A Portrait Study by John T. Tussaud.
Nurse Cavell, Jack Cornwell, and Captain Fryatt will always be remembered with esteem by the present generation, and the great story of their heroic deeds ensures for them a permanent home at Baker Street, where they will be viewed with patriotic pride by posterity. The portrait of Edith Cavell, the martyr-nurse, was modelled immediately after that heroic woman was brutally shot by the Germans at Brussels at two o’clock in the morning of Tuesday, the 12th of October, 1915.
I communicated with the London Hospital, Whitechapel, where Nurse Cavell had served before she went to Belgium, and the nurses there readily afforded me all the information they had to impart.
Several of them visited my studio and gave me valuable hints as to the posing of the figure and the general demeanour of Miss Cavell when at the hospital. They particularly described the way in which she used to walk through the wards with a book under her arm and her head inclined slightly to one side. When the model was finished they were good enough to say that it enabled them to visualise Miss Cavell as they knew her, and that it was a pleasing portrait.
My wife prepared the laurel wreath, placed above the model, on which are inscribed Nurse Cavell’s words, uttered a few hours before her death, “I am happy to die for my country.”
Soon after the boy hero of the Jutland naval battle was modelled and he had been awarded the posthumous honour of the Victoria Cross, his mother, accompanied by a lady friend, came to the Exhibition to see the figure of her son. It was on the 24th of August, 1916.
JACK CORNWELL, V.C.
A Portrait Study by John T. Tussaud of the boy hero of the Battle of Jutland.
No sooner did Mrs. Cornwell catch sight of the image of her young hero than she burst into a fit of weeping, and exclaimed, “My boy, my dear boy!” Upon resuming her composure she expressed her surprise at the remarkable resemblance, and added: “I am very proud of my boy, but I do miss him so.”