I called “Scotland for Ever,” and I
owe the subject to an impulse I received that season from the Private
View at the Grosvenor Gallery, now extinct. The Grosvenor was the home
of the “Æsthetes” of the period, whose sometimes unwholesome productions
preceded those of our modern “Impressionists.” I felt myself getting
more and more annoyed while perambulating those rooms, and to such a
point of exasperation was I impelled that I fairly fled and, breathing
the honest air of Bond Street, took a hansom to my studio. There I
pinned a 7-foot sheet of brown paper on an old canvas and, with a piece
of charcoal and a piece of white chalk, flung the charge of “The Greys”
upon it. Dr. Pollard, who still looked in during my husband’s absences
as he used to do in my maiden days to see that all was well with me,
found me in a surprising mood.
On returning from my _villeggiatura_ in Kent with my parents I took up
again the painting of this charge, and one day the Keeper of the Queen’s
Privy Purse, Sir Henry Ponsonby, called at the studio to ask me if I
would paint a picture for Her Majesty, the subject to be taken from a
war of her own reign.
Of course, I said “Yes,” and gladly welcomed the honour, but being a
slow worker, I saw that “Scotland for Ever!” must be put aside if the
Queen’s picture was to be ready for the next Academy.
Every one was still hurrahing over the defence of “Rorke’s Drift” in
Zululand as though it had been a second Waterloo. My friends (not my
parents) urged and urged. I demurred, because it was against my
principles to paint a conflict. In the “Greys” the enemy was not shown,
here our men would have to be represented at grips with the foe. No, I
put that subject aside and proposed one that I felt and saw in my mind’s
eye most vividly. I proposed this to the Queen--the finding of the dead
Prince Imperial and the bearing of his body from the scene of his heroic
death on the lances of the 17th Lancers. Her Majesty sent me word that
she approved, to my great relief. I began planning that most impressive
composition. Then I got a message to say the Queen thought it better not
to paint the subject. What was to be done? The Crimea was exhausted.
Afghanistan? But I was compelled by clamour to choose the popular
Rorke’s Drift; so, characteristically, when I yielded I threw all my
energies into the undertaking.
When the 24th Regiment, now the South Wales Borderers, who in that fight
saved Natal, came home, some of the principal heroes were first summoned
to Windsor and then sent on to me, and as soon as I could get down to
Portsmouth, where the 24th were quartered, I undertook to make all the
studies from life necessary for the big picture there. Nothing that the
officers of that regiment and the staff could possibly do to help me was
neglected. They even had a representation of the fight acted by the men
who took part in it, dressed in the uniforms they wore on that awful
night. Of course, the result was that I reproduced the event as nearly
to the life as possible, but from the soldier’s point of view--I may say
the _private’s_ point of view--not mine, as the principal witnesses were
from the ranks. To be as true to facts as possible I purposely withdrew
my own view of the thing. What caused the great difficulty I had to
grapple with was the fact that the whole mass of those fighting figures
was illuminated by firelight from the burning hospital. Firelight
transforms colours in an extraordinary way which you hardly realise till
you have to reproduce the thing in paint.
The Zulus were a great difficulty. I had them in the composition in dark
masses, rather swallowed up in the shade, but for one salient figure
grasping a soldier’s bayonet to twist it off the rifle, as was done by
many of those heroic savages. My excellent Dr. Pollard got me a sort of
Zulu as model from a show in London. It was unfortunate that a fog came
down the day he was brought to my studio, so that at one time I could
see nothing of my dusky savage but the whites of his eyes and his teeth.
I hope I may never have to go through such troubles again!
When the picture was in its pale, shallow, early stage, the Queen, who
was deeply interested in its progress, wished to see it, and me. So to
Windsor I took it. The Ponsonbys escorted me to the Great Gallery, where
I beheld my production, looking its palest, meanest, and flattest,
installed on an easel, with two lords bending over it--one of them Lord
Beaconsfield.
Exeunt the two lords, right, through a dark side door. Enter the Queen,
left. Prince Leopold, Duchess of Argyll, Princess Beatrice and others
grouped round the easel, centre. The Queen came up to me and placed her
plump little hand in mine after I had curtseyed, and I was counselled to
give Her Majesty the description of every figure. She spoke very kindly
in a very deep, guttural voice, and showed so much emotion that I
thought her all too kind, shrinking now and then as I spoke of the
wounds, etc. She told me how she had found my husband lying at Netley
Hospital after Ashanti, apparently near his end, and spoke with warmth
of his services in that campaign. She did not leave us until I had
explained every figure, even the most distant. She knew all by name, for
I had managed to show, in that scuffle, all the V.C.’s and other
conspicuous actors in the drama, the survivors having already been
presented to her. Majors Chard and Bromhead were sufficiently
recognisable in the centre, for I had had them both for their portraits.
The Academicians put “The Defence of Rorke’s Drift” in the Lecture Room
of unhappy “Quatre Bras” memory, no doubt for the same reason they gave
in the case of that picture. Yes, there was a great crush before it, but
I was not satisfied as to its effect in that poor light. It is now with
“The Roll Call” at St. James’s Palace. I learnt later how very, very
pleased the Queen was with her commission, and that one day at Windsor,
wishing to show it to some friends, the twilight deepening, she showed
so much appreciation that she took a pair of candlesticks and held them
up at the full stretch of her arms to light the picture. I like to see
in my mind’s eye that Rembrandtesque effect, with the principal figure
in the group our Queen. She wanted me to paint her two other subjects,
but, somehow, that never came off.