The canvas was enormous—simple and striking. The quiet dignity of Queen Victoria on the left, and the happy little family group of the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York (our present King), and baby Prince, was charming.
“A difficult subject,” sighed Orchardson. “It took me months to make up my mind how to tackle it at all. Two black frock-coats and a lady in black seemed impossible, till I insisted on having the child and his white frock to introduce the human interest. For days and days I wandered about Windsor to find a suitable room to paint the group in, and nothing took my fancy till I came to this long corridor. This is a corner just as it stands. The dark cabinet throws out the Queen’s head. The carpet gives warmth. The settee is good colour.”
“How very like that chair, on which the Prince has his hand, is to one of your old Empire chairs,” I exclaimed. The great painter laughed.
“It is mine. I lent it, you see. They have nothing quite so suitable as mine there, so I just painted in one of my own.”
It was only five days before the picture was to go to Burlington House. The Prince of Wales’s—alas, the only portrait he painted of Edward VII—was unfinished; one of the three busts was not even touched, besides many other minor details.
“Will you ever be ready?”
“Oh dear, yes! I once painted half my Academy picture in the last week. I take a long while thinking and planning, but only a short time actually painting. I shall be ready all right. At any time I rarely paint more than four hours a day, often only two; so you see I can accomplish a fair amount with an eight-hours day.”
In 1887 the Orchardsons moved from Victoria to Portland Place. The new house offered all the room required for his large family, but there was no studio. Nothing daunted, the artist designed a studio, and made one of the finest ateliers in London, where stables and loose-boxes once stood. He was not the first, for Turner, the great landscape painter, who lived in Queen Anne Street, close by, had his studio in the stables which later adjoined my father’s house in Harley Street. It was in that stable-studio Turner painted some of his finest pictures, and it was in a stable-studio almost a hundred years later that Orchardson painted his most famous canvases.
Rich tapestries hung upon the walls. Old chairs of the Directoire and Empire periods stood about on parquet floors, on which was reflected the red glow from a huge, blazing fire.
The upstairs rooms, with their pillars and conservatory, formed the background of such pictures as “Her Mother’s Voice,” “Reflections,” “Music, when Soft Voices Die, Vibrates in the Memory,” and “A Tender Chord,” and bits of the studio often served as backgrounds, just as his Adams satin-wood chairs, his clocks and candelabra, glass and old Sheffield plate, stood as models.