To seek the wanderer, forth himself doth come
And take him in his arms, and bear him home.
So in this life, this grove of Ignorance,
As to my homeward I myself advance,
Sometimes aright, and sometimes wrong I go,
Sometimes my pace is speedy, sometimes slow.
Life’s Journey.—George Wither.
From English Sacred Poetry.
By Frederick Sandys.
Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.
(Reproduced from their Fifty Years’ Work.)
By permission of
Messrs. George Routledge and Sons, Ltd.
To face page 115.
which I have specially referred, though he was full of generous appreciation of what was being done in that direction. The effects for which he was specially seeking in black and white demanded a style of execution peculiarly his own, and, when his mastery in the use of the material was complete, the result, more especially in the rendering of light and shade, was a thing distinct and incomparable.
The one man of all the group who showed, perhaps, the surest hold of the essential qualities of design was Fred Sandys. Though not of the body, he was closely associated with the pre-Raphaelite movement, and already in Once a Week, in such drawings as his illustration to Meredith’s poem of “The Old Chartist,” he had exhibited a complete command of technical resources. Sandys remained to the last a remarkable talker, keenly critical, and on occasion warmly appreciative. There was a period during his later life when he might be found almost any afternoon in the lower room of the Café Royal, and there, over a cigar and a cup of coffee, he would gossip freely of those earlier days during his association with Rossetti, always taking care, as it seemed to me, to let it be understood that when his own association with any one of the men of that time had ceased, they had ceased to be afterwards very interesting or notable.
I remember Whistler used to give some very humorous imitations of incidents that occurred in Sandys’ studio, and he was particularly happy in the reproduction of a scene between the painter and his father—real or fanciful I cannot pretend to say—in which something of the haughty reticence and reserve exhibited on both sides was very entertainingly reproduced.