"The great difficulty I experience is in getting people to understand that they must sit to me. They all say, 'Miss or Mr. So-and-So paints from photos—why can't you?' No doubt these artists do a very charming lightly-stippled coloured photo for them, but there can never be any life in these things, nor can they be anything else than coloured photographs, however pleasant to the eye of their owners."
The portrait of Miss Wilson, one of the beauties of the season, is also by Miss Coleridge, who works a great deal in pastels.
Many amusing stories are told by artists about their sitters, but as a rule the stories are told with this absurd restriction: "but you mustn't publish that"—which, of course, takes the point absolutely away.
Mr. Alyn Williams, the President of the Society of Miniature Painters, to whom the Society owes its origin and prosperity, tells a good story which he does not claim to be original. He tells it rather to show the difficulties which an artist is sometimes made to overcome by his client.
A man who distinctly came from the provinces once went to an artist who had painted a celebrated picture of David, and said that he wanted him to paint a picture of his father.
The artist consented, and suggested that it would be necessary for the subject to come to his studio. That, however, the son declared to be impossible, and at last the fact came out that he was dead.
"Have you a photograph?" asked the artist.
No; a photograph had never been taken.
"Then I cannot paint him," declared the artist.
"But you painted David," retorted the man, "and he has been dead much longer than my father!"