WOMAN IN ART
Congo, of Waterloo, and fight those bloody battles again on canvas, serving their purpose to art, to England, and the world, "Lest we forget."
In Italy, as a young girl, she painted with one Bellucci, an excellent draughtsman. She worked incessantly; even when the heat drove the master the country, the pupil remained in Florence and in the coolness of the church Santissima Annunziata she copied frescoes of Andrea del Sarto. So great was her enthusiasm that she arose at dawn and breakfasted alone, that she might have all the time possible for work.
Finishing her student work, she returned to England and opened a studio of her own, sending to the Academy "The Visitation." It came back to her with a hole in the canvas. For three consecutive years her work was rejected, but she kept on painting.
About that time an incident of the Franco-Prussian War absorbed her mind and brush, resulting in the painting called "Missing." Nothing daunted, she sent that also to the Academy. It was accepted, but hung "up and out of sight."
Just then a manufacturer from the north gave her an order for a picture of the Crimea for an hundred pounds ($599). For this she painted a subject long in her mind, "The Roll Call," after an engagement in the Crimea. The poor fellows who were left are massed together in battered and bandaged condition to answer to their names. Sadness and woe are depicted in their faces as the missing were called, who never again would answer, "Here."
The artist's father built a rough studio on the Isle of Wight, where she made studies for that subject; then she took a studio in South Kensington and painted the picture that made her great. Sending in the picture for the annual exhibition, she returned to her home on the Isle of Wight.
Here is a quotation from the letter she received from the Chairman of the Hanging Committee:
"I may tell you with what pleasure I greeted the picture when it came before me for judgment. I was so struck with the excellence of the work that I proposed to take off our hats and give it and you—though personally unknown to me—a round of huzzas, which was done. I shall do all I can to have it well hung on our walls."
Edward VII, at that time Prince of Wales, predicted a great future for the artist. The Duke of Cambridge, then Commander-in-Chief of the British forces, said: "It is astonishing to me how any young lady should have been able to grasp the specialty of soldiers under the circumstances delineated in that picture,
89
