In early Bohemian days, Henry Stacey Marks, long before he had blossomed into a Royal Academician, was an amusing and pleasant friend. Years afterwards I bought, at Christie's, the attractive panels of the Seven Ages of Man which he had painted for Birket Foster. They were well-beloved companions until a changed life came to me; they now adorn the walls of the Green Room Club.
Val and Marcus
Another R.A. and old friend was Val Prinsep, whose burly form looms from distant days, which his name recalls. It is easy to believe that he was the original "Taffy" in George du Maurier's Trilby. I have a remembrance of him in the sketch he made for his painting The Minuet, which was inspired by our introduction of the dance into The School for Scandal, again in its turn reproduced in our act-drop at the Haymarket Theatre. On his return to England after painting the Great Durbar, when Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India, he gave my wife a handsome native bracelet, which, as a souvenir of her, I passed on a little while ago to Marie Löhr, who married Val's son, Anthony.
"Val" left many dear friends behind him, with happy recollections of his worth.
Recently another friend of long standing, Marcus Stone, left us. He once told me an interesting incident of his childhood, a link with the past, when he was kissed by a very old and well-known man named Pickersgill, the engraver, who begged him, impressively, always to remember that he had been kissed by a man who once was kissed by Dr. Johnson. It is odd to remember, in these days of petrol, that Johnson said there were few keener pleasures in life than being whirled along in a post-chaise, in the company of a pretty lady, at the average speed of ten miles an hour.
Stone owed much to his early, almost boyish, friendship with Dickens, who engaged him to illustrate the book he was then writing, thereby made him known to eminent men, and altogether helped his career greatly. He was a good talker, and he read more books in a week than I do in a year: he also had what are called good looks and a distinguished bearing. Was it not written of him:
"Marcus Apollo Belvedere Stone,
Stands there erect, in all his glory shone."
Sculpture
In the hope that I have not been tiresome, I will close my remembrances of Academicians with the names of two sculptors: one, whom we knew with some intimacy, was Edgar Boehm. He chanced to be our guest on the evening when his baronetcy was "in his pocket," to be announced to his large circle of friends on the following morning.
There was a beautiful work of his on the staircase landing of the house Millais built for himself in Kensington. His fame rests chiefly, I suppose, on the statue of Carlyle, near to his Chelsea home; on the tomb of Dean Stanley; and the statue of Wellington at Hyde Park Corner, which replaced the old one, now at Aldershot, that I was taken as a child to see when it was erected—an earlier remembrance than that I retain of the Iron Duke's funeral.