[13] Leighton knew Mr. Chorley through Mrs. Sartoris. He accompanied the great cantatrice when she made a tour abroad. "Mrs. Kemble's children and their nurse are with them, and Mary Anne Thackeray, a life-long friend, and Mr. Chorley, and the great Liszt, who subsequently joined them in Germany."—Preface by Mrs. R. Ritchie to "A Week in a French Country House," by Mrs. Adelaide Sartoris.
[14] Leighton was perfectly right. "Orphée" was produced at Covent Garden, and the great artist, Madame Viardot, sang in it superbly. The opera was given after one or two acts of a well-known work, and I can vouch for the fact, having been one of the audience, that the house was very nearly empty at the close of "Orphée," Lord Dudley and a very few true lovers of music only remaining in the stalls to the end.
[15] The lady was Mrs. Sandbach, a Hollandaise, who was Maid of Honour to the Queen of Holland. In after years, on an occasion when she and I paid a visit together to Leighton's studio in Holland Park Road, she recounted the incident above related by Leighton, which happened in the palace at the Hague when she was in waiting. She also added that from her description Leighton painted what she had seen in her dream to perfection; but that he subsequently added two amorini, which in her opinion did much to mar the otherwise true feeling of the picture.
[16] See sketches in the Leighton House Collection. The picture itself is, I believe, in America.
[17] Ibid.
[18] A visitor to Leighton's "private view" wrote him the following suggestions:—
13 Chester Terrace, N.W., Easter Monday.
Dear Mr. Leighton,—Pardon intrusion. I thought much of your beautiful pictures after my yesterday's visit, and I anticipated a struggle with the difficulty you mentioned of worthily naming them.
Don't think me impertinent for volunteering the result. It seemed impossible without verbal description to explain the sacred subject to the profane imagination, while a prose translation of its sentiment must be heavy and subversive of romance.
I think, were I fortunate enough to own the picture, I would call it "Not Yet," and I would put some little lines in the catalogue, which, for aught any one knows, might have come from some volume of rhyme, and which should explain that it is a story of a dream, and that the rejection is not final: something in this spirit, only better:—