Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 6).djvu/126

"'I would like you to paint me an English subject,' he said.

Study of the stowaway for "The Casuals."

"I made up my mind there and then—'The Doctor'—a subject I had thought over for some years. He should be the actor in the little drama I had conceived—father, mother, child should only help to show him to better advantage. 'The Doctor' remained in my mind for a very long time, though it eventually proved the quickest painted picture I have ever done. Mr. Tate had to wait several years; I had other commissions. You see, I had painted my wife's portrait in 1887, and that gave me a run on portraits. At last, after four years of waiting, Mr. Tate came to me and asked, 'What about my picture?'

Study of woman and child for "The Casuals."

"'I'm going to begin now,' I assured him, and he saw nothing of the work until it was quite finished and ready for the Academy of '90. I travelled many places, from Devon to Inverness, to get thoroughly acquainted with the character of the cottages and people. Whilst on my journeyings I had been picking up odds and ends in furniture—even the cup and basin were specially purchased. I made many sketches of fishers' huts, returned to town, and had the room built up exactly to size at the far end of the studio. It was a most substantial structure—even the massive rafters were there—and I painted a great cloth to look like a flooring of red bricks. The scene was just as you see it. The lamp was lit, and the light of approaching day coming through the window."

"And the models, Mr. Fildes?" I asked.

"You know who the little girl was. The woman was a professional model, and the same man who sat for 'The Father' also sat for 'The Doctor.' 'The Doctor' was painted practically from a model with a clean shaven face, a young man—very unlike what I wanted, but so selected that my model might not interfere with the impression I had in my mind of the kind of man I really wanted. When it was finished, to all intents and purposes, in expression and character, yet lacking that decision of manner that can be only attained. by working direct from Nature, I levied freely on my friends who may have had a feature resembling my ideal, got them to sit for it, and thus compiled, from five or six persons, 'the doctor' in the picture as you have