“‘Oh,’ said an artist friend, ‘just break the glass, and you will find it will be easier to get the portrait away.’
“Accordingly, I broke the glass. Worse and worse! bits of the canvas broke too, and anything more deplorable than my poor lady with her torn canvas and bits of glass hanging to her nose cannot be imagined. The issue was critical.
“I dared not tell her, for her husband had liked the picture, so I determined to copy it. For three solid months I painted every day at that copy. I never can copy anything, and that was my last attempt. The more I worked the worse it grew. I really was in despair. They kept bothering me for the return of the picture. The lady was abroad and could not sit again. They had paid me for a thing that was destroyed, and I was at my wits’ end.
“One day the lady was announced. I felt in an agony. Then I thought, before confessing, I would have one desperate and final shot. I told her I wanted to make a slight alteration—would she sit? She amiably complied. I seized the copy; feverishly for a couple of hours I worked upon it, and then—all at once the long-lost likeness returned. I had got it.
“The picture was sent home; her people were delighted with it, and it was not till long afterwards that I told them the awful episode, by which I had at least painted half a dozen portraits of that lady.”
Live and learn. Education is one constant enquiry, and knowledge is but an assimilation of replies.
WATER-COLOUR SKETCH BY PERCY ANDERSON