SIR FRANCIS CHANTREY 83 on the church. A deformed crossing-sweeper look-out for a tip, no doubt-offered to prevent anybody from staring through at me as I worked, and with the help of his broom and some extraparliamentary language he succeeded admirably. I asked one of the flower girls if she would come and sit for me in my studio in South Kensington. She was much pleased at the project, and on the appointed day she arrived in a state of suppressed excitement. She told me all the other girls were “fit to be tied" with envy. This expression sounded familiar to me, and I was not surprised when she told me her mother was Irish. She had never been in a studio before, and all the time she was sitting I saw her eyes wandering round the room, taking in everything. At last she said triumphantly, "I knowed you was a lydy the first day you came down to paint." "How so?" I asked. "Well," said she, "when you had done your painting you packed up your things and carried them off yourself." From the way she said it, I imagine there had been a heated argument over this point. The notable house at the corner of Eccleston Street was for many years the residence of the sculptor, Sir Francis Chantrey, who died in 1841, 84 FAMILIAR LONDON leaving a large sum of money to the Royal Academy for "the encouragement of British Fine Art in Painting and Sculpture." He was born in 1781 near Sheffield, and as a boy used to ride his donkey, carrying the milk into the town. On a certain day, when returning home on his donkey, Chantrey was observed by a gentleman to be very intently engaged in cutting a stick with his penknife. Excited by his curiosity, he asked the lad what he was doing, when, with great simplicity of manner, but with courtesy, the lad answered, "I am cutting old Foxe's head." Foxe was the schoolmaster of the village. On this the gentleman asked to see what he had done, pronounced it to be an excellent likeness, and presented the youth with sixpence; and this may, perhaps, be reckoned the first money that Chantrey ever obtained for his ingenuity. When Macaulay tells the following story. Chantrey dined with Rogers he took considerable notice of a certain vase, and of the table on which it stood, and asked Rogers who made the table. "A common carpenter," said Rogers. "Do you remember the making of it?" asked Chantrey. Certainly," replied Rogers, in some surprise: "I was in the room while it was finished with the 66 DON SALTERO'S COFFEE-HOUSE 85 chisel, and gave the workmen directions about placing it." "Yes," said Chantrey: "I was the carpenter: I remember the room well and all the circumstances." Don Saltero's Coffee-house stood about the middle of Cheyne Walk. Its founder, John Salter, was an old servant of Sir Hans Sloane, from whom he received many old curiosities, which, with others, formed the collection exhibited as "Salter's Museum." Sir Richard Steele says, "When I came into the Coffee-house, I had not time to salute the company before my eye was diverted by ten thousand gimcracks round the room and on the ceiling." Salter brewed a famous bowl of punch, and was something of a musician. Steele "Indeed, I think he does play the Merry Christchurch Bells' pretty justly; but he confessed to me he did it rather to show he was orthodox than that he valued himself upon the music itself.” says, Chelsea is without doubt a happy huntingground for artists, professional and amateur. The sight of a "sketching stick" or even an easel attracts little or no attention, except from a few boys and an occasional loafer. I have frequently got little children to stand for me in the Embankment gardens by the Old Church, and beyond a 86 FAMILIAR LONDON small crowd of interested playmates have suffered no inconvenience whatever. What can be more picturesque than a London child-I don't mean one out of the slums, starved and puny, and looking as if no ray of sun or light had ever come across its miserable path-but of the sort that frolic in St James's Park, Battersea Park, and Chelsea? Often have I watched the little things in their close-fitting bonnets and smocked "pinnies," and have blessed the memory of Kate Greenaway, whose charming pictures revolutionised the style of children's clothes. The cares of mature life are thrust upon them at an early age. One rarely sees a child of over seven years with a doll: when that boundary is reached there is sure to be a live doll to be looked after, and the seven-year-old turns into a nursemaid with marvellous powers of patience, endurance, and affection. It always reflects great glory on them when their charges are painted. Mary Jane's "byby" having been "took twice by the lydy," the said Mary Jane can lord it over Eliza Ann, whose "byby" has only once found favour in the "lydy's" eyes. I remember getting a dear little blue-eyed, blue-frocked tot to stand for me with her back to some railings; of course, at once an admiring crowd of children of all sizes |