I at once rejoined Leigh’s, and soon began my first picture, a single half-length figure of Dog- berry. This was sent to the British Institution in the beginning of 1853. With many other students, I was much influenced by the Pre- Raphaelite School, and that influence was very evident in the picture. “The lay element,” the noblemen and gentlemen amateurs who formed the greater section of the selecting committee of that Institution, were perhaps not favourably dis- posed to the new movement in art. Anyhow they rejected Dogberry. But I didn’t lose heart, and in due time sent it to the Academy, where, to my great delight, it was both accepted and hung. In those days outsiders were not, as now, allowed a whole day for varnishing and touching, but a few hours only on the morning of the day when the Exhibition was opened to the public. My joy was increased by finding my picture well placed in the West Room, immediately below “the line,” next to Holman Hunt’s “Strayed Sheep,” and I had the additional satisfaction of hearing that artist say to a friend, “Who painted that? It isn’t bad.”
The sale of an artist’s first picture, like the memory of his first love, endures through life, and I cannot resist giving an account of how my earliest patron and I came together.
I had not been long at work one morning in
