I had to solace myself with taking Phil to sit for his portrait to Edward Burne-Jones—delightful occasions when that most lovable of great men would talk of my husband and of their kindred enthusiasms, chaffing me gently as well for the “wicked travesties” of classic myths with which I tried to keep quiet the “worst of little sitters,” who would innocently ask why his standing pose was called “sitting.”
And at last Joe came home, only about a week before our son Arthur was born.
These travelling memories are a digression induced by their bearing on my husband’s first published volumes. As to his subsequent contributions to permanent literature I may mention his Papers on Art—a sequel to the Essays on Art—published in 1885.
After that, until the last years of his life, his many vocations so entirely filled every hour of the day—and often of the night—that he had no leisure for any more such ventures, excepting the publication of his verse-plays as they appeared on the stage.
And it was not until 1908 that he once more came before the book-reading public. Then he wrote his two separate volumes of personal recollections under the titles of Eminent Victorians and Coasting Bohemia; but these are of recent enough date to need no comment of mine, for they are still before the world, as is also his posthumously published volume, The Ideals of Painting.
CHAPTER VII
THE GROSVENOR AND THE NEW GALLERIES
In the autumn of the year 1876 we were invited to Sir Coutts Lindsay’s Scottish seat at Balcarres, where Joe’s collaboration with Mr. C. E. Hallé as Director of the Grosvenor Gallery in Bond Street was fixed and led later to the long co-operation of these two friends in their New Gallery Exhibitions.