This ceiling, fifty feet square, divided into two equal panels, represents the twenty Christian centuries, as horses, led by the hours (winged female figures) out of the mists of the past into the illumination of the present. The models for the horses were the undersized nags of the Roman Campagna, which are "small but decorative beasties," as Mr. Elliott puts it, and lend themselves to a slightly conventional treatment. They sweep two by two, out of a cool mistiness, round the ceiling past the suggestion of a pale moon, into the full radiance of the golden orb of the sun. The triumph of the picture is its handling of the problem of light. This golden daybreak pierces the mists whereon the horses gallop, touches here a flank, there a wing feather on one of the hours, and warms to rosy glow the tip of a cloud. It appears in unexpected places, grows where only shadow seemed to be, and surprises you anew each time you look up. Painted in the flat—that is, with no part of the picture telling as farther from the eye than another, to distort the proportions of the room—the ceiling yet has great depth, distance, airy lightness. It is a true decorative painting.
While at work upon it, Mr. Elliott painted many portraits, including the well-known red chalk heads of the "Soldiers Three," Lord Ava, the Marquis of Winchester, and General Wauchope; the portrait of His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge; and that of Lady Katherine Thynne, now Lady Cromer, a celebrated English beauty. Indeed, he made her the model for the second hour in the Boston ceiling, the figure next to the leader in the procession. Three studies of her head for this figure, well known from reproduction, are now in the possession of Thomas W. Lawson.
In Rome the Elliotts occupied for some time the apartments of Mrs. Elliott's cousin, the late F. Marion Crawford, in the Palazzo Santa Croce. In writing "With the Immortals," Mr. Crawford had collected many death masks, including one of Dante, which fascinated Mr. Elliott. Two pictures of "Dante in Exile" were the result. One of them now hangs in the living room of Queen Margherita of Italy, the other in the house of Mrs. J. Montgomery Sears of Boston. A third pastel study was made, an unfinished head of the poet, and thrown into a wastebasket. By a curious fatality, it is now better known than either of the paintings. Mrs. Elliott rescued the drawing, smoothed it out, framed it, and was allowed to hang it in her chamber. Later it was seen and purchased by Mrs. David Kimball of Boston, and in reproduction has gone all over the world, receiving honors in Japan and the higher honor of a place over the desk of many Dante students. Yet few who possess the reproduction know anything of the artist.
Mr. Elliott, receiving his commission to do a great mural painting for the new National Museum in Washington, again went to Rome four years ago. "Diana of the Tides" was completed and signed on Christmas day, 1908. Three days later came the awful news of the Messina earthquake, and the Hon. Lloyd Griscom, then American Ambassador to Italy, at once called for volunteers for his relief expedition. John Elliott was among the first to respond. He went south officially as an interpreter. Actually, he played the part of stevedore as well for ten days on the relief ship.
"I have dropped my last knuckle down the hold this morning," he wrote back, "and I have only two fingers left that I can wash."
After a few weeks, he hastened back to Rome, to give a promised public exhibition of "Diana of the Tides," and, as soon as the exhibition was over, rushed down to Messina again.
There Commander Belknap, who was at the head of the American relief forces, put him to work, as architect, on the erection of the American village, in the lemon groves on the outskirts of the stricken city. "I had never been trained as an architect," he says, "but I once made over a house up in Cornish, New Hampshire, and that gave me a practical experience which came in remarkably handy."
Most of the lumber had been cut for the erection of small houses, and the door and window frames were stock pieces. It became his task to design and build, as quickly as could be done, not only comfortable houses for many thousand people, but a church, a hotel, three schools, a hospital, all out of these small lumber units. He combined the units for the larger buildings, so grouping the small stock window frames as to give a pleasing effect of size, even constructing a kind of rose window for the church. He helped lay out the streets in such a way as to preserve all the trees possible. And, in spite of the haste with which the work had to he done, and the sixteen-hour-a-day strain under which the workers labored, the Zona Americana emerged an attractive and sanitary, as well as practical, village. Queen Helena, as soon as the American village was under way, got Mr. Elliott to go over the drafts for the plans of the American quarter in her village near by, working them up along the same lines. So, in four months, he designed and superintended the erection of houses, churches, schools, and hospitals for a town of several thousand inhabitants.
Commander Belknap's report spoke of him as "the first to volunteer, and the most devoted worker, sharing every hardship with unfailing good humor and leaving his beautifying touch on every part of the work."
On June 12, 1908, having built his town and recovered his lost knuckles, John Elliott returned to Rome, where the soil did not rock, and set quietly about making twenty-four small pastel drawings to illustrate a fairy story! From building houses for the wretched homeless sufferers, he turned to the play tales of childhood. He laid down the T square and the hammer for a piece of pastel crayon. But he had triumphantly refuted the scorn of the "practical man" for the artist. He had shown the stuff that dreams are really made of. Incidentally, he had won for himself a decoration from the King of Italy, and the medal of the American Red Cross Association.