“Then you choose their dresses and surroundings, presumably?”
“No; I do not. I like to paint them as they are, and in their own home. Dressing them up and giving them strange surroundings takes away their identity, and makes a picture, but not a portrait. Men paint with their brain, and if they haven’t got brains, no amount of teaching will make them artists. They must feel what they do with the mind. Colour is in the artist himself, but he must learn for years and years, not to paint, but to draw. Drawing can only be acquired, and is difficult at first. No man can hope to be an artist until drawing is no longer a difficulty. Then, but not till then, he may start to paint. Look how beautifully Frenchmen draw. Art is poorly paid and a disheartening affair. When I see and hear of the thousands of ‘artists’ barely earning a living to keep body and soul together, it makes me positively sick.”
One day a friend brought a beautiful bunch of roses to Portland Place. Mrs. Orchardson was so delighted with them, she took them into the studio to show her husband.
“Can’t you paint them?” she enquired.
“Well, they are lovely,” he replied. And after thinking a moment, he went and fetched a large canvas, on which he had drawn roughly his scheme for the now famous picture of “The Young Duke.” Many feet of white canvas and charcoal lines were there. The rest of the scheme and the colour was only in the artist’s head. He fetched a bowl, placed the roses in it, and there and then painted the flowers upon the great white canvas. So began the picture, round the bowl of roses.
Flowers and the country were always attractive to Orchardson, and in 1897 he bought a house near Farningham. Once settled, they were invited to a large county dinner-party to be introduced to their neighbours. Just before it was time to dress for dinner, it was discovered that Orchardson had not brought his dress-clothes from London. Should they send a message that they could not go? No; they decided that would be ridiculous. Had he a frock-coat? No; he had not even that in the country, and a blue serge suit was all that could be produced. Accordingly, the artist appeared at the formal county dinner arranged in his special honour more like an English yachtsman than a dinner-party guest; and, to add to their misery—it had taken so long to hunt for the clothes, and it took much longer to drive than they had anticipated—the guests had already sat down when they were ushered into the dining-room.
For many years before this, the Orchardsons lived off and on at Westgate. It was there he built the tennis-court—real tennis, not lawn tennis—that from first to last cost about £3000, and was finally pulled down and sold as old bricks and mortar. That game was his recreation and his amusement, and round him the painter collected tennis players from all over the world. He called it the “king of games,” just as he called fly-fishing the “king of sports.”
Another hobby was old furniture. One of his most prized treasures was an old piano. A Vienna Flügel of the seventeenth century, containing peals, drums, and bells. It was shaped like an ordinary grand, with rounded side-pieces of beautiful rich-coloured mahogany, and in tone resembled a spinet. This he gave a year or two before his death with a tall harp piano, to the South Kensington Museum. One day, walking down Oxford Street, he had seen the end of this Flügel piano sticking out of some straw outside an auctioneer’s. The wood and form struck him, and he pulled aside the straw to examine it more closely. He had the legs brought out to him, and found they were figures supporting worlds, on which the piano rested. Charmed and delighted at the whole design, he offered to bid for it—and as only two very old musicians, who remembered the piano in their youth, bid against him, it was knocked down to him. Afterwards he found the only other similar one in England was owned by the Queen, and stood at Windsor.
Funnily enough, he who had himself painted so many portraits, disliked nothing in the world so much as sitting himself.
“I am a fidget,” he said, “and it worries me to keep still. When Charlie [his son] asked me to sit to him in the autumn of ’98, I said, ‘My dear boy, I would rather do anything else in the world for you.’ However, his mother persuaded me that it would be to Charlie’s advantage, and therefore, like a weak man—for man is always weak in the hands of woman—I gave in. The boy painted it very cleverly, and people tell me it is a good portrait. Not that I know much about that, for no one knows what he really looks like.”