MEN I HAVE PAINTED
to write the answers slowly and carefully in that well-known small handwriting that indicates the literary or careful and methodic mind. We worked in silence. Big Ben chimed the hours. The faces of statesmen looked down from the walls upon a scene that must have recalled many a similar episode in their own lives, for the drawings, mostly by Richmond the elder, were in themselves evidence of the relation between portrait-painter and patron.
Mr. Gladstone was, to me, very beautiful. I never tired of admiring him, and was always filled with the desire to paint or draw him in every pose he assumed. His colour was luminous; that is, his face seemed to irradiate light, to reflect light where most faces absorb it. These luminous faces are rare in women and more so in men. My niece, Norah, to whom I wrote the letter describing Bismarck, had the most luminous complexion in face and hair of anyone I have seen. This luminosity has been sought for by painters, of landscape chiefly, and Monet discovered that by leaving projecting particles of paint in a precise rather than an irregular pattern all over the surface of the canvas he was able to procure a greater impression of "open air" than by the ordinary manipulation of the paint. The explanation is simple. Each projecting point of paint caught a ray of light and projected a shadow, and the general effect became in consequence more brilliant. When age and cleaning has rubbed these points away the picture will assume a general dullness.
People whose faces have been pitted in small, almost invisible and regular, pits by small-pox seem to throw off light. Each pit is a concave reflector, and its lower half catches the light from above and reflects it as from a cup.
The face of Mr. Gladstone when last in Downing Street
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