[Illustration: THE MUFF (UNFINISHED). _From the experimental oil painting in the possession of John Greenaway, Esq._]
On the same subject she wrote to Miss Dickinson on April 24: ‘I am more enthralled than ever by the oil paint, which begins to go where I want it instead of where it wants to go itself.’
At the Exhibition of the Home Art Industries at the Albert Hall she has an amusing contretemps.
Then the Princess Louise came and I was introduced to her. She is so pretty and looks so young. I actually remembered to curtsey (which I always forget), and I was just congratulating myself on having behaved properly, when all my money rolled out of my purse on to the ground. The Princess laughed and picked it up. Wasn’t it nice of her? Something always happens to me.
I am improving now in my oil-painting. I begin to make the flesh look like flesh and no longer white and chalky. I like doing it so much and if only the models would not talk so much!—But how they talk! and if you stop them talking they gape and make such ugly faces! Some one was telling me that Sir Joshua Reynolds, to stop his sitters’ talking, had a glass put up so that they could see him working. I think of adopting that plan. You can’t think what you are doing while you have to listen. I can’t see why they want to talk so and never think. How funny it would be to have a mind that never liked to be alone with its own thoughts—very dreadful I should find it. I get to feel very tired and miserable if I can’t have any time to be quiet in.
You can’t think how funny it is—but finding the power of oil-painting now, my curious mind is wishing to see, and seeing, all subjects large; it seems as if my long-ago and ever-constant wish—to paint a life-size hedge—might now be realised. What a divine thing to do! A life-sized girl in the front and then the large foxgloves and wild roses, and strawberries on the ground. I should be lost in my picture. I should have to have a stool that moved up and carried me about over my picture. All the same I should not wonder if I _do_ do a life-size thing! Perhaps I have hopes of the capacity of oil paint that won’t be realised, but it is nice to get a medium to work in that does what you want more at once. I don’t like small oil things half as much as water-colours—but I do lose the _go_ of things in water-colours.