MEN I HAVE PAINTED
the Boulevards like two exotics, our pointed beards and long moustaches ébouriffées, hats with straight brims, à la Whistler, pegtop trousers, and square-toed low shoes, with silken ties making us more at home sur les Boulevards than in Piccadilly. I was the first to degenerate into the normal style, but Ford hung on to the flowing tie until the last, and in the height of his success he had his imitators. I shall never forget the effect he produced in Chatham, at the time of the unveiling of his statue to Gordon, as he walked alone down the main street, upon the provincial populace of that truly British town, who greeted him with shouts of "Frenchy!" quite unconscious of the fact that they were acclaiming the hero of the hour.
Onslow Ford, as I have said, was in no sense a Frenchman, either in blood, in habits, or in education. He studied in Munich, the most artistic of all the towns of Germany, where he at first made so little progress in drawing and painting that one of his heartless teachers told him to return to his home and take up shoemaking. He followed his advice in part, gave up drawing and painting, and entered the studio of a sculptor. Here he found the bent of his mind, and followed it with success, which proves that talent must be trained in the direction of its growth, and not against it.
It was not long before his work began to attract the attention it deserved. The Royal Academy welcomed him as a member, and one important commission after another followed in close succession. But it is not so much as an artist that I wish to consider him, but as a man. His Shelley, at Oxford, is a beautiful and pathetic figure, but the two works that I love are Folly, the first of the small bronzes, and the last marble, A Snowflake. The latter, a
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