I forget the year in which this drawing appeared. The scene is laid at Scarborough, where Leech was passing his summer holiday. I was so taken with the beauty of the girls, the composition of the drawing, and its general adaptability to the making of an oil picture, that I wrote to the artist; and, pointing out these characteristics, begged him to "paint the subject." I received no reply to my entreaty, but on meeting him afterwards in London, he apologized, and declared he would take my advice.
"You don't mind my not answering you, old fellow: I hate letter-writing. It was very kind of you to write—glad you like the girls on the garden-seat. Well, I will try my hand at it the moment I have time to spare." The time never came. A "Remarkable Occurrence" did not even appear amongst the "Sketches in Oil."
It would have been a very onerous task for a man in perfect health, and accustomed to the use of the brush, to have prepared those sixty-seven sketches in oil for exhibition, even if his time could have been wholly devoted to it. To Leech, with the hand of Death nearly touching him, in almost entire ignorance of the method in which he was working—the ordeal was terrible. To the entreaties of his friends that he should stick less closely to his easel at Lowestoft or Whitby, he would reply that the fine air of the former, and the picturesque scenery abounding at the latter, were intended for idle people, and not for him.
To the man with well-strung nerves Leech's sensibility to noises of all kinds seems incomprehensible; but for years before the oil sketches were undertaken I knew of his sufferings from himself; and the world must have guessed them from his attacks upon the organ-grinders, the bellowing street-hawkers, and the thousand and one noises that distress the London householder whose livelihood depends upon his brain. Of course most of the drawings in which the organ-grinder and the itinerant vendor of stale fish figure, are highly humorous; causing the unthinking to laugh, unconscious of the terrible seriousness under which they have been produced.
Humour was so much a part of Leech's nature that it sometimes asserted itself incongruously. For example: One evening a convivial party of the Ancient Order of Foresters returning from, perhaps, the Crystal Palace, where high festival had been held, roused poor Leech almost to madness by a yelling uproar opposite his door. He left his work, and rushed bare-headed amongst them.
"What are you making this horrible row for?"
Then seeing the extraordinary Robin Hood kind of costume affected by these people, he said:
"What's it all about—who are you?"
"We are Foresters, that's what we are," was the reply.