Two days after this Prince Habibullah gave me the first sitting for his portrait. He sat in the Salaam Khana, and when I arrived I found him in the upstairs room, the Guest-house, which has large windows all round. As the light came in every direction, painting there was an impossibility.
I could not get any shadow under the brow or chin to give an effect of relief, and I asked His Highness if he would sit in another room. As the Prince had studied the art of photography he understood the difficulty, and we moved at once to one of the lower rooms. Here, by shutting the shutters of one window, and hanging a curtain over the lower part of another, we managed to get a very fair light.
There were several of the Prince’s suite in the room, and when I put in the preliminary charcoal sketch the Prince’s Shaghassi said:—
“Al-láh! What a colour he is making the Prince. The Sirdar Sahib is not black!!”
If I had known that I should find photographs of these portraits of the Princes in possession of the Graphic when I arrived in London, and that woodcuts of them would be in many of the illustrated London papers, I should probably have postponed my holiday for a time and put more work into the paintings. As it was, Prince Habibullah’s was painted from four sittings and Prince Nasrullah’s from three. That of the elder Prince was the better likeness. Prince Nasrullah’s portrait, on being carried from my house to the Palace after I had painted His Highness’s name on it, met with an accident and was badly scratched. It was sent back to me, therefore, to repair. When I had it again, it struck me that one part was not quite correct in drawing, and I worked at it somewhat without the sitter. When it was dry I sent it in again. The Prince approved of the alteration, and he desired to send it back to me yet again, for he said:—
Nasrullah’s Comment.
“Behold! it is handsomer than it was; and if I send it a third time may be it will become still more beautiful.”
By the time the pictures were finished Mr. Pyne had returned to Kabul from India, bringing with him an English tailor. The day Mr. Pyne arrived I joined the English party at the Workshops, and we had dinner together.
